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“Come on! There’s been a fight.”
    He ran across the plaza at a breakneck pace. Wilson followed him down the steps of the Office living quarters and through the metal doors of the airlock. Robb turned left and right as he ran through the dim hallways.
    His mother’s rooms were in this section. Robb ran past her door and Wilson decided to breath again.
    Around a corner stood a cluster of villagers, and Wilson pushed into the center. On the floor lay a pale teenage boy in a fringed buckskin jacket. At his side, the chestnut-braided Kaya pressed her bloody hands on a dark red patch spreading across the young man’s midsection.
    “It’s Flora’s son Delmar,” said Robb. “Took a knife to the belly.”
    Wilson touched the boy’s forehead and looked for other injuries. On the floor he noticed a short kitchen knife smeared with blood.
    “You pulled it out?”
    “Don’t jump down my throat! That was on the floor when I got here,” said Robb.
    “Cat’s teeth,” said Wilson. “You, you, and you. Pick him up by the arms and legs. Kaya, hold down on that cloth and don’t let go. Robb, run and tell Father Reed.”
    Wilson took a leg and three boys took the other limbs. They carried the limp Delmar at a running pace through the dark corridors and bright afternoon sunshine to the rectory.
    Father Reed had just entered the treatment room. The lighted wall panels popped alive as Wilson and the others laid the boy on a black slab in the middle of the room.
    “What happened?”
    “Stab wound to the abdomen,” said Wilson. “Going into shock.”
    “Wash up. Prepare two sterilizers,” said Reed.
    He wrapped diagnostic bands around Delmar’s arm and forehead then inserted a large-bore catheter into the boy’s left arm. Fluid pumped into the needle from a clear tube connected to the slab.
    Kaya still pushed on the bloody cloth over Delmar’s midsection. Her face was streaked with tears.
    “Out of the way,” said Reed.
    He held a cabled spatula over the injury and watched a black and white display.
    “Some internal laceration, hard to tell without an implant. Sedate him now and prepare for surgery.”
    Wilson pressed a few lines on the display, adding a sedative to the fluid in the tube, and Delmar’s head rolled to the side. He handed silver tools to Reed as the priest opened the wound and patched the damaged tissue with transparent thread. He had almost finished when the entrance door squealed.
    “Keep whoever that is out of here for a few minutes,” said Reed.
    Wilson stepped into the corridor and sealed the door after him. An older woman stepped out of the entrance: tall, grey-haired, and wearing a red tribal jacket and skirt. She sneered at Wilson like a cat backed into a corner.
    “He’s doing fine, Flora. You don’t have to worry,” said Wilson in the tribal dialect.
    Flora waved at the door of the treatment room. “Don’t tell me when to worry! You’re trying to kill him. You and everyone else!”
    “Why would I do that?”
    Flora squatted against the concrete wall of the corridor.
    “Ever since we came here, it’s been like this. Hate. Venom in the words. But now–”
    “Who hates you? Not anyone I know.”
    Flora shook her head. “The lost children of David. Not all of them. Not all, but enough.”
    “I don’t see why. You and your sons have more in common with them than with us.”
    “The hateful ones blame me for the loss of their home. My tribe was part of the Circle and ordered to attack David. But you know the story, Wilson-from-the-West. I refused and paid for that good deed, paid with everything but two sons. And now ...”
    “Reed is doing his best.”
    “You say that but the priest doesn’t trust us. His eyes betray his mind.”
    “Flora, I know that Reed’s made horrible decisions before, but trust me––he’s a good doctor and knows what to do.”
    The outer airlock door rumbled and Wilson helped the old woman stand up. Hausen and a group of tribal men entered. The