Stardate 2258.42

"I grieve with thee," a raspy voice said.

Dagny opened her eyes and stared at the man as hot, quiet tears continued to slide down her face. She suddenly felt ashamed to be openly crying in a room full of such reserved people who all had their own grief to contend with.

"I only lost two brothers," Dagny choked, trying to clear the knot from her throat. "You lost... everything."

Her voice started to crack and she inhaled a gasping breath. She fingered the hypospray in the front pocket of her smock and fought the urge to give herself a sedative and sleep until next week.

"Loss is loss," the man replied. "But grief is not a thing which is easily quantified."

"I disagree," she countered. "One planet, billions of people, two brothers. Those are all numbers. All quantifiable."

The man's left eyebrow flicked upward and he responded, "Do you believe your emotional pain would be halved if you had only lost one brother, or doubled if you had lost four?"

She grimaced and felt more moisture pulse down her cheeks. "No, probably not."

"Precisely. Grief and loss are not interchangeable."

Dagny frowned, wondering what the man knew about grief if Vulcans truly didn't have emotions. Just hours ago, they sat huddled in the belly of the dark ship, listening to the news of their planet's destruction as if they were receiving a weather report. She had never met any Vulcans before today and even she had been reduced to tears at so much devastation.

"Do you disagree?" the man asked, studying her reaction.

"Um, no, I agree that grief and loss are different things. That makes sense. I just…"

"Speak your mind."

She inhaled a staggering breath. "I don't mean to be rude, but if Vulcans don't have emotions, how can you know what grief is?"

"You are misinformed," the man replied. "Vulcans possess emotions just as you do. We are taught from an early age to repress them and seek the serenity of logic."

"How does logic help a situation like this?" she asked, waving her hand around the overpopulated cargo bay.

"Logic is logic; it is not a solution to difficulty," he explained. "Rather, it is a means of transcending the difficulty."

"You're very… wise," Dagny sighed, feeling too worn to wrap her mind around his statement. "But wisdom won't bring my brothers or your planet back."

"No, they are gone," he agreed. "But logic allows a person to transform fear into prudence, pain into purpose, mistakes into initiation, and desire into duty."

She gritted her teeth and hated the grief that continued to trickle down her face. She didn't care about prudence or duty. "All I want is to be able to tell them how much I loved them."

"Regret is illogical," he said. "We are only in possession of the present and what has gone by shall never be ours again."

"Yeah, no kidding." Dagny shuddered and tried to keep from sobbing. She started to feel angry with him, so peaceful and calm and talking about death in an abstract and useless way.

"I'm- I'm sorry," she grumbled after a few minutes, rubbing the tears from her cheeks and feeling ashamed at her earlier rudeness.

"An apology is unnecessary. Your grief must be acknowledged."

"How though?" Dagny countered. "If regret is illogical and grief is… I forgot what grief is."

"Grief is an opportunity, a reminder to approach each action as though it were your last and dismiss idle thought, emotional recoil, admiration of self, and discontentment with your circumstances," he explained. "Many Vulcans prefer to grieve in private, but you are not Vulcan. You must be as you are."

She sighed. She felt entirely too tired to keep debating philosophy with a man who looked like he was on the wrong side of nine hundred years old. She climbed to her feet and suddenly felt light-headed. Moments later, her stomach began a loud series of groaning complaints. When was the last time she'd eaten? It had probably been the Kjøttkakesaus her mother had made last night. Or was it the night before last? She had no idea.

"Have you had anything to eat?" she asked her elderly Vulcan companion.

"No."

She looked him over, noticing his thin robes and delicate slippers. Like many of the others, he looked as though he'd fled his home in the middle of the night. Unlike the others, however, he was sitting by himself, partly secluded by the support pylon.

"Excuse me," she said, turning on her heel.

She made her way to the back of the cargo bay, stopping several times to check dressings or answer questions. Many of the Vulcans were asleep or sitting with their eyes closed, muttering quiet prayers and meditations. They didn't seem very grief-stricken, but the man had said Vulcans preferred to grieve in private. Unfortunately, with this many people, there was no such thing as privacy.

