Stillblood

The building that holds my clinic used to be something respectable.

You can tell by the bones of it—the concrete that doesn’t buckle beneath the weight of five levels, the steel handrails bolted deep into the stairwells, the overhead lights that hum and glow just bright enough to guide you through the corridors. Even the Undercut once built things with the expectation they would last.

Now everything lasts because we need it to.

There are materials to replace what’s broken—cleaner glass, stronger wiring—but in a place where every coin is spent before it’s earned, what still stands must endure. Repairs are made with what can be salvaged, what can be reinforced, what can be convinced to hold a little longer.

The building doesn’t endure because it’s cherished; it endures because it must. A broken place can still work for desperate people.

The storm last night left its signature behind: a fallen limb sprawls across the narrow pavement in front of the doorway, bark split raw where the wind tore it free. The branch drags part of an older world down with it—a bent yellow-and-white sign.

EVACUATION ROUTE →

The paint has faded. The arrow points nowhere anyone still goes.

I drag the limb just far enough aside, the sign scraping across cement, until the entrance into the multiuse building is clear again.

Once inside, I make for suite 107, the first door on the left before the hallway turns. The old wooden door resists as I fit the key into the lock, catching for a moment before yielding, just as it always does.

The clinic is a narrow waiting area with one bench, a compact counter, and two doors set into walls too thin to hide much of anything. Exam Room B sits closest to the desk. Room A is its mirror. In each room, a locked cabinet of supplies I count at the beginning and end of every day, because the line between need and theft thins when people are desperate enough.

The exam tables are eclectic—salvaged doors laid across stacked shipping pallets, padded with foam and wrapped in vinyl patched with duct tape where old tears have spread. They’re ugly as hell, but practical—easy to clean and dress with fresh sheets.

Most of my work is women and by midmorning I have seen three.

One is young, her belly just beginning to round beneath a coat that no longer closes. I listen to her heartbeat and the quieter, faster one beneath it. I tell her what foods she needs more of and which ones she should avoid, if she can afford to.

Another bleeds when she should not. When I’m finished examining her, I tell her she needs to come back in a week. The third smells wrong before I ever touch her—an infection she waited too long to treat. I clean what I can, give her antibiotics, insist she finish them and return if things worsen.

I walk her to the door.

“Thank you,” she says quietly.

I nod once, because motion is all I have to give her.

She slips back out into the street. The quiet that follows is not peace.

Through the window I hear someone cough, another laughing too loudly. A cart rattles past over broken pavement.

The city keeps breathing, and for a moment, I don’t move.

Then I catch my reflection in the cracked mirror above the sink.

My long-sleeved shirt has come untucked.

I smooth it down and push it back into my trousers, pressing the fabric flat along my waist until it sits right. Then I adjust the band I’m required to wear on my left upper arm when I’m operating as a healer. Dark red; deeper than crimson. Down the center runs the matte black midwife’s sigil, stitched clean and unmistakable. I correct its placement, straightening it so the symbol faces forward, visible without being theatrical.

Strands of hair have slipped free, softening the lines of me into something careless. I gather them back with practiced hands and retie them tight. Nothing loose near a patient—nothing that can fall where it shouldn’t.

Then I see them—the crimson facets of hemalith scattered along my neck. Their color traces irregular patterns beneath my skin, marking me too clearly as something other than a pulseborn.

I tug my collar higher, carefully covering them again. I’ve spent too much time in the sun lately. The facets darken faster than the rest of my skin, making the traces of what I am harder to ignore. Attention is the one thing I can’t afford.

When sound comes—it’s not a knock, but a hard kick against the clinic door that rattles the frame before two quick more follow behind it.

I glance toward the entrance.

The clinic is open; it always is while I’m here. And I spend more time here than I do at home.

People with emergencies don’t knock. Pregnant women from the borough don’t wait for an invitation, they let themselves in. The ones who hesitate usually don’t belong here.

Usually.

My hand slips behind my back, fingers finding the familiar handle tucked into the waistband of my breeches. The knife is always there in the Undercut. Most days it trims cord, opens packages, cuts linen into bandages. Occasionally, it reminds people that not every woman in the borough is easy prey.

My father taught me to use a knife long before he taught me to trust one.

Know your intention before the blade ever leaves its sheath. Every movement has a purpose. Every cut must matter. Panic has no aim.

I leave it where it is, my hand closes around it without thought, exactly where my father taught me it should be.

I open the door just enough to see who’s on the other side.

