Chapter 7: The Dressing

By nine that night the clip had four million views.

Hank's young mechanic read the numbers out loud from the filing cabinet.

"Four million two hundred thousand. Five. They're calling you Raven in the comments."

"That's not my name," I said.

"It's on your helmet," Hank said, and slid a plate of eggs in front of me. "Eat."

"Your landing was ugly."

"I put you down on a roof once, remember?"

"It was a very ugly roof," Hank said, and the whole crew laughed.

It was the first time I had laughed in front of people in a month.

The crew drifted to their cots by ten.

Hank stood at the door, looked at me, then at Bruce, and said he had a bad knee and was going to bed.

He did not have a bad knee.

The hangar went quiet, with the radio ticking and the rain starting on the roof.

I sat on the bench by the workbench, peeling a glove off with my teeth.

The inside of it was dark red.

"Stop," Bruce said.

He crossed the floor and knelt in front of me with the first aid kit open on his knee.

"I can do it."

"You can't. You've got both hands in gauze."

"Mostly."

He did not argue.

He held out his hand, palm up, and waited.

After a moment I laid my wrist across it.

His thumb settled on the pulse inside my forearm, and he held it there for a breath longer than he needed to.

Then he began to unwind the dressing.

The gauze stuck.

I hissed.

"Sorry," he said, low.

"Keep going."

He soaked the bandage with saline from a bottle and peeled it back an inch at a time.

The raw skin underneath was shiny and red and ugly.

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