“I dislike healers.”
“We survive this grief daily.”
She holds out her hand. I give her my arm.
The old bandage peels away slowly, catching on dried blood and whatever blue-lit nonsense my body has decided to turn into. I clamp my teeth together as the cloth comes free.
The cut looks wrong. Not infection red or bruise purple. It’s blue. Faint veins of light thread beneath the skin around the wound, pulsing in a slow rhythm I can’t hear but feel under the floor. Merra goes still.
“Don’t,” I say.
She says nothing. Excellent. Very calming.
“Don’t look at my arm like it’s joined a cult.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Everything hurts. Be specific.”
“The glow.”
“It’s cold.”
“Only cold?”
“It pulls sometimes.”
“When?”
When the system pulses. When I’m near the samples. When Kavor is close enough that my body remembers he exists before my brain can make it behave. I don’t say any of that.
Merra notices what I’m not saying. Of course she does. Healers and route-runners are both professionally nosy. We only pretend it’s care.
“When?” she asks again.
“The system,” I say. “The samples. Sometimes the floor.”
“Sometimes?”
“Merra.”
Her mouth tightens, but she wraps the wound. One layer. Then another. Tight enough to hide the glow, but not enough to make me feel like a person again.
The floor trembles. Small. Then not small. The basin ripples. The blue under the fresh bandage brightens. I suck in a breath and immediately regret involving my ribs.
Merra’s hand closes over my wrist. “Stay still.”
“I am.”
“You are planning to stand.”
“That is a separate activity.”
The pulse comes through the floor. Once. Pause. Again. Farther than before. No. Closer than before. But not here. It moves through the City like a thought looking for a mouth. Shouts rise beyond the hanging cloth. Then footsteps. Fast ones.
Merra turns as a young runner shoves through the curtain, sweat streaking clean lines through dust on his face. Not Penr. One of Ila’s, I think. Thin, bright-eyed, terrified enough to break.
“Sera,” he huffs, out of breath.
