I set my notebook on the shelf and the vials beside it.
I spend the first two hours of daylight mapping the deterioration. He sits on the stone floor with his back to me, vest set aside, while I work down the gland line.
“Twenty-three dead zones. Fourteen transitional. Look at this, the spread pattern’s asymmetric, which means one side of the gland line’s been overproducing harder than the other,which means. Hm. Which means you favor one side when you sleep, don’t you?”
He doesn’t answer, and I wasn’t really asking. I’m saying things to keep my hands paced.
“The rest are healthy,” I say to his back. “Not for long. Three months ago this would have been twelve dead zones, maybe fifteen. Six months from now, if nothing changes, the healthy patches will be islands in ash.”
Silence. He’s doing the breathing thing, slow and measured, the breathing of someone who has learned to hold himself very carefully, the kind of control that comes from years of making yourself smaller than you are.
The gland line is the key. It runs from the base of his skull to his lower spine, and from what I’ve read it should be bright and responsive.
His is dim. The tissue is swollen, engorged, the channels backed up with venom that has nowhere to go.
Underneath the swelling there’s something else, a roughness in the gland tissue that doesn’t feel like overuse. It feels like damage. I press along the ridge and feel the fluid beneath the scales, warm and dense, the consistency wrong, too thick, stagnating.
“Oh, you poor thing,” I say, and then freeze, because I didn’t mean to say it out loud, and also becauseyou poor thingisn’t what you say to a venomous apex predator with gold eyes and a crest of bony ridges.
I keep working. Pretend I didn’t just sayyou poor thingto the Ophidian. Pretend the tips of my fingers aren’t learning his body by touch. Pretend I didn’t notice his breathing change when I said it, a loosening.
For months people have leaned away when I get close. He holds still and lets me put my hands on the worst of him. I don’t have a note for what that does.
I write it all down, and he doesn’t ask to see the numbers. He sits still and lets me work. The only sounds are my pen on the paper.
I work lower, past the gland line terminus, past the transition where the thick scales thin into finer ones below. I come around to face him, kneeling.
His wrapping, the hide that covers him from waist to thigh, is folded beside him on the stone, and between his thighs there’s a ventral slit, closed, the scales around it finer than the chest scales, thinner, intact. No deterioration. I press along the margins the way I’ve pressed every other junction, checking tissue response, scale condition, gland line connectivity.
The slit is warm, and the tissue underneath responds to the pressure with a subtle shift, involuntary, and I...
Okay. Professional. I note it and move on, clinical shorthand, the kind that lives in the notebook and not in my mouth.
I don’t know who I’m writing it for; nobody’s going to read these notes. There’s no guild panel reviewing my research design anymore, and I’m writingconsistent with species literature.
My fingers were on an Ophidian’s genital slit forty seconds ago, and the notebook is where I go when my body does things that don’t match my self-image of who I am. I make my handwriting careful. It helps.
I don’t linger, even though part of me wants to, because there are six more dead zones on his lower left side and the light is already shifting. I work the remaining patches along his left flank and lower back, each one pressed and cataloged, the pen balanced between my teeth when both hands are needed.
When I’m finished, I come back around to face him.
“I need extracted samples,” I say. “Four draws. One at rest, one after physical exertion, one after sleep, one during an emotional state change.”
“I can extract for you.”
“Good. Use these.” I hand him four glass vials from my pack, the last of my lab equipment besides the assay stone and one pipette.
I sold most of my kit over the past seven months, piece by piece, to buy bread and passage through walled-city checkpoints that turned me away anyway. I kept the vials because a poisoner without sample vials is just a woman with opinions about toxicology, and I wasn’t quite ready to be that yet.
He takes them carefully, and his fingers brush mine. His skin is dry, scaled, warmer than I expected.
The venom glands underneath produce heat as a metabolic byproduct; I know that, because I know venom biochemistry. But the warmth registered before the knowing did, which doesn’t usually happen. I hand over the vials and let go.
“And the bite,” I say.
He takes the vials to the stone shelf and sets them down carefully, his back to me.
“You said tomorrow.” I move in front of him. “It’s tomorrow.”
