Chapter 28 | Slight Improvement In Both Of My Wives Health

Chapter 28: Chapter 28 | Slight Improvement In Both Of My Wives Health

His jaw tightened.

He did not let go.

Shira felt it leave.

He watched her face change , a slow, stunned loosening, like a fist that had been clenched so long it had forgotten how to open. Her shoulders dropped. Her breathing changed quality. The permanent tightness across her forehead eased.

She looked at him.

His expression was controlled. He was working to keep it controlled. The pain was significant and getting more precise as the transfer deepened.

"Kai," Shira said.

"I’m fine," he said.

"You are not fine," she said.

"I’m managing," he said.

She tried to pull her hands back. He held them.

"Don’t," he said. "It needs time to stabilize."

Shira stopped pulling.

She looked at his face. Reading it the way she read things she needed to understand.

"How bad," she said.

He considered lying.

"Significant," he said.

She looked at their joined hands.

"This is what I carry every day," she said. Not a question.

"Yes," Kai said.

Shira was quiet.

The pain was doing things to his concentration. He breathed through it steady, slow, the way the discharge papers had described breathing exercises for chronic pain management and he had read those too on the cab ride over.

"You read the pain management section of my discharge papers," Shira said. Like she was following his thoughts.

"Yes," Kai said.

"On the cab ride," she said.

"Yes," he said.

She looked at the window.

"You really did read all of it," she said.

"Every page," he said.

Another silence.

"The section on long-term psychological impact," Shira said. "Did you read that section."

"Yes," Kai said.

She looked at their hands.

"What did it say," she said. Quietly.

"That chronic pain at sustained high levels changes the way people understand their own future," Kai said. "That it makes forward feel impossible. That people in your situation are at significant risk for giving up on recovery before recovery has had time to work."

Shira said nothing.

The pulses kept coming through his hands. Four seconds apart. Precise and exhausting and relentless.

"You haven’t given up," Kai said.

Shira looked at the window.

"Some days," she said.

"Not yesterday," Kai said.

A long silence.

"No," Shira said. "Not yesterday."

====

He held her hands for twenty minutes.

At the end his arms were trembling slightly from the effort of managing the load. He released her hands carefully and sat back.

Shira looked at him.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Thank you," Kai said.

The corner of her mouth moved.

"How long will it last," she said. "The relief."

"I don’t know," Kai said. "The system didn’t specify. However long the transfer holds."

She looked at her hands. The braced arms resting easier than usual. The absence of the constant background pain changing the quality of everything.

"It’s quiet," she said.

"Yes," Kai said.

She looked at her right hand.

Without the pain consuming her baseline energy the nerve signal was clearer. He could feel it through his own hands even from a distance now — the upgraded Nerve Sense showing him the pathway quality in real time. The L4-S1 corridor that had been at 2.1% this morning was running cleaner. Not higher exactly. Cleaner.

She pressed the index finger down on the desk surface.

It lifted.

She pressed it again.

It lifted again.

Cleaner than yesterday. Less delay. Less effort.

She looked at it.

"Oh," she said. Very quietly.

"Yes," Kai said.

She pressed it a third time and held it up.

Two seconds. Three. Four.

She let it down.

She looked at Kai.

"Go," she said. "Go do Mira. I’ll — " She stopped. "Go."

He stood up.

His legs were steady. The pain was manageable. He had processed it into something he could carry rather than something that was carrying him.

He went to Mira’s door.

=====

He knocked. Three knocks.

The door opened.

Mira was standing with her cane and her whiteboard. She looked toward his face the way she always did. But something about the quality of her attention was sharper than usual. She had heard him in Shira’s room. The duration. The silence from both of them.

She wrote before he could speak.

What were you doing in Shira’s room.

Kai looked at the board.

"Pain absorption," he said. "It’s a system function. I can take some of your chronic pain temporarily. Let your body redirect the energy."

Mira held her whiteboard.

She looked at him for a long moment.

Shira agreed, she wrote.

"Yes," Kai said.

How bad was it.

Kai paused.

"Significant," he said.

Mira wrote: And you want to do it again. For me.

"Yes," Kai said.

She held the board for a moment.

Then she lowered it.

She held out her left hand. The right was on the cane.

Kai took her left hand.

======

Mira’s pain was different from Shira’s.

Shira’s was pulses. Sharp and rhythmic and located.

Mira’s was pressure. A low constant compression behind her eyes that spread into her temples and down her neck. It was quieter than Shira’s in volume but more pervasive the kind of pain that existed so constantly it had become part of how she experienced everything. The way she held her head. The way she processed sound. The tension that never fully left her jaw.

He felt it arrive through their joined hands and settle behind his own eyes.

He kept his face still.

Mira felt it leave.

He watched her face the way he had watched Shira’s. The same slow loosening. But different because Mira’s face was already composed and the change was subtler a very small easing around the eyes, a barely perceptible release of tension in the set of her jaw.

She turned her face slightly upward.

Like someone feeling sunlight after a long time indoors.

Her free hand, the one not on the cane, moved to her temple. She pressed it there. Then released.

No pressure. For the first time in however long, no pressure.

"Oh," she said.

Not written. Not on the whiteboard.

Said.