Things weren’t calming down, at least not from where Lena stood. A boy spoke to her, pointing out the animal that was close to them, observing the scene. She watched as it slunk away, her eyes wide and her brain working 100x faster than usual. She could hear someone shouting over the chaos. The boy who had spoken to her (Lawrence, was it?) disappeared. Lena was feeling incredibly overwhelmed – currently the only thing stopping her from panicking was the fact that she had the open sky above her. She looked up, focusing on the sky for a moment. There were white things floating in the sky – the powdery layer she’d seen from The Continent, when she had gazed down on the earth from the tiny window in her cell – were they clouds? For a moment, everything around her stopped and the noise faded away.
Then something broke her concentration and her serenity - someone crashed into her from the side and sent her flying into a boy who looked around a similar age to herself. She would have apologised, but the girl who had fallen into her was sobbing and bleeding and screaming. She grabbed Lena’s arms and was screaming something at her, something Lena couldn’t understand through the girl’s tears. Lena looked down and saw that the blood coming through her shirt was the result of a shard of metal stuck in her stomach. Lena had seen a few people with wounds, but none like this. The girl collapsed and Lena caught her under the arms, barely able to hold her on her feet.
“Oh my god, oh my god,” She gasped, turning to the boy she’d backed into – Lyle?, “You have to help me! We need to get her inside, and lie her down. I need to see how deep this wound is.” Years of living beneath the floorboards meant that Lena had a lot of time to read and learn and, her father having been a doctor, there were a lot of medical books in their quarters. Now, Lena was no doctor, but she knew a thing or two – possible enough to stop the bleeding. If somebody could find the right medicinal plants – maybe so some seaweed or blackberries, they might be able to fight off infection while she healed.
