Sara

Sara’s work in the Colony places her between two kinds of bodily crisis: the prolonged decline of Gabe Curtis, for whom care can offer only small comforts, and the arrival of a wounded Walker girl whose injury begins to heal in front of her. Her bedside attention makes the contrast concrete. With Gabe, she can ease suffering but not reverse its course; with the girl, the signs she knows how to read lead to a mystery medicine cannot immediately explain.

Identity and Work

Sara is associated with the Colony’s Infirmary, a modest medical space in Old Town. Her work is practical and attentive: she brings medicine and food, responds to calls for help, and intervenes at the bedside when a patient is choking. Her presence is not confined to the ward. After returning from a ride, she answers Mar’s urgent request and follows her back to the Infirmary with her medical kit.

The Infirmary itself occupies a former grocery store across the Sunspot from the Sanctuary. It has six cots, though only one is occupied when Sara first visits Gabe. The old shop’s identity remains visible in the frosted front windows, where the name Mountaintop Provision Co., Fine Foods and Spirits, Est. 1996 can still be made out in the afternoon light. The change from provisions to medical care gives Sara’s work a setting shaped by survival: familiar structures are put to new use, while their earlier lives remain legible.

Caring for Gabe Curtis

On her way to the Lighthouse with stew, Sara remembers Gabe and stops at the Infirmary. His illness has advanced, and she suspects the cancer began in either his stomach or liver, though the distinction no longer seems to matter. Sandy Chou is preparing dillonweed seeds with a mortar and pestle. Sara sets the stew aside, takes a kettle off the heat, and asks whether the preparation is for Gabe. When she learns his jaundice has worsened, she says she will bring him the tea.

At the bedside, Sara sees the cost of the illness in both Gabe and the family caring for him. Mar sits beside him after months of tending him, with sleeplessness visible beneath her eyes. Their sixteen-year-old son, Jacob, works in the dairy with his mother and needs direction for even basic tasks; he cannot read or write. Sara recognizes that Gabe’s death will leave Mar with both grief and the continuing burden of caring for Jacob, while the prospect of Mar remarrying seems unlikely.

Gabe’s physical change is stark. Before becoming sick, he was a large, capable laborer who had rarely entered the Infirmary; when he first came complaining of back pain and indigestion, he apologized as if illness were a personal weakness. Sara’s examination of his liver revealed the presence growing there, and she understood that he must have been in agony. Half a year later, he is reduced to a frail husk. Mar has trimmed his beard and nails and applied ointment to his cracked lips. The tea Sara brings is a gesture of care, but the narration makes clear how little it can alter the course of his illness.

Gabe’s Final Hours

When Mar later comes to Sara’s door, Gabe is moaning, thrashing, and struggling to breathe. Sara retrieves her medical kit and follows Mar to the ward. Jacob is leaning awkwardly over his father, trying to give him tea. Gabe chokes and coughs blood; Sara gently takes the cup from Jacob, rolls Gabe onto his side, and places a metal basin beneath his chin. His body has become so light that she can move him easily. The blood is bright red and flecked with small black clumps of dead tissue.

The sequence makes Sara a witness to a death she cannot prevent, not a rescuer who arrives in time to restore health. Her actions remain careful and immediate: she takes the cup, positions Gabe, and uses the basin. The limits of treatment do not make these gestures meaningless; they are the practical form care takes when cure is no longer available. Sara is waiting for Gabe to die, and the family’s presence around his cot makes that vigil a shared, intimate ordeal.

The Wounded Walker

A different emergency brings Sara to the Infirmary before dawn. She arrives with Peter and finds no crowd, contrary to what she had expected from Caleb’s account. On the nearest cot lies a girl with a bolt embedded in her shoulder and a dark shape pinned beneath her back. Alicia stands over her, her jersey spattered with blood, and asks Sara to do something. Sara responds as a medical caregiver, treating the wound and tying off the last stitch.

The girl’s body then presents evidence that resists Sara’s expectations. After the girl is rolled onto her back and the sodden compress is moved, the bleeding has slowed; the entry wound looks smaller, its edges pink and puckered. Her face is composed as if she were asleep. Sara checks her throat and feels a hard, regular pulse. Peter holds a lantern while Sara lifts the girl’s eyelid and studies the dark pupil and ribbed iris. The examination ends on the recognition that something is different, without resolving what the difference means.

Narrative Significance

Sara’s two encounters establish the range—and the limits—of practical care in the Colony. Gabe’s decline is gradual and legible: symptoms worsen over months, his strength disappears, and the family prepares to lose him. The Walker girl’s condition reverses that expectation at the level of observable signs: a wound appears to contract and bleeding slows, even as a bolt remains lodged in her shoulder. Sara does not provide an explanation; her role is to observe, touch, treat, and recognize that the familiar account of a wounded body may not suffice.

The contrast is sharpened by Sara’s attention to physical detail. She notices the old pain that Gabe had mistaken for weakness, the jaundice and emaciation of his final illness, and the pulse and changing wound of the girl. In both cases, her knowledge begins with the body rather than abstract certainty. The narrative therefore makes her bedside work a measure of the Colony’s precarious knowledge: care remains necessary in the face of death, while an apparent exception to ordinary healing opens a new question instead of supplying an easy answer.