The Things She Takes

Sera woke when Inez moved.

The clinic had not properly brightened yet. Morning pressed weakly through the damaged blinds, laying pale stripes across the floor and the edge of the treatment bed. Somewhere beyond the curtain, Amara was already awake, moving quietly among the equipment.

Inside Inez’s head, the silence remained. Halo still held the doors closed.

She sat on the edge of the bed and looked across the room at Sera. The bandage around her wrist had loosened during the night. Bruising showed above the collar of her shirt, darker now against the skin.

Sera opened her eyes and took a moment to remember where she was.

Inez did not wait for her to ask. “I’m leaving.”

Sleep disappeared from Sera’s face. She straightened slowly, then looked down at her wrist.

“Because of this?”

Inez knew what she meant. It was not the injury itself, but the guilt attached to it.

“No,” she answered.

Sera looked back at her.

“Because there is no next cartridge,” she continued. The words sounded different spoken aloud. Cleaner than they felt. “Tomas’s substitute is gone. There is nothing left for Amara to give me when this wears off.”

Sera glanced toward the regulator beneath Inez’s jaw.

“How long?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know roughly.”

Inez hesitated. “Not long enough.” That answer seemed to settle something between them.

Sera rubbed her thumb carefully along the edge of the bandage. “And Tomas?”

“Saint thinks he could be inside for years.”

Sera’s mouth tightened. “You believe him?”

“I believe he knows enough that I cannot pretend Tomas will be back next week.”

The clinic remained quiet around them, but Inez could hear the pipes shifting behind the wall.

Sera looked toward the window. “New Carthage?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“The transport is gone?”

“Yes.”

“So you have to ask Saint again?”

“Yes.”

Sera turned back toward her. “Are you going to tell him?”

There was more in the question than Saint. Inez understood. “Yes.”

Sera nodded once. No praise. No reminder that Inez had once left without a word. She did not need either.

After a moment, Sera held up her injured wrist. “Do not make this the reason.”

Inez looked at the bandage. “It isn’t.”

Sera waited, and Inez forced herself to keep looking.

“It is evidence.”

Something changed in Sera’s expression. It wasn't forgiveness. that was not what Inez had asked for. Understanding, perhaps.

“The medicine failed,” Inez continued. “Yesterday proved what happens when it does.”

Sera’s eyes dropped briefly to her wrist. “And if you stay?”

“It happens again.”

“Maybe.”

“Yes.”

The word hurt more because Sera did not argue with it. Inez had expected anger. Or resistance. Some demand that she remain because Mercy Row had chosen her before and could choose her again. Instead Sera only sat there, bruised and tired, accepting a truth neither of them wanted. That restraint reached deeper than an argument would have.

Inez looked away. She now understood that leaving was not the hardest part. Telling someone was.

* * * *

Amara waited until Sera had gone to change her bandage before beginning the examination.

Inez sat on the edge of the treatment bed while the clinic woke around them. Somewhere beyond the curtain, metal touched metal with the soft clink of morning work, and a patient coughed twice before settling again. The ordinary sounds made the quiet inside Inez feel stranger.

Amara studied the regulator display. “The Halo is holding.”

“You sound almost disappointed.”

“I am.”

Inez looked at her.

Amara adjusted the reader beneath the port at Inez’s jaw. “I dislike things that work this well when I do not trust what they are doing.”

The architecture on the screen had settled into clean separation. Memory traffic no longer crossed into motor response, and the partition boundaries that had dissolved the previous night now held with unsettling precision. Inez knew how good that should have felt. Instead, the silence made her wary.

Amara disconnected the reader and moved to the terminal. She inserted a blank storage wafer, then began copying Tomas’s calibration notes along with Inez’s recent regulator history. The withdrawal data followed, and finally the spectral profile from Saint’s Halo.

When the transfer finished, she removed the wafer and held it out.

“This is information. It is not treatment.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

Inez took the wafer.

Amara’s expression remained severe. “Do not hand this to somebody who tells you they understand it after looking for five minutes.”

A small smile almost reached Inez’s mouth. “Tomas took longer.”

Amara’s face changed. “Tomas took weeks.”

The words settled quietly between them. Inez looked down at the wafer in her hand. There was no reason to expect Tomas would be free next week. Saint had made that clear, and the detention notice had done nothing to contradict him.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Amara glanced toward her. “For what?”