At the back of the cargo hold she found a pile of Orion emergency ration packs and a stack of threadbare blankets on a low table. She spied Sigurd, Sigrid, and Hedda fast asleep under the stand, sharing her grandmother's wide quilt and curled into a tight formation like kittens in a nest. She tucked the quilt around them more securely and brushed one of Hedda's red coils of hair away from her face.

She wondered how much of this they understood. Hedda was five and the twins had only just turned four. Even amidst the despair and disorder, they looked so content. She longed for a return to that kind of innocence; life seemed to weigh heavier with each passing year.

She straightened herself and collected two meal packs and the thickest blanket she could find and returned to the man. He was leaning against the pylon, reading a small book no larger than her hand with strange, loopy text on the cover.

"I thought you might want something to eat," she announced, trying to sound cheerful.

He lowered the book and his eyes flicked in her direction. She presented the blanket and the food and tried to smile, though the skin on her face still felt sticky from salty tears.

She sniffed and added, "I'm Dagny. I never did catch your name."

The man formed his right hand into a V-shape. "Live long and prosper. I am Tolik."

He accepted her offering and examined the unusual script scrawled across the packaging. She took a seat next to him and pulled at the edges of the durable plastic wrapping to reveal a clear container of a gray pudding-like mixture and two hard, greenish bars of something that looked roughly analogous to dried fruit.

Tolik was gazing at the food in his hands as though he were trying to see through it. The empty look in his eyes was exactly how Dagny felt, but she wasn't eager to wallow in her misery so she opted for small talk.

"What were you reading?" she asked.

"The Teachings of Surak."

"What's it about?"

He cocked an eyebrow and replied, "The writings of the philosopher Surak, the father of modern Vulcan civilization."

"Oh," Dagny blushed, sensing that was something she should probably know. "You know we usually don't travel this far into Federation space so I've never met any Vulcans until today. Sorry if my question was stupid."

"One often does not know what one does not know," he admitted. "Furthermore, I have never left my home world, so I have not encountered many humans."

"I'm sorry we had to meet this way." Dagny gave him a pained smile.

"An illogical apology." His words were quick and severe, and since she didn't know how to reply, she turned her attentions to her meal.

She took a bite of one of the bars and recoiled: it was like chewing on duranium. She wondered if Orion rations were specifically designed to break teeth or if these were just particularly old. She set the fruit bar down and opened the bowl of gelatinous gray goop. She sniffed it and was pleasantly surprised—it smelled of honey and rich starch.

She found a tiny plastic spoon mixed in with the packaging and tried a small bite. The consistency was unusual, but it proved to be reasonably palatable.

"It's not half bad," she said, turning to her Vulcan companion. "I wouldn't say delicious, but it's definitely edible."

"I shall defer to your judgment," Tolik replied, setting the food down on the floor and spreading the blanket over his legs.

Dagny spooned the rations into her mouth quickly in an effort to ignore the disgusting texture. Silence crept in again, dangerous and insidious. It allowed her mind to turn to sadder things, and that was the last thing she wanted.

She snuck a look at Tolik; his eyes were closed and his lips forming inaudible words. His chin started to quiver and Dagny sensed he was on the verge of tears. The sight of his stoic face twisting into slow agony threatened to cause her own raw emotions to boil over once again.

"Tolik, are you ok?" she blurted, her voice shaky and slow.

His eyes cracked open but he didn't immediately reply. She felt compelled to touch his arm or embrace him but she'd learned from treating scores of injured Vulcans that his people didn't prefer casual touch, even as a means of comfort.

"Your question is imprecise," he finally said. "I am alive. I have suffered no physical injuries."

"I'm worried about you though."

The muscles in his face twitched; her admission seemed to catch him off-guard. "Your concern is appreciated but unnecessary."

"I don't know. You said a lot of really good things about grief and logic and loss, but I almost wonder if you were trying to convince yourself as much as you were trying to convince me."

She finished the last bite of her gray goo, set the empty container and spoon with the other trash, and peered carefully at the old man. They made eye contact for the first time and Dagny felt a haunting chill as she gazed into his distant, dark eyes.

"I grieve with thee, but I prefer to be alone for a time," he finally said.

She nodded and shuffled to her feet, collecting the remnants of the rations. "I'll come check on you in a bit."

