Five. My step stutters. The corridor tilts.
Not the floor. Me.
The red strobe smears across the walls and suddenly there is too much of all of them. Too much feeling. Too much pull.
My knees stop being reliable.
"Thaw."
It comes out thin. He turns immediately.
He reaches for me and his hand lands flat on my sternum, over the mark. His eyes lock on mine and his voice drops. The same one he used on Fen through six feet of corridor.
"Me. Just me. Find me."
I do.
The other bonds do not disappear. They are still there. Still pulling. But Thaw is closer. His hand. His voice. The noise inside me eases. I take a deep breath.
"Good," he says.
His hand falls away.
"Stay on me. We move."
We pass the last of the medical section. A sample fridge. A whiteboard I do not let myself read.
Then Fen twitches.
For one second, I feel him.
Not words. Not Thaw's clean focus or Crull's anchored weight. A churn. Dark. Fast. Wrong. A body climbing toward consciousness through four canisters of gas and clawing at the inside of its own sedation.
I feel how far down he is. I feel how hard the climb is. I feel, for one second, what it is to be Fen, and it is the worst thing my body has ever done.
Then it is gone.
On Crull's shoulder, Fen's whole body locks. His back arches. The lolling head comes up an inch. The claws flex, and one hand closes on nothing, grasping. A sound comes out of him.
The half-whine. The broken one.
"He's coming up," I say. "Crull—"
"I know."
Crull's rumble never stops.
"I have him."
His hand tightens once across Fen's back, then pats. Slow. Certain.
Fen's back eases. Not all the way. The half-whine thins. The grasping hand opens.
Between one red strobe and the next, he sinks again.
The hollow in my chest stops fluttering.
It goes silent again, and I am ashamed of how relieved I am, because the flat cold silence means he is safe. Because he cannot survive waking in the wing where they broke him.