“For bringing this here. For Sera.”

Amara leaned back against the counter. “You came here when you knew something was wrong.”

“I still hurt her.”

“Yes.” There was no hesitation in the answer.

Inez looked away.

Amara continued more softly. “Both things are true.”

That hurt less than forgiveness would have.

After a moment, Amara crossed the space between them and rested one hand briefly against Inez’s shoulder. “Leaving to find treatment is not the same as deciding we are better off without you.”

“I know.” This time she did.

Amara removed her hand. “Stay alive long enough to find something better than Halo.”

Inez closed her fingers around the wafer. “I’ll try.”

Amara nodded once, as if that was the only promise worth accepting.

* * * *

Inez waited until Amara returned to the front of the clinic before opening the isolated receiver.

The screen remained blank for several seconds. She could hear movement beyond the curtain, the low murmur of a patient speaking to Lio, and somewhere outside, metal scraping against concrete as Jonah’s crew moved another section of temporary conduit.

She typed:

I NEED PASSAGE.

Saint replied almost immediately.

NEW CARTHAGE?

Inez looked through the clinic window.

Mercy Row stretched beyond the glass in patches of temporary light and shadow. Sera crossed the passage below with her bandaged wrist held close to her body, talking to Mina as though the morning were ordinary.

Inez turned back to the receiver.

YES.

Saint’s answer came quickly.

THE DAWN ROUTE IS GONE.

I KNOW.

Then nothing.

Inez set the receiver beside the medical wafer Amara had given her and waited. Several minutes passed before the screen lit again.

FREIGHT TRANSFER. WESTERN CORRIDOR. TONIGHT.

Another line followed.

SECOND CARRIER OUTSIDE PORT MERIDIAN. DOCUMENTS REQUIRE LIVE AUTHORIZATION. I GO AS FAR AS THE TRANSFER.

Inez read it twice. The route was worse than the one she had refused. Slower, less clean, dependent on Saint being physically present long enough to keep whatever identity he manufactured from collapsing under scrutiny.

Then the final message appeared.

THE ACCOUNT IS LARGER NOW.

Inez looked through the window again.

Sera had stopped near the clinic entrance. Mina stood beside her with the ledger tucked beneath one arm. The bruise above Sera’s collar remained visible even from here.

Inez picked up the receiver.

I KNOW.

Saint sent a departure time and a meeting point near the western exit. Nothing else. No congratulations. No reminder that he had warned her.

Inez closed the receiver. Several hours remained before she had to leave. She slipped Amara’s wafer into her coat and stood. 

There were things in Rusk’s that did not belong to her. And a few that did.

* * * *

Rusk’s was quiet when Inez returned. Relay slept beneath Tomas’s chair with his paws folded under his chest, untroubled by the repairs waiting on the shelves or the fact that nobody had sat above him in days. Mina had sorted the morning’s components into shallow trays beside the workbench, following Tomas’s paper labels closely enough that Inez could tell which drawer she had opened last.

For a few minutes, the shop looked almost ordinary.

Inez brought the travel case down from the apartment and set it on Tomas’s workbench. She had packed it before. More than once. Each time the act had meant leaving quickly enough that nobody could interfere, but this time she opened it slowly.

There were small things inside that did not belong to her. A calibration lead she had taken to the clinic and never returned went back into Tomas’s drawer. A borrowed diagnostic clip went into the pouch beside the bench. She carried one small medical tool across the passage and left it on Amara’s supply shelf without interrupting the patient she was treating.

The spare key took longer. Inez stood beneath the western transit map with it in her palm. Tomas had told her where it belonged while security officers were preparing to take him away.

The spare key is behind the western transit map.

At the time, the sentence had sounded absurd beside everything else happening, but now she understood why he had chosen something so ordinary.

She slid the key into its hiding place and pressed the corner of the map flat again.

When she returned to the bench, only three things remained.

The chipped cup sat near the open case. She had carried it away from the communal dinner without thinking much about it. Nobody had asked for it back. Nobody would miss it.

Saint would have considered that proof it had no value. Inez wrapped it in a piece of cloth and set it carefully inside the case.

Beside it lay the small mechanical component Tomas had once placed in her hand and told her to keep.