"If you must."

"Thanks for your wisdom," she mumbled, trying to keep her emotions in check as her thoughts inevitably turned back to her brothers.

"There is no other wisdom, no other hope for us but that we grow wise."

The words seemed practiced, like one of her father's many sayings. She was about to ask after its origins when their eyes locked again and he said, "May you have peace and long life, Dagny."

There was a strange finality in his tone that made her pause. She didn't really want to leave him alone, but his eyes were already closed and his mouth had returned to forming the noiseless prayers. She headed for the matter reclaimator to dispose of the ration packaging and on her way there, Erik Larsen intercepted her.

"Your brother was looking for you," he said. His face was dirty and his hands were covered in minor plasma burns.

"Which one?" she sighed. "I have eight brothers."

The words had barely left her tongue when the first tear cascaded down her cheek. She didn't have eight brothers anymore; she had six.

"Listen, I'm so sorry about Aksel and Benjamin," he said.

She opened her mouth to thank him but all that came out was a squeak. He pulled her into a tight hug and his warm and comforting embrace made her feel like it was finally safe to let her guard down a little. She cried for nearly a minute and when she was done, she tried to wipe her face with the sleeve of her smock.

"Thank- thank you," she sniffled, trying to catch her breath.

"It sounds like your mother isn't taking it well. Daniel and Ingrid are with her in one of the forward storage lockers."

"Thank you, Erik," she sniffed.

He gave her a cautious smile. "You got my name right."

"What? I've always known your name."

"But you didn't think I was Karl."

She studied his face and offered a shrug. The Larsens were nearly as prolific as the Skjeggestads, only not as diverse. They had nine children, one daughter and eight sons. Of their eight boys, there was a set of identical triplets—Erik, Karl, and Hans.

It was possible to differentiate Hans from his brothers thanks to an unfortunate engineering accident three years ago that left scar tissue on the left side of his face and neck. Erik and Karl remained virtually indistinguishable though, even opting for the same close-cropped hair and broad, crooked smiles.

She started to walk past him but he trailed behind. "Want some company?"

"If you like," she said, forcing a weak smile.

"What a day," Erik mused, looking down at his heavy work boots.

"Worst day of my life," she agreed, weaving through small groups of people milling around in the corridor. "I think it's easily the worst day of just about everyone's life."

She could hear low wailing in the distance and knew right away the grief belonged to her mother. It was agony, clean and pure. Her heart started to race; she wasn't prepared to deal with this. Dagny didn't know how long it would take her to come to terms with her brothers' deaths, but she wasn't sure whether her mother would ever recover. She crossed her arms and surged forward.

"I have to go back to engineering, mama," she could hear Daniel pleading.

"No!"

Dagny entered the small storage locker and saw her mother perched on a stool, red-faced and struggling to catch her breath. Ingrid knelt on the floor and held their mother's hand. Her eyes were red from crying and she looked a million kilometers away.

"Mother?" Dangy whispered.

"See, mama? Dagny is here. Ingrid is with you. It's going to be fine."

Her mother started to shriek and yell about how her sons, her boys were dead and gone. Involuntary tears slid down Dagny's face as she confronted the pain of a mother, her mother, who'd lost her children.

"I don't know what to do," Daniel stammered, looking to Dagny for help.

"We'll take care of her," she whispered to her brother. "Go with Erik back to engineering."

She inched forward and reached for her mother's tightly balled fist. She pulled Dagny into a monstrous hug and rocked back and forth. She moaned and hiccupped and muttered a lot of things about not being able to protect them, and all Dagny could do was listen and cry along with her. When she didn't get better after about ten minutes, Dagny started to worry. She recalled the new hypospray the Andorian surgeons had given her and debated giving her mother a sedative to help her sleep. It was a temporary fix, but it was better than letting her continue to suffer like this.

She reached into her front pocket and felt a wave of panic, which was quickly replaced by confusion. The hypospray was gone, replaced by something slim and rectangular. She extracted a small red item from her pocket and instantly recognized it as Tolik's philosophy book. Strange. It took her brain several seconds to process this unexpected development, but as she traced her thumb across the book's hard binding, something clicked.

