I turn and walk. She follows.
The cave is three more hours up, and I’ve lived in it for two years. Before that, the eastern ridge; before that, the lowland burrows near the salt flats. I move when the locals decide I’m too close.
This mountain was the last option, because nobody climbs this high without reason and nobody stays. The two thousand gold was everything I had.
The entrance is a gap in the rock face, half-hidden by a shelf of granite that juts out above it. You’d walk past it if you didn’t know where to look.
It’s wide enough for my shoulders without angling them, and I go through first. She follows without hesitating, one hand on the rock above her head, through the short tunnel and into the main chamber.
It’s large enough to stand fully upright, even for me. A fire pit sits in the center, the stones blackened from two years of use, coals banked under ash from this morning.
I kneel at the pit and blow on the coals until they catch, feeding in dried scrub until the flames hold. Then I take the glow-stone lantern from the shelf and set it on the ledge near the workbench.
The stone inside brightens when uncovered, a clean white light that doesn’t flicker. Better than firelight.
There’s a sleeping space along the far wall, my bedding, a pile of furs I traded for at the lowland market before the sickness made the trip too difficult. Stone shelves I carved into the rock hold dried meat, water skins, a few tools. A water source runs down the back wall in a thin sheet, cold and clean, collecting in a basin I chipped out of the floor.
It’s not much. It was never meant to be much.
She walks in, looks around, and doesn’t react. No flinch at the bareness of it, no surprise. She sets her pack down near the fire pit, drops her bedroll against the wall nearest the warmth, and turns to me.
“Vest off.”
I stare at her.
“I need to see the scale deterioration across your back. If your glands run along the spine like most venomous species, the worst damage is behind you. Unless you want me to work blind.”
I pull the clasp at my left shoulder and the vest lifts off. The deterioration is worse than what shows from the front, and I know it. I’ve felt it spreading for months, a deadness where there should be sensation, a flatness where the scales should catch light.
She walks behind me. I hear her boots on stone, then her fingers, bare, pressing against a dull patch between my shoulder blades.
I go rigid. Every muscle, every scale.
“Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“What about this?” She presses harder, her fingertips finding the edge where healthy scale meets dead scale, the transition zone, where it still aches.
“Yes.”
“Good. Pain means the nerves are still functional in the transition zone. If the dead patches were painless at every border, I’d tell you to enjoy your last few months and stop wasting both our time.”
She moves to the next patch, lower, closer to the gland line. I stand still and let a human woman touch the parts of me that are dying.
I don’t flinch. I don’t speak, and I hate every second of it. Not the touch. The fact that I need the touch.
“The gland line,” she says. “I need you to flex the venom production. Push a dose up. Don’t release it. Just bring it to the surface so I can feel the tissue response.”
I hesitate.
“I’m not going to die from skin contact. Besides, the delivery requires puncture. Fangs. I’ve read what there is to read about your species.”
I flex the glands. The familiar pressure builds behind my jaw and down through the channels in my spine, flooding the secondary reservoirs along my back and sides. The scales in those regions flush, brightening, the color returning for a moment before it fades again.
Her fingers track the wave from behind me, from the gland line outward, pressing at each junction to feel for blockages, for dead tissue, for the places where the venom can’t reach anymore.
Her touch is impersonal and thorough.