She turned it between her fingers. It was not useful enough to justify the space it occupied. That was not why she kept it. Tomas had given it to her, and that distinction mattered. She placed it beside the cup.

The last object was a folded piece of paper. Inez opened it on the workbench.

INEZ SERRANO

The letters had not changed. She did not need to check whether the name was still correct. She only wanted to see it once before leaving the place where other people had begun using it without asking for proof.

Inez folded the paper along its old crease.

The cup went in the case. The component went beside it. The paper did not. She slipped it into the inside pocket of her coat and pressed her hand briefly over the place where it rested.

Relay opened one eye from beneath Tomas’s chair.

“I know,” Inez murmured.

The cat closed it again. There were still things she had to do before leaving.

* * * *

Mina came into Rusk’s carrying the ledger against her chest.

She stopped just inside the door. Her eyes went to the travel case on the workbench, then to the folded cloth around the chipped cup. The blue fingers of her prosthetic hand tightened once around the ledger strap.

“You’re leaving?”

Inez had known the question would come, and still the answer caught somewhere behind her ribs.

“Yes.”

Mina looked toward Tomas’s chair. Relay had moved beneath the bench now, but the chair remained empty.

“Because Tomas isn’t here?”

Inez considered lying by simplification. It would have been easy to tell Mina that she needed medicine and leave everything else out. Instead she shook her head slightly.

“Partly.”

Mina waited.

“The medicine Tomas made for me is gone. Amara used the last cartridge yesterday.”

“The one Saint brought worked.”

“Yes.”

“So you have medicine.”

“For now.”

Mina’s brow tightened with the concentration she usually gave a damaged circuit.

Inez continued before she could ask the wrong question. “Halo does not last forever, and Saint does not have a supply here that I can use safely. Tomas knew how to make something different, but he may not be able to make another for a long time.”

“Because they took him.”

“Yes.”

Mina looked at the floor.

Inez could almost see her assembling the logic piece by piece.

“So you have to go where there is more.”

“I have to go where I might find enough to stay alive.”

That distinction mattered, even if Mina did not fully understand it. For several seconds, the only sound in the shop came from the temporary power line humming behind the wall. Then Mina asked the question Inez had been expecting all morning.

“Are you coming back?”

Inez looked at her.

“I want to.”

Mina said nothing. She did not need to. The answer was too small, and they both knew it.

Inez looked down at her hands. “I don’t know.”

Mina absorbed that more quietly than Inez expected. 

She shifted the ledger beneath her arm, then opened it on the edge of the workbench. Pages filled with names and dates lay beneath her hand, some marked returned, some transferred, some still waiting for an answer that had never come.

Her finger stopped halfway down one page.

“Do I take your name out?”

Inez stared at the line.

INEZ SERRANO

The name was written in Mina’s careful block letters.

“No.”

Mina looked up.

“But don’t mark me missing.”

Mina's mouth pulled slightly to one side. “You told us where you’re going.”

“I told you I’m leaving.”

“That’s different?”

“Yes.”

Mina thought about it. Then she nodded as if the distinction had become obvious. “So you’re not missing.”

Something in Inez’s chest tightened hard enough that she had to look away. Years of her life had been defined by people changing what she was called, where she belonged, whether the person before them still counted as the same one they had known.

Mina solved the problem in six words. You told us where you’re going. She uncapped the pen clipped to the ledger, and beside Inez’s name, she wrote:

AWAY

The ink shone wetly for a moment.

Mina bent close and blew across it gently. “It smears.”

“I remember.”

“You smeared Mr. Cale’s once.”

“He complained.”

“He still complains.”

That almost made Inez laugh.

Mina closed the ledger. “I’ll feed Relay.”

“I know.”

“And I know where the spare key is.”

Inez looked at her.

Mina’s expression became faintly defensive. “Tomas showed me before.”

“He showed everyone except the people he was hiding it from.”

“That seems bad.”

“It was not his strongest security system.”

Mina considered this and nodded. “I can keep the repair queue in order until Tomas comes back.”

The words landed more heavily than the rest. Until Tomas comes back. Inez did not tell her that Saint had said years. She did not say the detention system might keep moving Tomas farther away while calling the delay procedure. Mina was allowed to keep the sentence as she had made it.

