It was just a damn scrape.
Teema had thought the words over and over again, had heard them from her foster mother’s own mouth when she had first walked back into the Tenny, arm trickling spirals of thick green blood into the air from the cut beneath her damaged vacsuit. Yilda had been through worse, much worse than a little cut on the arm might provide. The pair of them had simply wiped it off, vacc’d up the blood to keep it from floating about the cabin, and thought nothing more of it.
That was, until Yilda woke up in the middle of their sleep cycle feverish and burning.
Her foster mother had always run warmer than she did — something about her leathery skin letting out more heat than Teema’s own thick chitin — but this was on another level. Teema could feel her burning from almost across the room, a beacon of misery in the pitch dark night of the Black.
There wasn’t much she could do.
Their first aid kit had long since been picked over, the tiny tube of antibiotic salve pressed flat and curling, and even cutting open the tube had only provided them with a miniscule amount of the precious medicine. Things had gotten more expensive of late, and the scrapping business wasn’t quite so lucrative. There were plenty of wrecks to salvage these days, whole planets of empty, smoking cities that the vincam had left behind.
She tried to keep her anxious humming to herself as she dipped the cloth back into cool water, but she had never been all that great at keeping her emotions to herself. So while she was refolding the towel and placing it upon Yilda’s forehead, it was her own lower set of hands that were being patted in comfort.
“It’s okay, child,” Yilda told her, the pleasant rumble of her voice sounding hoarser than usual. “I’ll be fine. Why don’t you find us a radio broadcast or something, hmm? Something to pass the time while I’m stuck here in bed?”
“Okay, Mom,” Teema said, her artificial voicebox crackling a bit, and though the last thing she wanted to do was leave her right now, she headed towards the cockpit of the salvage ship and settled herself down in front of the comms panel.
Dutifully, she flipped through the channels, though her eyes lingered on the piece of scrap paper, tucked into the corner of the dash. Torn from the corner of ganda poster, the message scribbled down with the barest nub of a graphite stick, decoded from a message spray painted upon the wall.
She was almost certain she knew what she could find on the other end of that frequency. And she knew exactly whose heart she would be breaking by calling. Yilda had told her never to call them, never to trust them. They had taken so much from her already, and she knew that no aid from them would come for free. And yet…
She could hear the soft groans of discomfort, coming from deeper within the ship. What other choice did she have…? There were no other suppliers, not in this sector, and certainly not anyone who was willing to help an old scrapper from the kindness of their hearts. But if Yilda’s stories were true, then… maybe they would help. Out of debt, maybe. Obligation.
“…Teema…?”
Teema quickly switched the dial to something she knew Yilda would like, picking up an old Ryuthian broadcast of fictional radioplays before hurrying back to tend her only ally in this world.
Tomorrow. If the fever hadn’t broken by tomorrow…