A man leans heavily with one arm draped over the shoulder of a boy I recognize from the borough. A boy too thin, with eyes too old for his years. A runner—paid to carry messages and pretend he doesn’t hear what he’s paid to deliver.

The boy braces beneath the man’s weight as best he can, shoulders bowed, face flushed with effort.

That’s why he kicked.

He couldn’t spare a hand to open the door.

I don’t know how he managed to get him this far.

And then I feel it.

Lancing pain collides with my algia. It recognizes the pain as his as easily as a tongue finding a split lip. It isn’t mine, but my body feels it all the same, waking along every intact nerve where his are damaged.

The sudden charge steals half a breath before I force myself steady.

Sweat tracks down his forehead and blood darkens the fabric at his side.

The boy swallows hard, eyes flicking to mine. “I knew… you’d help,” he manages.

For a moment, I don’t look at the stranger. I look at the boy.

“Who is he?”

The kid tries to shrug but can’t under the weight. “Don’t know.”

Of course he doesn’t.

A runner who hears everything and claims to hear nothing has carried a bleeding stranger to a midwife who practices beyond the limits of her badge. My brain tells me to shut the door, to protect the space and myself. My gut drags my attention back to the injured man—the color leached from his skin, the tightness around his mouth, the blood stiffening dark into the fabric at his side.

He isn’t much of an adult by anything other than appearance. Young enough that the lines of childhood haven’t entirely left his face. Old enough to fight and bleed. Old enough for the law to hold him responsible for choices that could have killed him.

Not old enough to know better—especially with the privilege his blood is already confessing.

He’s a stillblood.

It shows in the physiology of what leaks from his side.

This isn’t the bright red of pulseborn blood. It’s deeper—garnet with a blue-black undertone, darkening the moment it meets air.

It doesn’t clot.

It reaches.

Crystalline threads spread through torn muscle and flesh, weaving themselves into a living lattice meant to draw the wound closed.

Hemalith.

It should already be pulling the wound together.

Instead, the strands bloom through the torn flesh only to splinter apart with every breath he takes, reaching again... and failing again.

Something underneath isn’t where it’s supposed to be. Every breath is tearing apart the hemalith’s work before it can take hold.

Wonderful.

This is going to be a bitch.

The hemalith won’t stop just because I need it to. It’ll keep weaving, hardening, protecting. Every bridge it manages to build will become another one I’ll have to cut through before I can make the repair that actually matters. If I don’t beat it to the tissue, I’ll be stitching crystal instead of flesh, and from the way the lattice keeps splintering, I already know stitches are the only thing that’ll hold until the hemalith finally can.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” the runner rushes on.

“I’ve got him,” I say, pulling the stranger’s arm from around the boy’s shoulders and shifting the weight onto myself.

The boy hesitates, eyes darting between us.

“Get out of here,” I snap.

Disappointment flashes across his face before he bolts. He’d expected a tip—payment for a service. If he’s desperate enough, he can track the stranger down later and try his luck. I’m not paying for work that’s about to cost me.

“It’s about five yards to the cot that holds your reservation.”

When he lifts his gaze, confirmation writes itself there. Double-star irises—an outward signature of a stillblood. He looks across the clinic’s narrow lobby toward the exam rooms and hesitates a beat too long, measuring the distance. Deciding whether his body will cooperate.

Then we move.

The algia tells me what my eyes can’t. Every pull of torn muscle, every burning nerve, every deep ache hidden beneath unbroken skin. It doesn’t just show me where he’s hurt. It lets me feel how he’s hurt.

Every pain arrives with its own shape.

The one blooming beneath his ribs catches me so sharply I drag in a breath of my own, one I try—and fail—to conceal.

That’s when he tries to pull away, realizing how much weight he is putting on me.

“I can—”

“No—you can’t.”

His mouth tightens.

“Chivalry can wait,” I tell him, shifting his weight back onto me and ignoring the flare along my ribs. “You’re inured, badly.”

I adjust my grip and force balance back where it belongs.

“One step at a time.”

With his jaw clenched, he takes one step. Then another. And on the third, his weight shifts wrong and his knees buckle.

I steady us as best I can.

Internally, I reach for the sharpest edge of his pain and siphon. It would be easier to let him keep it all, but we would never make it to the exam table if I did.

The echo becomes substance, settling through my body—a fraction of everything he feels, exactly where he feels it. As we move, he shifts without realizing he has, and the next breath he draws comes deeper, less guarded.

When we reach the cot, he lowers himself onto it and eases back until his shoulders find the wall at its head. His eyes close—concealment over confession—as though shutting them might hide the fracture in his control.

“Name,” I say.