Page 7 of Rescued By the Convicts
The chemical worked for a whole fifteen seconds! She was on the right track, though she still had to test her wrist against an access panel during the fade to see if the panel could pick up the serilium.
“Doc?” One of the guards knocked on the lab door. “Got a patient.”
“Coming.” Melina quickly grabbed a marker to label the small bottle. The termAnti-seriliumwas too long for the vial and too obvious for anyone poking around the lab. No one had access to the chem lab, thanks to Jayce hacking Manager Thorne’s computer and establishing the room as a safe room for her. Just the same, she wouldn’t take any risks.
Anti-serilium. Her head was spinning with the possibility of getting rid of her tattoo if she and her men ever had a chance to leave Veenith.
She labeled the bottle with the letters RJIZ, the first letter for each of her men, in the order that they’d ringed her. They’d freed her that night. Maybe the RJIZ would help free them one day.
An icy chill slid through her at that notion. Leaving Veenith would make her vulnerable to Namir again. Oddly enough, being condemned to a prison planet protected her from him. The Company lowering her from Level 1 to Level 5 status wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to her. Being married off to Namir, beingownedby him, was.
Even if she had the chance to leave Veenith, she wouldn’t. Not unless her men were with her. She could never leave them behind. Despite the constant threat from the other prisoners here, she’d stay with her men rather than leave without them.
Melina quickly shoved the RJIZ into the cabinet and left the lab. Before she entered the triage bay, she knew the med-techs had their hands full. Too many voices—and arguing—filtered out from the ten-bed room.
Five prisoners in various conditions had been chained to the first five beds. . . a protocol that never really made sense to her before, given the three guards always on duty in the med-center. But now, with her patients yelling at each other, despite the obvious knife wounds on all of them, it became clear that three guards could be cut down quite quickly, even though they had blasters.
“I put the two men with non-life-threatening wounds in beds three, four, and five,” med-tech Yost said. “Patients One and Two have multiple knife wounds each to the torso, so they’re top priority.”
“I’ll start with bed one,” she said, already scrambling to get an extraction kit. “Make sure you clean out any knife wounds before sealing with skin-gen,” she called over to Yost as she spotted a large puddle of blood on the floor by the third bed. “Don’t rely on what you can see. Use an extraction kit.”
The man in the third bed, the prisoner the med-tech had classified as a low priority, was losing blood too fast. “Light!” she yelled and another med-tech appeared at her side. She moved fast, suturing a nicked artery in the man’s leg. He’d already passed out.
“Give him a unit of generic blood-synth until we can run his blood-type, then rush that test and switch him out to the right synth. And don’t forget to match the Rh factor, not just blood type!”
“Doc?”
As she repaired the artery of Patient Three, she moved too close to the man in bed two. Despite his hand being chained at his side, his legs were free.
“Watch out!” a familiar voice yelled.
She jumped aside a split second before Patient Two kicked at her.
“Fucking bitch!” the man swore when he missed. He was huge and powerful. A kick in the back from him could have damaged her kidneys or broken her spine.
“Chain his legs,” she ordered Sedgewick who hadn’t been paying attention to the man who’d tried to kick her. The guard had been watching the prisoner in bed five, the man who’d shouted the warning to her.
Zev.
She hadn’t seen him in weeks. “Zev,” she said in a whisper.
His eyes caught hers and widened. A subtle but effective message for her not to acknowledge him. She closed her mouth and turned away from him, treating him as if he didn’t matter to her.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Even now, still shaking from her near miss, her entire body leaned in Zev’s direction. She wanted—needed—to feel his arms around her, to smell his clean musk, to touch those sweet gentle lips if only to reassure herself that he was really there. She’d begun to think she’d never see him again. On a prison planet of only a few hundred men, he’d disappeared from her life, intentionally, completely.
But here he was, in her med-center. He’d been dragged in with the rest of the men, all of whom continued shouting at one another, her, and the guards. Whatever had started this fight wasn’t over.
“Can’t you do something to shut them up?” Elgin, the new guard asked.
“I won’t drug them unnecessarily if that’s what you’re suggesting. Next time separate them into different wards.”
“Can’t. Not enough guards to watch them all unless they’re together.”
“Then space them out better next time. There are ten beds in here and five patients. And from the way they’re yelling, prisoners Two and Four seem to be on the same side. How about you move Three and Five to the other end of the room. Start with number five. I want to check him next.”
Elgin nodded and unlocked Zev, then escorted through the room, chaining him up while Melina grabbed a fresh extraction kit. He’d been stabbed below his right ribcage. He was lucky no organs had been hit, but there was a fair amount of blood.
“And get a privacy screen up to divide the room. You can post yourself by it and view both sides if you’d like, Elgin.”