When she turned toward the door, her blue hand reached out and caught the edge of Inez’s sleeve. The same gesture as before. Only this time, Inez did not wait for Mina to let go. She took the prosthetic hand gently in both of her's. The surface was scratched in places now, white stars worn thin along two fingers from use.

Mina looked down at their hands. “Your repairs are getting better.”

Inez felt something inside her give way just enough to hurt. “Do not tell Tomas that.”

Mina’s mouth trembled. She fought it, trying very hard to keep the serious expression she used when she wanted adults to treat her like someone older.

“He’ll know.”

Inez squeezed her hand once. Then she let go.

Mina picked up the ledger and walked toward the door without looking back. Inez watched until she disappeared into the passage.

Her name remained inside the book. Not missing, only away.

* * * *

Sera came to Rusk’s with less than an hour before Inez was supposed to meet Saint.

The shop had grown dim as the afternoon light faded from the passage. Temporary power had not yet cycled back to this section, and most of the room was lit by the work lamp over Tomas’s bench. Inez’s travel case sat closed beneath it.

Sera stopped beside the counter. Her wrist had been rewrapped. Inez noticed the clean bandage immediately. There was still bruising above Sera’s collar, dark enough that the edge showed beneath her shirt.

Neither of them mentioned it.

Sera looked at the case. “That’s everything?”

“Everything I need.”

Her gaze moved slowly around the shop. Tomas’s manuals still crowded the shelves. Repairs waited beneath handwritten labels. Relay slept beneath the empty chair with his tail curled across his nose.

“That is not the same thing.”

Inez lowered her eyes. “No.”

Sera came farther inside, stopping near the workbench. For a few seconds they listened to the ordinary sounds of Mercy Row beyond the shutter. Someone was arguing about water pressure. A child ran past outside, followed by a voice demanding that they slow down.

Sera folded her arms carefully. “I still want you here.”

Inez looked at her. The words hurt because there was no accusation in them. “I know.”

Sera’s expression tightened. “And I want you alive more.”

Inez could not answer immediately. The quiet inside her remained complete, held there by Saint’s Halo. She could remember the previous night clearly now without any memory bleeding over it. That almost made it worse.

“I know that too.”

Sera nodded. Nothing about the decision became easier. After a moment, she glanced toward the travel case. “Can you trust Saint?”

“No.”

"Good," Sera said, with the flat satisfaction of someone confirming a diagnosis she had already made.

Inez frowned.

A tired smile touched Sera’s face. “I was beginning to worry the Halo had damaged your judgment.”

Inez laughed before she meant to. The sound was brief and uneven, but it loosened something between them.

Sera stepped closer. Inez saw the movement and hesitated. Her eyes went automatically to the bruise above Sera’s collar.

Sera followed her gaze. “You are allowed to touch me.”

Inez looked back at her. The words did not forgive what had happened. They did not make the bruise disappear or turn violence into something harmless. They only refused to make it the final thing between them.

Inez put her arms around Sera carefully. Sera held her much harder. For a while there was nothing to say. Inez could feel the wrapped wrist against the back of her coat, and she hated knowing exactly why it was there. Still, she did not pull away.

When they finally separated, Sera kept one hand against Inez’s arm.

“Tell me next time too.”

Inez understood immediately. Before leaving. Before deciding alone. Before becoming another name people waited for without knowing whether it would ever answer.

“I will.”

Sera searched her face. “Even if you think I’ll try to stop you?”

“Yes.”

“And even if you know I will?”

That almost brought the smile back. “Yes.”

Sera nodded, satisfied. Then she let her go. This time, when Inez walked away, someone would know she had gone.

* * * *

There was one thing left. The sign above Rusk’s had been dark since Tomas was taken away. Before that, it had never worked properly. Enough letters had failed over the years that the name had become its own damaged abbreviation across Mercy Row.

RUSK AN LOG & NE RAL REP IR

Nobody seemed bothered by it. They called the place Rusk’s.

Inez carried the maintenance ladder out into the passage and set it beneath the sign.

Mina appeared in the doorway while she was testing the first rung.

“You’re fixing it now?”

“Yes.”

“You’re leaving in less than an hour.”

“I know.”

Mina considered this, then leaned against the doorframe with the ledger tucked beneath one arm.

Inez climbed.

