The cut is on her left temple. Not deep. I can tell from the flow pattern, the way the blood has tracked down the side of her face and along her cheek in a single line. Superficial. A glancing blow, not a direct hit. But there’s enough blood to make it look worse than it is, which is the thing about head wounds. They bleed like motherfuckers.
Behind her is Mara, breathing hard. She has no visible injuries, but there’s something in her posture that tells me she handled herself in whatever happened back there. She’s in the aftermath of adrenaline, which is different from shock. Shock makes you still. Adrenaline makes you vibrate.
Vi sees me and her stride doesn’t falter. She walks straight toward me with blood on her face and a bag of documents against her chest. Her eyes lock on mine with an expression I can’t read because there’s too much in it, all defiance and pain and something that which looks possibly, triumphant.
She got what she went for.
She stops in front of me. Close. Her breath is coming fast. The blood has reached her chin now, a thin red line threatening to drip down her shirt.
I stare at her and she stares back.
Every prepared response I have, every measured statement, and every calm assessment, is obliterated by the sight of her blood. My speech, my reprimand, are all gone, replaced by a single, white-hot, wordless reaction that fills every availablepore and has nothing to do with strategy or logic or any of the things I’m supposed to be.
I reach out and my hands find the side of her face, tilting her head to assess the wound. The gesture is automatic, the thing you do when someone is bleeding and you need to determine severity.
And I’m not only assessing the wound. I’m also holding her face in the middle of a dark corridor with Rogue behind me, Mara behind her, blood on my thumb, and I’m looking at her with something I can’t name.
Her expression transforms, her defiance softening. She sees whatever is on my face, whatever I’m failing to control, and she doesn’t look away.
“I got them,” she says, holding up the bag up between us. “That’s what matters.”
I look at her. Bruised, bleeding, alive.
That’s not what matters—but I can’t say it. Not here, not now, not with her bleeding and the truth hitting me all at once: I can’t lose her.
30
STING
We don’t talkon the walk back, where we’re in standard formation with me in front, Rogue behind, Vi and Mara between us. The residential section opens up around us and the population thickens. The Rot becomes the Rot again, familiar, controlled, and manageable, and I wait to feel relieved.
But I don’t.
What I feel instead, now that the adrenaline is fading and immediate danger is past, is anger. Not the cold, calibrated version I usually operate with, nor the measured response I deploy when someone crosses a line and needs to be informed of the consequences. This is something else. Hotter. Less structured. Erupting from a part of me I didn’t have access to before I held Vi’s face in a dark corridor with her blood on my thumb.
We get to the Skylight Room and close the door. Rogue finds the first aid kit, a real one, not the scavenged collection of bandages the work hub keeps, and hands it to me without aword. Mara sits against the far wall, knees up, breathing slowing. She watches me with wary eyes. She should.
Vi sits on the edge of the couch, the bag of documents on her lap. She hasn’t let go of it since I found her in the corridor. Blood has dried in a line down the left side of her face, cracking where the skin moves. She looks exhausted but alert, and entirely unrepentant.
I kneel in front of her, open the kit, and take out antiseptic and gauze and clean the wound. I was right, that the cut is shallow and does not need stitches. I dab antiseptic along the edge and Vi winces but doesn’t pull away. I press gauze over it, tape the edges, the whole thing taking maybe two minutes.
Then I sit back on my heels and look at her.
“The section you were in has no reliable exits,” I say. My voice is controlled, which is deliberate and Vi knows it because she’s heard me like this before. “If the route you took in was blocked, your only alternative was a maintenance passage that runs through a structurally compromised section of the second floor. The ceiling in that passage has partially collapsed. If you’d been forced through there, one or both of you would have caught falling debris.”
Vi’s eyes are on mine. She doesn’t interrupt.
“The people who occupy that territory don’t operate under any authority. If the group you ran into had been larger, or better organized, or more interested in what you were carrying than in whatever scared them off, you would not have walked out.”
I hear my own voice, steady and precise. Every word is correct and every word is a wound I’m inflicting on myself as much as her because I’m not describing hypotheticals. I’m describing the scenarios I ran in my head while I walked to No Man’s Land not knowing if Vi was dead or alive.
“You have no combat experience, no knowledge of the Rot’s layout beyond what you’ve seen. And Mara, Mara’s been here amatter of days, and you took her into an area that experienced Rotters avoid. If something had happened to her, that’s on you. If something had happened to you?—”
I stop.
Because the end of that sentence isn’t clinical. The end of that sentence isif something had happened to you, I don’t know what I would have done, and I can’t bring myself to say that. Not in this room. Not with Rogue leaning against the wall pretending to examine the first aid kit. Not with Mara watching from the floor with those wide, careful eyes.
Vi waits. She can feel the unfinished sentence. She can see it sitting in the air between us, the words I won’t say.