"Ingrid, stay with mama!"

She fled from the storage locker and sprinted down the corridor, nearly knocking over a group of small Vulcan children. She found Tolik where she'd left him, but something was off. His posture was strange and his head was slumped against his left shoulder. She stumbled forward and groped at his neck. His skin was warm but his head and limbs were slack and non-responsive. He didn't have a pulse.

She started to call out for help when she heard the tink of metal on metal. The small, silver hypospray had fallen out of his hands. She grabbed it and gasped. He'd taken nearly 200 ccs of ambizine—twenty times the recommended dose of the sedative.

She grabbed his hands and dragged him away from the pylon, begging someone to find Dr. Sevek. Dagny knew very little of pharmacology and had no idea what to do for this kind of overdose. She squeezed his hand and felt nothing.

Fat tears fell from her eyes once again and landed on his elegant, silky robes. After his convoluted speech about loss and grief and prudence and whatever else, why? Why had he done this? A shadow fell across his body and she twisted at the waist to see Dr. Sevek.

"He took- he took my hypospray," she gasped. "Ambizine. At least 200 ccs. Not more than fifteen minutes ago."

Sevek nodded solemnly. "Come away, Dagny."

She clambered to her feet to allow him room to maneuver. Sevek bent forward and ran one of the Andorian tricorders over Tolik's lifeless body and shook his head.

"Do something," Dagny hissed.

"There is nothing to be done," Sevek replied, straightening his back. "He has been deceased for approximately eight minutes."

Dagny had heard stories of people being clinically dead far longer than that and being revived. "But isn't there- can't you- can you just try? Please?"

"Your appeals will not alter reality," he insisted. "Furthermore, it is evident that any attempt to revive him would go against his wishes."

Dagny sneered at the Vulcan surgeon. "How can you know that?"

Sevek tilted his chin in her direction and uttered a small sigh. "Did you inject him with the ambizine?"

She wanted to throttle him. "Of course not! I realize that he did this to himself, but he—everyone, really—has just been through a terrible loss. Surely he didn't mean-"

"His is the twenty-third suspected suicide in the past fourteen hours," Sevek interrupted. "I believe there will be more in the days to come."

"I thought you people worshipped logic," she rebutted, raising her voice higher than she intended. "How can suicide be logical?"

Dr. Sevek looked away and inhaled a deep breath. "In most circumstances, it isn't. Yet these are not most circumstances."

The pain in his arm and back was sobering. It was dark under the rubble and he didn't know how long he'd been unconscious. There was a massive object on his back pinning him to the ground. Voris could feel the girl writhing beneath him and he was worried she was suffocating under his weight.

He braced his legs on a solid surface and pushed but faltered when pain ripped through his body. Trails of dust fell from above and he twisted his face to avoid getting the fine particulate in his eyes. He had been too slow; he blinked furiously to clear the agitating debris.

He pushed harder with his legs. The girl whimpered and called for her mother again. Voris found the strength to push even harder and the heavy object on his back started to give a few centimeters, but he couldn't continue through the pain. Somewhere overhead he heard muted voices.

"Help!" he called. The girl started crying. Voris was uncertain how to comfort a human child.

The voices grew louder and he heard a woman say, "Get a debris jack. Scans show we've got two under here. Human female and a Vulcan male."

Voris took a slow breath and tried to re-center himself. Assistance was coming; it would be illogical to injure himself further by continuing to struggle. He glanced down at the girl to try and assess her condition, but all he could see was the top half of her face.

"Mommy?"

It was logical to conclude from the resemblance and the girl's reaction when he extracted her from the hovercar that the driver had been her mother. Her mother was dead, probably from the initial collision and certainly from the subsequent fire, but he wasn't sure if the child could understand death.

Voris had no training in pediatrics outside of his residency, but he estimated the girl to be between three and four years old. He knew a good deal about Vulcan growth and development, but his knowledge of human development was far less extensive. Could a child her age understand such an abstract concept as death? Even if she could, was it his place to inform her that her mother was dead?

His five-year fellowship in interspecies medicine had given him casual exposure to human parent-child interactions, and he knew that unlike Vulcans, many humans preferred to shield their children from uncomfortable truths.

