She woke to someone knocking on Inang Cora's door.

Not her door. She had no door. But the sound landed close enough that she sat up before she was fully awake, already running through the list of reasons someone knocked before sunrise.

The light through the walls said early morning. Maybe an hour past dawn.

Inang Cora was already up, speaking quietly with someone outside. Maricel heard a child's name. Then the word "cut." Then "two days."

She got up.

---

Inang Cora's back room was small and used for storage — clay pots, rope, folded cloth, baskets stacked to the ceiling in one corner. There was a worktable along one wall that was currently holding three large jars of dried something.

Maricel moved the jars to the floor.

"Put her here," she said.

The mother carried the girl in herself. Eight years old, maybe nine. The kind of thin that came from regular meals that weren't quite enough. She was holding her left hand against her chest with the focused stillness of a child who had learned that moving hurt.

"Two days," the mother said. "She fell. We cleaned it."

"Let me see."

The girl looked at her and then at her mother. The mother nodded. The girl held out her hand.

The cut was on the palm, just below the first two fingers. Long but not deep — a clean edge, probably from a shell or a sharp piece of wood. Someone had packed it with something dark and herb-smelling that had dried into a crust.

Maricel leaned in close.

The packing wasn't wrong.

She recognized the preparation from Marisol's memory — a poultice made from the same broad-leaf plant that older households kept specifically for cuts and scrapes. Mildly antiseptic. The reasoning behind it was traditional, but the effect was real. Whoever had suggested it knew what they were doing.

The problem was the edges of the wound.

Red. Warm when she touched the skin around it. The infection was shallow still, just the surface tissue, but it had been going for two days and surface infections didn't stay shallow on their own.

"Who made the poultice?" Maricel asked.

"My mother," the woman said. "She learned it from her mother."

"It was the right thing to do. The infection got in anyway, not because of the poultice — because cuts on the palm are hard to keep clean when a child uses her hands."

The woman's expression shifted slightly. Less defensive. Maricel had learned early that the fastest way to lose a patient's cooperation was to make the person who had been caring for them feel like they'd failed.

She kept the old packing. Added a second layer of something stronger on top. Wrapped the hand cleanly with strips of cloth she had Inang Cora boil while she worked.

"Keep it dry for three days," she told the girl directly, not the mother. "No swimming. No fishing work."

The girl looked pained by this.

"Three days," Maricel repeated. "Then it heals. Or it doesn't heal for three weeks. Your choice."

The girl sighed in the way of children accepting terms they don't like but understand.

The mother paid with two eggs.

Maricel took them and didn't make anything of it.

---

The second patient arrived while the first was still leaving.

A pregnant woman, maybe six months along by the size of her. She had the careful walk of someone who'd been told by everyone around her to be careful, and had decided to be careful, but also had things to do and couldn't be that careful.

She sat down and looked at Maricel with assessment in her eyes.

"Rena sent me," she said. "The one whose husband has the bad cough."

Word from Nena had moved fast.

"What's the concern?" Maricel asked.

"The baby's low. My midwife says it's early. She says to rest and eat well and it will move up on its own." She paused. "But she looked worried when she said it."

"Is this your first?"

"Third."

"How did the other two sit?"

"High. Both of them. Never had this."

Maricel asked her to lie back. She assessed the position carefully, hands on the woman's abdomen, measuring what she could without tools. The baby was low, but not alarmingly so for the stage. The positioning suggested the baby was already starting to turn, which was normal at this point, possibly earlier than average but not concerning.

The midwife's advice had been correct.

"Your midwife is right," Maricel said. "Rest when you can. Eat well. At your stage this is not unusual, especially if the baby is a little bigger than your previous ones."

"She didn't say that part."

"The size part? Does it run in your husband's family?"

"His brothers are all large."

"Then there it is." Maricel helped her sit up. "Come back if the baby stops moving for more than a day, or if you have pain that doesn't go away when you change position. Otherwise trust your midwife. She knows what she's doing."

The woman looked at her for a moment. "That's all?"

"That's all."

"You're not going to give me something?"

"You don't need something. You need rest and food and your midwife, who is already giving you good advice."

The woman left looking slightly unsatisfied, which Maricel recognized as the correct response to being told you were fine. Nobody liked being told they were fine. But nobody liked being given unnecessary treatment either, even if they didn't know that's what it was.

