On Three

CHAPTER ONE

Gwen breaks into a run. Her destination: six kilometres and three years into the past. She’ll never get there but she runs like this is her last chance to. Her breath resounds in her skull, a hushing rhythm over her footfalls on the path below her. Birch trees blur in black and white along both edges. All her thoughts dissolve into this rush of oxygen. There’s only her run, to get there before—

The treeline opens with a blast of sunlight. Here, the path is paved under open sky. Other people walk it. Gwen halts for only a few blinks. She begins walking too, letting her heart and lungs slow. Feeling the possible fractures in her heels. The cable bridge over the river appears. She smiles and feels her smile pull on deep parts of her that haven’t been pulled on since the last time she was here. Meeting up with Curtis and Hannah always does that.

She walks halfway out onto the bridge and drops her momentum onto a steel cable. She’s the only one here so far. Her blood and breath return to their usual pace. The river flows as she waits. Its splitting of this city park allows a wide vantage on the city’s centre. She gazes at the intertwined buildings and streets. Their city. She almost hooks her thumbs into the tactical belt that she hasn’t yet pulled on for the day.

The people who live out their stories in this city cannot live without destroying each other, even if only in little ways. Curtis, Hannah, and Gwen know this destruction well. They’ve witnessed it and felt the shock of it to their nervous systems. Like lightning, even. That’s why they give their days to putting an end to it all, though none of them believe that end will ever come. They’ll protect and repair and distract those people until they all die of time’s passage like a toxin through them.

Along the shore below, just before the treeline, a doe has collapsed in mud. Dead of a injury invisible to Gwen. Now the doe is slowly disappearing into the park. Rot and wildlife will unravel her until there are only bones left. Then, those bones will sink into the ground. That’ll be the end of her. Gwen yanks her gaze off the doe and turns around.

She pulls her smartphone from its strap around her left arm. As much as she dislikes the idea, this device has become an exterior organ of hers. Essential to not only stay connected to the people she loves, but also to be on hand for the Police Service whenever they need her. She needs the Service too, she knows. She fingertips the glass to light up her messages.

One from Curtis: Crash on perimeter hwy. Multiple. See you.

Damn. He’ll be caught up in the hallways and operating rooms of the hospital for now. Not here.

One from Hannah: …there isn’t one from Hannah.

Gwen stares into the glass. This has never happened before; Hannah not being here and not sending out a message to explain why. Not in two years of the three of them meeting on this bridge on the morning after every new moon. Of course it’s possible that she’s caught up in painting at the art gallery, but this isn’t how the trio’s story unfolds. They’re bonded too deeply for a slip like this. So deeply that none of them have ever found words for it. It can only be felt.

Truthfully, Hannah has always been one to get lost in her interior. But Gwen, trained in being observant, has watched her friend drift farther than usual in the last few months. Farther into her interior but farther out into the world too. Hints have been there. Clipped words, distant gazes, less presence. Even during their meetings here on the bridge. Now, not even a message.

But Gwen doesn’t question their bond. Not for a second. She decides to wait here for Hannah and trust that Hannah would be here already if she could. Maybe when she sees Hannah, she’ll ask about her friend’s drifting. She’ll help however she can to orient Hannah in the world, in her world. And on the morning after the next new moon, the three of them will be here on the bridge to look out over the city and sip coffee like they always do.

Eight metres along, a boy in a dark hoodie walks up to a cable that spans the edge of the bridge. He’s poised also on the edge of a kick up in height and turmoil. He ought to be walking to school right now. He peers over the edge, spits, and eyes his spit’s trajectory into the river. Eyes his spit’s departure in the flow. Would he have spit if he’d known that a police officer was eyeing him?

Gwen’s absolutely one now. Always primed to quickly make any decision, draw her handgun, or take notes. Even during her REM sleep. The classes, the training and the patrols have encoded those skills in her. To protect the people of this city from each other. To never allow a moment like the one three years into the past when she learned how to truly run.

Here comes the whistling of a crosswalk signal, carried on wind from the city’s centre. Time to decide. Gwen lets out a sigh and pulls out her smartphone once more. Still no messages from Hannah. She taps out Where are you? and sends her question up to a satellite to be echoed down to Hannah’s smartphone. Answer me, Hannah. Don’t let this be some kind of tear in our trio’s story.

She returns her smartphone to its strap and swings her bones in every direction to warm herself up. Doubling her warmup to give Hannah one last chance to appear. Crows circle in the blue above, seeking out the doe below. Hannah doesn’t appear. Gwen retraces her steps along the bridge and paved path.

At the opening into the treeline, she takes in a breath and breaks into a run.