"What is your name?" he asked her.

The girl continued to cry. How did human parents soothe their children? He'd seen parents at the hospital bribe their offspring with sweets, but he had nothing like that on his person and even if he did, he wouldn't be able to reach it. He couldn't move. "Excuse me?"

After several minutes, her cries faded into sniffing and hiccupping. He could hear people moving overhead again and a loud screeching sound of metal on metal. The girl screamed and started to tremble from the loud and unanticipated noise.

"Please do not cry," Voris urged.

The girl buried her face in his chest and continued to shake.

"What is your name?" he repeated.

She said something that he couldn't understand because his shirt muffled her voice. "Will you repeat yourself?"

No response. "I am Voris," he tried. "What is your name?"

"Nyala," she mumbled, her tiny voice barely audible over the growing din overhead.

"Hello, Nyala." He was unsure what to say next. Vulcans did not engage in the human social custom of small talk, and furthermore, he was uncertain how to relate to a tiny, human child.

The weight on his back shifted and the girl started crying and shaking again. He felt a warm wetness trickle down his abdomen and was fairly certain Nyala had relieved herself, either from necessity or fear or both. He wasn't angry or disgusted; even Vulcan children were not always toilet trained by her age and he'd seen far more repulsive things during his medical career.

"Hello? Can you hear me?" called a woman's voice.

"Yes!" Voris shouted.

"We're going to get you out, but we have to wait for a heavy excavator. Stay with me!"

What an illogical statement, as if either he or Nyala weren't trapped under hundreds of thousands of kilograms of debris and might wander away. It occurred to him the woman was probably speaking euphemistically and attempting to comfort them—he'd heard human doctors utter the exact same reassurance numerous times to nervous patients over years—but he didn't need her human niceties, and the girl was sobbing too loudly to give them any consideration.

"It's going to be alright, honey," the woman continued to shout. "Don't cry. We're going to get you out of there."

Voris fought to maintain his composure amid his growing agitation. Of course someone would get them out eventually, but he wasn't certain whether or not they would be alive. Then again, the woman hadn't promised their survival, so perhaps he was the one being illogical. Profound sadness and emptiness nibbled at the edges of his consciousness, but he found his emotions were easily subdued by focusing on his present predicament.

It was not considered good practice to avoid one's emotional struggles with distraction, but Voris didn't currently feel capable of more traditional methods of logical discipline, given almost everyone he shared an intimate telepathic connection with was dead and he was buried under the remains of a city building and pinned against a small child who had urinated on him.

The crushing weight lurched again and his arm and back erupted into dazzling pain. He faded from consciousness as voices screamed for people to brace for an aftershock.

He awoke the second time to muffled cheering, wailing, and intense, stinging light. He inhaled deeply and steeled himself against his body's physical response to his injuries. He was choking. Just as he worked up the concentration and energy to move his neck and survey the scene, someone encased his head in a heavy foam collar—standard protocols for suspected head and spinal injuries.

He nearly fainted again from the shock and agony of being strapped into the hoist and lifted from the wreckage of the former skyscraper, but soon his arms burned with analgesic injections and the pain fell into muted memory.

He wanted to examine his injured left arm but his head was sluggish and his eyelids were heavy—not to mention his head was tightly secured to a backboard. The medics were pumping him full of painkillers, anti-coagulants, and sedatives, and he wondered if they knew how to adjust the dosage for his physiology. He made an attempt to wiggle his fingers and toes to check for sensation, but everything felt deliciously numb.

He stared straight ahead while the stretcher started to tilt horizontally. He caught sight of the tiny girl, her dark skin made a hideous shade of gray by pulverized concrete. Frightening black veins trailed from her eyes where her tears had washed the dust from her cheeks. She clung to a man's hip, but screamed and stretched her arms in Voris's direction.

He tried to lift his arms to take hold of her, but they were strapped down. How strange that he would have forgotten.

"Is she injured?" he asked no one in particular, or at least, that's what he'd intended to ask. The words seemed to fall out in a long, monosyllabic slur.

"You're a hero!" a woman screamed in his ear.