The housing resisted at first. Corrosion had seized one corner, and she had to work the panel loose with a flat driver before it folded open above her head.

The damage was worse than she expected. The storm had burned through part of the driver assembly, leaving one section blackened around the contacts. Several connectors were green with corrosion where water had worked its way past the seal.

Inez climbed down and went through Tomas’s drawers. The paper labels led her to what she needed. Of course he had spare drivers. Of course he had written the part numbers by hand even though the printing on the packages was still perfectly readable.

She carried them back to the ladder.

Her hands remained steady while she worked. That should have pleased her. Instead she was aware of the Halo holding everything quiet inside her, giving her clean movement and reliable distance between thought and muscle. The steadiness was real. So was the reason for it.

Inez replaced the burned driver and cleaned the contacts until the metal showed beneath the corrosion. The final connection took longer because one lead had fractured inside the insulation, almost invisible until she bent it.

Tomas would have found it faster, but she found it anyway. When everything was seated, she connected the sign to Jonah’s temporary power branch. Nothing happened.

Mina looked up.

Inez frowned, opened the housing again, and traced the circuit back to the final contact. Loose. She tightened it, and the sign came alive.

Light moved across the old lettering until the entire name stood above the passage.

RUSK ANALOG & NEURAL REPAIR

Mrs. Ortega looked up from the domino table. Mr. Cale stopped with a battery case tucked beneath one arm.

Someone farther down the passage stared at the sign and called, “Huh. Forgot it had that many letters.”

A few people laughed. Then Mrs. Ortega slapped a domino against the table, Mr. Cale continued toward the clinic, and Mercy Row returned to whatever it had been doing before the light came on.

Inez climbed down and stood beneath the sign and looked at the full name. There was no message she could send Tomas that would reach him. No promise she could leave honestly. She did not know when he would come back, and when he did, she would not be waiting in the shop. So she had repaired something instead.

Tomas had spent years keeping abandoned things working long after everyone else had decided they were finished. Inez looked once more at the sign, then folded the ladder and carried it back inside.

* * * *

The temporary power cycle reached the western passage near dusk.

Saint was waiting beyond the edge of Mercy Row beside a narrow cargo vehicle with mismatched panels and a registry plate that looked newer than the rest of it. He had stopped well outside the first occupied doorway.

He did not come in. Inez carried the travel case herself.

Sera stood near the clinic entrance with one hand tucked beneath the opposite arm, protecting the wrapped wrist without seeming aware of it. Mina remained beside her, the ledger pressed against her chest.

Amara was nowhere in sight. A patient had begun coughing badly ten minutes earlier. Somehow that felt right. Mercy Row did not stop because Inez was leaving it.

She reached Saint, then turned once. Not because she had forgotten anything. The repaired sign glowed above the shop.

RUSK ANALOG & NEURAL REPAIR

Every letter worked.

Beneath it, the passage continued around people moving batteries and carrying water. Relay was somewhere inside the shop, probably beneath Tomas’s chair. The chair itself would still be empty when the lights went out tonight.

Mina lifted one hand. The blue prosthetic caught the sign light across its worn white stars. Inez raised hers in return, but she did not go back for another goodbye.

Saint opened the cargo door. “Everything?”

Inez looked down at the case. The chipped cup was wrapped inside. Beside it rested the small mechanical component Tomas had given her. Against her chest, beneath the coat, the folded paper carried the name she had chosen. Other things remained behind because they were supposed to. The spare key. Tomas’s tools. Her name in Mina’s ledger, marked AWAY rather than missing.

“Enough.”

Saint looked as though he might comment, then thought better of it.

Inez climbed inside.

The door closed with a dull metal sound. As the vehicle pulled away, Mercy Row receded through the rear glass. The buildings merged slowly into shadow, but the sign remained visible above the passage.

For years it had survived by illuminating only pieces of itself. Now the whole name burned against the gathering dark.

Inez slipped her hand inside her coat and touched the folded paper.

She did not know what waited in New Carthage. She did not know how long Saint’s Halo would hold, or what his debt would eventually demand.

Behind her was a place she had once believed she could protect by disappearing from it. She understood better now. Leaving was not disappearing.

The vehicle turned beneath the western transit line. Concrete moved between her and Mercy Row. The last thing Inez saw was the light.