CHAPTER TWO

Steel glints between Curtis’ fingers as he sutures an old woman’s left cheek under a powerful light. Bringing together the skin split by a chance shard of windshield flung over the city’s perimeter highway. He trusts his hands, these marvels of bone and flesh that he wields to keep people intact. They’re well-trained now after two years of practice. He guides the crescent needle through each edge of the wound, loops the suture and gently pulls it tight. Closing the wound loop by loop so her skin can begin to meld in place.

Not a surgery passes when he doesn’t remember the moment that brought him into this work. When he, breathing in heaves, pressed his hands into someone’s neck to halt the flow of blood from their wound into a hallway through the university. Him delirious, yet acting. Not a surgery passes when he doesn’t wrench his focus out of that memory and return it to the work under his hands. There’s no bulk to a memory, but it can have force. That one’s got a force that will upend him if he lets it.

When the old woman’s cheek is sealed and washed, Curtis steps backward and waits. He watches as the last of her other wounds are bandaged, or sealed and washed by the other two surgical nurses. Their work to counter the carnage of the accident on the highway. The surgeon steps up, takes a final look over the old woman’s wounds, sighs and tells his team to allow the post-op nurses to take over now. Curtis leaves the woman there, knowing that the data of her body will be tracked closely. She’ll likely wake up soon and heal over time. He blinks away his memory of the brilliant carmine that spilled from her wounds.

Two walls away. He pulls off his gloves, washes his hands and gulps down a cup of coffee. He glances at the time on his smartphone. The swing-up of the ambulance to the hospital’s doors, the three patients lifted, and all their surgeries took Curtis halfway into the day. Getting time to send out a message to Gwen was a feat.

He leaves the nurse’s hideout, still in his sky-coloured clothes and takes a hallway that opens to a waiting area. Sunlight falls through the windows over a boy and a girl that remind him of the old woman. They’re bandaged too. So tenuous, so lucky. He watches them as he walks along, how they peer with their eyes and clutch their hands. He knows the rupture they survived today. That rupture of your belief that nothing terrible can happen in the time it takes to blink. A rupture that spans across your nervous system and can never be repaired. The truth’s that something terrible can happen in that time. After learning so, you’re always vigilant and that drains you.

The boy and the girl notice him from much farther away than they really are. Him, one of those nurses in sky-coloured clothes who try to keep people intact here. He slows his pace, wonders how he can soothe the rupture for them and thinks only of lifting a hand to wave. They each give a slow wave in return. Bewildered. He wonders how he might speak to them but only comes up with a mess of words in his mind, so he continues on.

He finds a bench along a wall of windows and claims it. Stillness hits him. A yawn escapes from him. His instructors told him that every surgery would test his stamina. The balance, the focus, the risk. He’s felt that. But his instructors didn’t tell him about the clarity that surgery would bring him. He missed out on two hours of sleep after being called in to the hospital this early morning, yet his mind is vividly clear right now. Maybe a side effect of letting so much thought float on and so much adrenaline spurt through.

His smartphone in his chest pocket hums and he pulls it out. A swipe across the glass reveals a message from Gwen: Coming to see you. Yeah, he missed out on the trio’s new moon meeting on the bridge over the river. He rarely does. He can already feel a slight difference in his gut. Like it’ll warp until he finally meets up with Gwen and Hannah. They meet for a reason. He imagines his best friend Gwen and his sister Hannah on the bridge this morning. He hopes they turned their minds over with each other. Hannah needed that. Knowing her for all her life, he knows her patterns. She’s been less herself in the last few months, or perhaps too herself.

He walks over to the cafe on the ground storey of the hospital and grabs a cup. He carries it through all the light and noise, out of the swinging doors and into the parking lot. He crosses the lot to where he parked and rests his heft on the hood of his weathered Toyota pickup. Gwen didn’t let him know where they’ll meet, but he always parks here, and she knows that. Hannah knows too that if he’s not answering her messages, she can find him here eventually.

Sparrows hop and peck across this quiet span of the parking lot. Little creatures able to perceive any nearing threat, even one as ethereal as a gust of wind. As a flock, they flutter off and flutter back when the landscape is safe. Sharing intuition. There are countless dangers in this world and they survive partly by flocking.

Curtis sets down his cup, folds his arms across his chest and closes his eyes. Retreating from his odd blend of fatigue and clarity. Plunging himself into the revitalizing dark within. This is not sleep, but it’s like sleep. If he’s going to continue repairing the people of this city, he needs sleep or this. This has the advantage of bringing no dreams of needless bloodletting.

Gwen will be here soon. He replays their goodbyes to each other when they last parted ways, after taking in some of Hannah’s paintings at the art gallery. In the doorway, Hannah grinned as she listened to them.

Keep suturing people up over there, Gwen told him.

Keep ‘em safe so I won’t need to, Curtis told her.