He didn't feel very heroic, but he was once again on the verge of not feeling anything at all. Perhaps they'd given him an excessive dose of the sedatives or painkillers; perhaps he was dying. The last thing he recalled thinking was he didn't really mind not living anymore, if all there was to dying was slipping away into the sensation of sleep. He giggled as the world faded to black.

Some time later, he learned that he had not been dying in the middle of 16th Street, but had been the victim of a pair of overzealous paramedics ill acquainted with Vulcan physiology who had given him twice as much ambizine as was necessary. He awoke on a stretcher in the corridor of Sarah April Memorial Hospital with his left arm encased in a surgical bone knitting unit and a cool breeze running over his face. The scene was devastating chaos. Medical staff flew by, pushing stretchers of critically injured patients and yelling various status updates.

He sat up slowly, noting the sensation of a deep ache reverberating through his ribs. His breathing was clear, his head was pounding, and on initial inspection, he appeared to be very much alive. He reached for the chart dangling from the foot of the biostretcher, wincing as his newly patched bones and musculature creaked into motion.

He noticed the woman on the stretcher in front of him was sealed behind a silvery wall of energy. A biopreservation field. She was waiting to be taken to the morgue. Stretchers lined both sides of the hall and held patients of all emergency indexes—from non-urgent to dead. He snatched the PADD and attempted to piece together the past few hours of his life.

The paramedics' report was short and only said, "Vulcan male of unknown age. Critical. Suspected spinal injury/crush injury. Administered 50 ccs ambizine and 600 mg potassium chloride." On scene emergency personnel were rarely known for being thorough, but given the state of the city, he understood the brevity. The hospital's information wasn't much more detailed.

He'd been brought in at 1442 hours and immediately triaged as level 2, which meant his condition was initially classified as emergent and likely to result in deterioration. After generalized scans determined nothing more than a compound fracture of his left arm, minor internal bleeding, a bruised left kidney, and hairline fractures to his skull and lower ribs, they'd given him more sedatives, connected him to the central hospital computer via cardio/cortical monitors, and placed his arm in a bone knitter.

He palpated his ribs: they ached but he could breathe without difficulty, so he presumed the built-in osteogregenerators in the biobed had been set to mend the minor fractures. There was no note of it, but there were almost no annotations in his chart, other than a recommendation to monitor kidney function.

"I need more beds!" a male voice shouted. "We have fifty more criticals inbound from the embassy district! And why the hell are we still getting burn patients? I told the city dispatch to reroute them to Parker General in Oakland! Dammit!"

The voice was unmistakable—Dr. Timothy Kelley, a man who took pride in being unpleasant and thrived during periods of high stress. Voris worked closely with him during his fellowship and respected his medical expertise, even if he didn't prefer his manners.

Voris flung his legs over the side of the stretcher and stood. His legs were unsteady, like a newly born animal desperate to take its first steps. He took a deep breath and stretched, sensing the drugs still weighing heavily on his muscles.

"Help," a voice coughed from behind him.

Voris turned to see an elderly man clutching his chest, noting the cortical monitor on the side of his neck was flashing amber. He shuffled to the stretcher on the opposite side of the corridor, scooped up the man's chart, and studied it. The man—James Easton, age 81—had generalized chest trauma and had yet to receive a bioscan. He glanced down the row of stretchers on the left side of the hall and saw nurses at the far end ferrying patients to the diagnostic labs. The people on this side of the hall hadn't even been triaged yet.

Voris dove into an ocean of pneumothorax, hemothorax, shock, traumatic amputations, concussions, fractures, myocardial contusions and so much more. As he repositioned the autotourniquet on a woman's leg—it had been placed too low and she was still oozing a small amount of blood—he heard someone shout, "What the hell are you doing?"

Dr. Kelley had returned.

"These people are dying," Voris replied, giving an illogical answer to an illogical question.

"Yeah, welcome to the party," Kelley spat. "You came in here with a fractured skull; you're in no condition to be treating patients."

Voris appreciated the truth of the doctor's claim, at least in regards to the more critical patients. He wouldn't trust himself to perform surgery right now, but he was certainly well enough to handle the more minor lacerations and fractures. "With all due respect, doctor-"

"Oh, shut up." Dr. Kelley groped at the cardio/cortical monitor near the base of his skull and clicked his tongue. "Vulcan superhealing strikes again. Listen, if you want to make yourself useful, we really need another physician in the morgue."

