Page 5 of Spread Me
Kinsey eyes the new station physician with a combination of suspicion and preemptive resentment. She doesn’t trust them. She doesn’t like that they’re here. She certainly doesn’t like that they’re here before any of her own hires.
“Who dropped you off?”
she asks as she leads them through the interior airlock door.
“TQI sent a car,”
they reply, dropping their bags onto the linoleum just inside the station.
“It was nice. There were little bottles of C?roc in the back.”
The mention of TQI makes Kinsey’s tongue twitch against the roof of her mouth. They’re a finger on the hand of one of the biggest holding companies in the world, and they’re the reason she has access to this research station in the first place. They’re looking to inflict some major development on the area and want to find out if, as the CFO put it, there’s anything worth selling the rights to out there.
Kinsey was violently disinterested in the job until that same CFO told her that she could stay out here for an unprecedented four years with no oversight and no interruption in funding. A full presidential administration, with almost no limits on her scope of exploration. Four years in near isolation, with minimal temptation to distract her from work.
That’s when she stopped asking questions and accepted the job. Now, she mostly tries to forget that her time here has an end date on it. She and her team will study the life that lies beneath the desert soil—the life that can be damaged by a single footfall, that could certainly be destroyed beyond salvaging by any kind of construction, that absolutely does not qualify a.
“anything worth selling the rights to.”
They’ll write down everything that stands to be lost so TQI will know what it’s killing.
She doubts anyone at the company will read her reports. Occasionally, briefly, she has been allowing herself to hope that TQI might forget anyone is out here at all. Maybe, she lets herself think, if no one is looking, she and her team might be able to stretch these four years into six, or eight, or ten.
Those hopes are hobbled by the physician TQI has hired to join her team. The hire is to appease TQI’s insurance agency, to provide proof of the corporation’s efforts to prevent fatalities in the field. There will be someone monitoring her, after all.
She’ll have to make do with four years.
“Did you bring any of it with you?”
“Any what?”
the new hire asks, wandering down one of the three hallways that split off from the airlock. They rap a knuckle against the wall, listening to the echo of the dead space behind it.
“C?roc.”
Their scratchy laughter echoes from halfway down the leftmost hallway, the one that leads to the lab. Kinsey follows the sound reluctantly and finds them poking their head into the exam room that will be their domain while they’re at the station.
The exam room is as makeshift as everything else at the station. The drawers and cabinets are freestanding, and the exam table is a sheet of stainless steel on locking casters. It looks more like a restaurant kitchen counter than real medical equipment.
“Well? Is it everything you dreamed of?”
“I mean. It isn’t set up for anything more intense than a few stitches,”
they reply, wandering inside. Their frame nearly fills the room.
“This equipment can’t save a life, which is what I’m supposed to be here for.”
“We’ve got emergency equipment.”
Kinsey points to the AED that hangs on one wall.
The new doctor radiates a kind of calm confidence that leaves Kinsey feeling more stable than she did before they arrived. She frowns, determined not to like them. They turn around and lock eyes with Kinsey.
“Look, Doctor Harlowe—let’s you and I be honest with each other.”
“Call me Kinsey.”
They nod and hold out one massive, calloused hand.
“Then you’ll call me Mads.”
When they shake on it, Mads looks into Kinsey’s eyes with frank candor.
“Nobody here expects to be able to keep a dying person alive for the time it would take to drive to civilization and return with a medevac. I’m going to bitch at you about getting real medical supplies anyway, though, because I don’t want to have a dead body on my hands. And then you’ll tell TQI that I’m bitching at you, and maybe they’ll send us what we need and maybe they won’t. Either way, I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing I did my best. Sound good?”
Kinsey looks up at them with a sinking feeling in her stomach, her hand still clasped in theirs. She can tell that, in spite of her determination not to like them, she and Mads are going to become friends.
“Sounds good.”
“Good.”
They release their grip on her and reach into one deep pocket of their coat. With a clink, they withdraw four miniature bottles of bright green C?roc.
“Now, why don’t you and I get settled in?”