She paid nothing. Maricel didn't ask for anything.

Some visits were just information.

---

The third patient took longer.

An elderly man named Ambo, brought by his daughter, who did most of the talking while he sat and looked at the middle distance with the patient expression of someone accustomed to being spoken about.

"His sight," the daughter said. "Getting worse for a year. He bumped into the gate post twice this week. The Babaylan practitioner we saw in the market town said it was a spirit matter — that someone had caused offense and the spirits were taking his sight as payment."

Maricel looked at the man's eyes.

She didn't say anything yet.

She held up one finger in front of his face and moved it slowly. Watched his eyes track. Asked him to tell her when the finger went blurry. Asked him which direction was worse, near or far. Asked about headaches, about whether colors looked different than they used to.

He answered all of it in a low, steady voice. He'd been watching things get smaller and dimmer for a year. He'd accepted it the way people accepted things they believed were punishment — with a kind of resigned waiting.

It wasn't a spirit matter.

It was the lens of his eye thickening. A slow process, usually, that dimmed and blurred vision over years. In her world there was a straightforward surgical correction. Here there was no correction.

But there were things that could slow the progression.

More importantly, there were things people did that sped it up — squinting in harsh light, straining to see in low conditions, rubbing the eyes. She could stop those, at least.

She explained it without using words that would mean nothing here.

"The structure inside your eye that focuses your vision is thickening," she said. "It's not a punishment. It's something that happens to some people as they age. It cannot be reversed here."

The daughter's face tightened.

"But," Maricel continued, "the rate at which it gets worse is not fixed. Strong light makes it worse faster. Straining to see in the dark makes it worse faster. There are things you can do to slow it."

She laid them out. Practical. Specific. A woven shade for the doorway at the angle the afternoon sun hit it. Not reading close work in low light. A particular preparation applied to a cloth and placed over the eyes in the evenings to reduce strain.

None of it would restore what he'd already lost.

But it might mean the difference between him seeing his grandchildren's faces for two more years or five.

Ambo listened to all of it quietly. Then he said, in his low steady voice, "The Babaylan practitioner was wrong."

"About the cause, yes."

He nodded slowly. Like he'd suspected this and was glad to have it confirmed by someone who would say it plainly.

His daughter paid with a small bunch of root vegetables and a piece of palm sugar wrapped in leaf.

Maricel thanked her.

---

She became aware of the headman's wife somewhere around the end of the second patient.

Not close. The woman was standing near the house across the path, in the partial shade of an overhang, with the specific quality of stillness that meant she'd been there long enough to stop thinking about whether she was visible.

Fifties. Well-dressed by village standards — not ornate, but clean and well-made, nothing frayed. The kind of woman who maintained a certain standard because it cost her something and she decided it was worth it.

She wasn't hostile. She was watching.

Maricel didn't acknowledge her directly. She kept her attention on her patients, on the work, on the conversation happening in front of her. But she tracked the woman the same way she tracked everything useful — in the background, consistently, without making it obvious.

The headman's wife was still there when Ambo and his daughter left.

Maricel began cleaning the worktable.

She heard footsteps cross the path. Then stop.

She didn't look up.

After a moment, the footsteps moved away.

---

She was eating a late lunch — the eggs from this morning, cooked simply the way Inang Cora did everything — when the knock came again.

A boy this time. Twelve or thirteen. Neat, well-behaved in the way of a child who'd been specifically instructed to behave before being sent somewhere.

He was carrying a clay pot with a cloth tied over the top. He held it out with both hands.

"From my mother," he said. "She says nothing."

Maricel took the pot. Lifted the cloth.

Rice porridge. Still warm. Enough for two people.

She looked at the boy. "Tell your mother thank you."

He nodded and left.

Inang Cora appeared from the back of the house. She looked at the pot. She looked at the direction the boy had gone.

"The headman's wife," she said.

"I thought so."

"She doesn't do things without a reason."

"I know."

The porridge was good. Well-made, lightly seasoned. Not a grand gesture. Not nothing either.

Someone in that house had decided she was worth watching. And had decided, at least for now, that watching wasn't enough.

Maricel ate the porridge and thought about what that might mean.

She didn't have an answer yet.

But she kept the pot.