Voris blinked and glanced around. He saw at least five bodies lying on stretchers in plain view in the corridor, and he knew their presence was limiting access to living patients. Furthermore, he knew in an emotionally charged species like humans, visible corpses often heightened distress and panic in emergency settings.

The morgue was not where he preferred to be, but it was what the situation required of him. "Very well."

He turned to make his way downstairs when Dr. Kelley stopped him and pointed over his shoulder at the double doors in the distance. "Not on level 1. Outside. And take one of these with you and have someone bring back my stretcher. I need it. Oh, and sorry about your planet. Welcome to hell."

Voris stared at the exit forty meters down the lengthy corridor and nodded. He exchanged his anger and despair for absolute numbness. How many people had died here today? He pushed the stretcher bearing the young woman who had laid next to him down the busy hallway and through the sliding doors into parking area, which had been transformed into a sea of tents by mobilized emergency crews.

The temporary on-site morgue was on the left in a series of thirty black tents, with non-critical patients were being treated in numerous rows of yellow tents on the right. The pain in his chest returned when he entered the first tent with the body of the woman and was immediately turned away due to lack of space. It wasn't until he reached the twelfth tent that he'd delivered her—Jiao Zhang, age 33, dead of a penetrating chest trauma—for processing where she became decedent 12-068.

When he looked back on that day in his later life, he couldn't comprehend how he'd managed to maintain enough logic to function in a scene of complete devastation and loss. He was secretly impressed by the neutral expressions on the faces of many of his human counterparts. One woman, whom he learned was a first-year cadet from Starfleet Academy sent to help with recovery efforts, described the condition as "autopilot." He later found her sobbing over the body of a little boy—apparently autopilot had its limits.

As the afternoon turned into dusk and then twilight and eventually into night, the tents filled to capacity and they resorted to stacking the dead outside. The weather was warm and clear, and though they experienced a handful of small aftershocks, none were severe enough to halt operations. He worked to keep from thinking and though rumors about the Romulans and war and Vulcan and speculation about the final death toll ran rampant, Voris never stopped to listen.

Denial of the truth wasn't logical, but little about the day's events fit into a logical mold. Though he tried not to think about it, the sad nature of the work refused to be ignored. He signed off on one fatality tracking card after another, but at a rate of one every minute, he and the hospital's coroner were falling far behind. The math wasn't difficult: each tent held a hundred bodies and there were thirty tents filled to capacity in addition to approximately a thousand more lined up outside waiting to be processed. And more trickling in each hour.

Voris wandered out of Tent 12 just in time to see the sun rise, showering the ugliness with brilliant orange and purple hues. He'd always thought the sunrises and sunsets of Earth were more captivating than those of Vulcan, but this morning's was particularly beautiful. He inhaled slowly, realizing he would never see alam'ak rise over the L'langon Mountains again. He'd never thought to miss the plainer sunrises of Vulcan until now.

"Coffee?" asked a high-pitched voice.

Voris turned to see a cadet with untidy, straw-colored hair offering a cup of steaming liquid. He disliked the vile drink but appreciated the gesture, knowing humans often shared hot beverages as a sign of kinship, particularly in difficult times.

"No, thank you."

"I'm really sorry about what happened to your planet," she mumbled, pulling the cup back toward her chest.

"What has happened to yours is also regrettable," he replied, pushing back against the anguish pooling in his soul.

"Yeah," she sniffed.

"I must return to my duties," he explained, walking the short distance to Tent 13. He clenched his jaw and sucked in air through his nose, stuffing the heavy emotions down as far as he could manage.

He swiped his finger across the PADD in his hand and stooped to examine decedent 13-001 and frowned slightly. Cynthia DePaulo, human, female, age 45. His landlady.

His next breath came out slow and ragged and a second later, a warm tear fell from his left eye onto his cheek. He instantly wiped the shameful wetness away, set the PADD down by her feet, and wandered from the tent and away from Sarah April Memorial Hospital, back to his sad purple apartment on 17th Street.