Steelhands - Jaida Jones [57]
“Thank you,” I said, not wanting to seem like too much of an ungrateful boor right off the bat. The poor woman was just trying to do her job, and I wasn’t making it any easier by acting like a particularly sullen cow. “I’ll be sure and remember that. If I need anything.”
“Well,” said Germaine, with a little sigh, “I suppose you’re anxious to get out of here.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, before realizing it’d probably been one of those rhetorical questions.
Lucky for me, she didn’t seem to mind that I’d gone and answered anyway though she did gesture for me to scoot back up in my seat. I leaned back, staring up at the whorls on the wooden ceiling, and noticed a place where there must’ve been a leak, because the plank was warped and stained. A little bit of tar would solve that problem, easy. Didn’t these city folk know anything?
“Roll up your sleeve,” Germaine said, setting my chart down. “I’ll be right back.”
I did as she’d told me, biting down on my tongue. She didn’t leave the way she’d come in but instead went through a door I hadn’t noticed at the back of the examining room—probably because it was painted white, the same as the walls. She’d put the chart facedown on the counter, so I couldn’t even try to sneak a glance while she was gone, and I didn’t know if she’d be out of the way long enough for me to hop down off the table and scamper across the room to check it out. It’d be just like me to get caught with my hand in the cookie jar, and seeing as how I didn’t know what the punishment for peeking at your files would be in Thremedon, I decided to be a good little girl and wait for my bloodletting like everyone else. Even though I shouldn’t have to be cautious when it came to my own files, but all Toverre’s obsessive behavior was starting to rub off on me.
Curiosity was liable to kill me if I kept focusing on it, so I turned my sights to something else, instead.
Germaine had left the door slightly ajar when she’d gone through it, I realized, because it left a long sliver of dark against all that boring, white wall. That was probably where they kept the really mean-looking instruments they didn’t want anyone seeing until they stuck you with them. We did the same with the horses at the stables, and even though Da never bothered to brand our cows, Toverre’s parents had a separate room for that kind of stuff that smelled of burning hide, so they had to keep the doors locked at all times. If I leaned back, I could even see all sorts of weird, silvery equipment that I didn’t recognize, and the tools I did recognize were ones I’d never seen in a physician’s office before. Shears and pliers and all sorts of cogs, big and small, littered the slice of desk, illumined by bright lamplight. It looked more like a clockmaker’s desk than anything. I didn’t like the idea of that one bit, because if she was a clockmaker, then I felt like the clock, but I was probably getting ahead of myself. Maybe it was a hobby she kept on the side. You never could tell with these Thremedon folk.
Also, I was getting a crick in my neck from leaning so far back on the table.
The door creaked and I heard footsteps, so I straightened up, tugging at a piece of my hair and trying not to look like I’d been sneaking a look at something that didn’t concern me. This Germaine woman seemed pretty passive as far as physicians went, and I was a head taller than she was besides, but they were all pretty big on the rules here. I didn’t want her to decide she didn’t like me right before she was about to stick me with a needle, either, which was just plain common sense.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting again,” Germaine said. She sounded a little out of breath, like she’d been climbing stairs or something. It made me wonder how big the space behind the examining room really was, or why they kept