“You’ve been scratching wizh somezhing dirty.”

“My claws.”

“Exactly.”

The yinglet’s ears lowered.

Mehrab cleaned the open lesions. The stranger gripped the edge of the examination table and hissed through his teeth.

“Zhis will sting.”

“It already stings.”

“Zhen you’re prepared.”

He administered an injection into the loose skin of the upper arm. The stranger watched the syringe suspiciously.

“What’s zhat?”

“Antiparasitic. It may make you nauseated.”

“May?”

“It will make you nauseated.”

Mehrab then filled a small paper packet with tablets from a bottle and wrote the dosing schedule on the front. He added a jar of sulfurous ointment whose smell caused the stranger’s nose to wrinkle before Mehrab had removed the lid.

“Apply zhis twice each day. Neck, shoulders, behind zhe ears, anywhere it spreads. Wash your bedding and clozhes in boiling water. Burn zhose if you can replace zhem.”

“I can’t.”

“Zhen boil zhose.”

“What about work?”

“No work for four days.”

The stranger stared at him as though Mehrab had prescribed starvation.

“I need work.”

“You need skin.”

“My foreman won’t hold zhe place.”

“Alright, zhen give me one moment.”

The stranger said nothing.

Mehrab softened only in the practical sense. He took another form and wrote a medical suspension order bearing the base stamp. Olissingen employers did not always respect VSEA paperwork, but many respected the possibility of soldiers arriving to ask why they had ignored it.

He handed over the paper.

“Give him zhis.”

The stranger read none of it.

“He won’t like it.”

“He doesn’t have to.”

Mehrab removed his gloves and dropped them into the disposal bin.

“Four days. Return sooner if zhe fever rises, if zhe lesions turn black, or if you have trouble breazhing. Do not mix zhe tablets wizh biteleaf or alcohol.”

The patient’s expression altered just enough.

Mehrab saw it.

“No biteleaf.”

“I didn’t say anyzhing.”

“You didn’t have to.”

The stranger took the packet and jar and climbed down from the table, then picked up his boilersuit. His movements remained careful but some of the fear had gone from them, transferred perhaps into the paper bearing Mehrab’s signature.

At the door he paused.

“Will it go away?”

“Yes.”

Mehrab considered the answer.

“Probably.”

The stranger accepted this because probably was more than he had possessed upon entering.

When he had gone, Mehrab opened both windows despite the heat. The smell of rubbing alcohol and jungle-mange moved slowly toward the screens. Outside, the base had entered the working day. Engines turned over. Men shouted inventory numbers. Someone dragged a crate across concrete. Farther off, the administrative building door opened and the newly arrived human stepped inside to report to Obs’rt.

Mehrab washed his hands.

He scrubbed between the claws and beneath them, along the wrists, then again. The water ran warm from pipes heated by the morning sun. Above the basin a printed notice instructed personnel to report unexplained fever immediately. 

Mehrab left it there.

He dried his hands and looked toward the waiting-room bench.

Three more patients had arrived.

One human with a swollen eye. A yinglet in VSEA fatigues holding a bloodstained cloth around one foot. A local woman carrying a child whose breathing he could hear from across the room.

He opened the door.

The heat entered first.

“Next,” he said.