Location:Seven Peaks — Medicine Hall, Recovery Ward, Residential Quarter
Date/Time:TC1853.12.02–03
Mira stopped counting at thirty.
Not because the children stopped arriving — they didn't, the convoys staggering in through the night and into the following dawn, each one delivering its cargo of blankets and stretchers and small bodies that weighed less than they should — but because counting became an obstacle to working. She needed her attention on the child in front of her, not on the number behind her.
The recovery ward she'd built during the preparation weeks held twenty beds. She'd thought that was generous. She'd thought she was planning for worst-case scenarios.
Twenty beds were filled in the first two hours.
"Clear the lecture hall," she told Sera, who had teleported from the Cloudrest branch at midnight without being asked. "Every cot, every blanket, every sleeping mat in storage. I need forty more beds by dawn."
"Forty?"
