The shadow fell across him from above.
The sound was brief. The outcome was not complicated.
Her attacker dropped, unconscious on the dock before Coreni had fully registered what had happened.
The figure who had produced that outcome straightened, and turned toward her.
The cloak and the eyes proved her savior was the same Fraluma who had decided not to kill her.
Several questions raised in her mind. Yet, when she opened her mouth, nothing happened.
He stepped toward her, and his expression was different now — neutral but something underneath it. Like he knew a secret. He reached out and his hands were very gentle when he touched her shoulders.
"It is time to take you away from here, Cremmilek," he said quietly.
She didn't know that word. She didn't know why it hit her the way it did — like something she'd forgotten she'd been waiting to hear. A door opening in a wall she hadn't known was there.
The cold, the wet, the adrenalin all slammed into her at the same time, overwhelming her system.
She registered that he still held onto her as the darkness overtook her.
Chapter Two
Edi-Veen
Maelek was on door watch, which was either fortunate or the opposite, depending on what happened in the next five minutes.
He looked at Edi-Veen. He looked at the woman in Edi-Veen's arms. He opened his mouth.
"Get Dremma," Edi-Veen said.
"You were supposed to —"
"I know what I was supposed to do."
Maelek closed his mouth. Opened it again. "Sraaak is going to —"
"Maelek." He kept his voice level, because raising it would mean this had already become something he couldn't control, and he was not yet ready to concede that. "Get Dremma. Tell her it is urgent and private, in that order, and do not tell anyone else."
A beat. Then Maelek turned and went.
Edi-Veen carried her through the passage toward the upper rooms, angling her sideways through the narrow bend without slowing. She hadn't stirred since the dock. Her breathing was shallow but even, and the blue had faded from her fingers on the walk in, which was something. Her fake implant had shifted in the fall — the seam wrong, the edge slightly lifted. He had noticed it on the container. He was noticing it again now, the specific wrongness of it, and he was doing what he had been doing since the dock: turning it over. Looking at it from every angle. Arriving at the same place every time.
He settled her on the bed in the upper chamber — pink-lit, mineral-cold, the small shelf with the crystal catching the light in the corner — and stepped back and looked at her face and thought about a word he hadn't planned to say.
He waited.
Dremma arrived in less time than he expected. She had been awake.
She took in the room with a single pass of her eyes — the woman on the bed, the shifted implant, Edi-Veen standing at the door — and said nothing, which meant she was already thinking.
"Her fingers were blue when I brought her in," he said. "They've improved. Her breathing is stable. She was conscious on the dock until the cold and the shock caught up with her."
Dremma moved to the bed. She stood over the woman for a moment, looking down with that particular quality of attention that had nothing to do with sight. Then she reached out and lifted the woman's hand in both of hers.
Edi-Veen watched.
The silence stretched. Below them, the Collective breathed — the water through the rock, the slow telepathic murmur of sleeping minds. He tracked it the way he tracked all things in his periphery, and kept his focus on Dremma's face, and waited for it to tell him something.
