Nobody has touched me in over a year. The last person who tried was a healer in a lowland village; her hand came within an inch of my shoulder, the venom flushed at the proximity, and she pulled back before making contact. She apologized, and I left. That was fourteen months ago.
This woman doesn’t pull back. Her fingers press into the dead patches, the living patches, the transition zones betweenthem, and the venom responds by surging. I clamp it down and hold still and let her work.
“Production rate is high,” she says, half to herself. “Concentration feels extreme even at rest. Your glands still work. You’re just making venom faster than your body can clear it.” She pauses. “If the literature is right about bonding mechanics, a mated Ophidian would clear this excess. But even unbonded, this rate seems wrong. Too fast. Something else is driving it, and I don’t know what yet.”
She steps back and comes around to face me. Her head doesn’t reach my collarbone. “I can work with this. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“The alternative is doing nothing, and you’ve already tried that. Didn’t work well, did it?”
She opens her pack and pulls out a notebook, worn leather cover, pages dense with handwriting, ink stains on the edges. She flips to a blank page and starts writing, fast, in a tight script, not looking at me.
“I’ll need samples,” she says. “Extracted. Small volumes. Multiple time points over the next forty-eight hours. And I’ll need you to bite me.”
I step back in shock. “Bite you?”
“Yes.” She glances up from the notebook. “My assay stone is calibrated to my blood. I’ve built tolerances to other venoms through deliberate self-exposure. Yours will be the next one.”
I look at her, small and lean and road-worn, hands that don’t stop moving, already reaching for the next page, a voice that doesn’t soften and doesn’t apologize.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Tonight would be better.”
“Tomorrow.”
She holds my gaze for three seconds, then turns back to the notebook. “Tomorrow, then,” she says. “Don’t eat anything after midnight. I want your body at rest, not digesting.”
She writes something else.
I pull the vest back on, and my hands are shaking worse now; the flexing aggravated it. She doesn’t look at the shaking. She’s looking at the stone shelf where my dried meat is, measuring the surface area, the distance from the water source and the glow-stone light.
The shelf would be at the right height for her to use, but it’s full of my supplies. She doesn’t ask me to move anything. She sets up on the floor instead, cross-legged, notebook on her knees, vials in a line beside her. Workable. Not ideal.
After she falls asleep, I move the dried meat and the water skins off the shelf and stack them against the side wall. I wipe the stone clean with a rag and carve a shallow lip along the front edge so the vials won’t roll.
It takes twenty minutes. My hands shake the entire time and the work is rough and uneven, the tremor in every cut.
It’s not much, a cleared shelf with a crude lip. But it faces the cave mouth, and the morning light will fall across it. Her notebook will fit, the vials will stay put, and the pale stone she keeps wrapped in cloth, the one she handles more carefully than the vials, will sit where the light hits it.
I move the glow-stone lantern to the shelf edge so she’ll have light to work by.
I go back to my side of the cave and settle down. Her voice is still in my head, the flat certainty of it. I close my eyes and listen to her breathe across the cave.
RUELLE
The scale deterioration is worse than I assessed at the market, by a significant margin. That’s the first thing I notice as a professional.
Before the professional mind kicks in, I notice the shelf.
He cleared it while I slept. The workbench I’d been eyeing is wiped clean, supplies restacked, and along the front edge someone has carved a shallow lip, rough work, uneven, tremor-hands doing careful work in the dark.
I want to thank him. I open my mouth,you didn’t have to do this, orI noticed, or both, and nothing useful arrives.
He’s sitting against the far wall, eyes open, watching me try to work out what I’d say. I close my mouth again.
Get to work, then.
