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I'd built half of who I was around what I could do with fire and water and earth and air. Without it, kneeling in the dark with blood on my hands and nothing but a knife and some torn cloth to work with, I felt about as useful as I had the day some palace groundskeeper's boy caught me trying to pick his father's pocket. Small. Empty-handed. Entirely out of tricks.

"Mine's gone too," I said, and heard how thin my own voice had gotten.

Corian had gone very still, staring past all of us toward the cavern wall a few feet beyond the rock shelf, where the strange glow I'd noticed on the way down pulsed faintly, jagged seams running through the stone like veins.

"That's Null crystal," he said.

"That much of it?"

"There's only one known mine, small under the palace-" He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to. The seams ran as far as the light reached in either direction, thick veins of black crystal buried straight into the cavern walls, more raw Null than any of us had ever heard of existing outside a locked vault.

"That's why none of it's working," Nykos said, hollow. "It's not us. It's the whole cavern."

Corian didn't say anything to that. His eyes had already moved past the crystal seams to Ashter, to the way his chest rose too fast and too shallow, and something in his face went from grim to something worse.

I looked up, expecting the commander's voice, the next order already lined up the way it always was, and found him instead kneeling exactly where he'd stopped, staring at the seams of black crystal like they'd personally taken something from him. His hands had gone still on his knees. Not clenched. Just still, in a way that scared me worse than anything he could have said out loud.

"Corian."

Nothing.

"Corian, I need you."

His head turned, slow, and for one second, one single unguarded second, I saw exactly what four years of watching him hold a room together had never once shown me. Not fear. Past fear. The particular blankness of a man who'd just watched every plan he'd ever built collapse into a single fact he had no tool left to fix: she was bleeding out in front of him, and nothing he could do, nothing he had ever been able to do, was going to matter here.

"Corian." I said it sharper this time because gentle wasn't going to reach him and I didn't have time to find out what would. "Look at me. I need hands, not a shield. Can you give me that much?"

Something moved behind his eyes, slow at first, then all at once, like a man remembering how his own body worked. He blinked. His jaw set. By the time he looked back down at Jade, whatever had cracked open in him a moment ago had been shoved somewhere out of sight, not healed, just put away, the same way he put everything away when the squad needed him standing.

"Tell me what you need," he said, and his voice came out steady enough that I almost believed it had never wavered at all.

I looked back down at Jade, at the blood still welling steady from wounds none of us could close with anything but our own two hands, and understood exactly how much trouble we were actually in.

"Then we do this the slow way," I said, and reached for the rope coiled over my shoulder, because a tourniquet didn't need magic and neither did a splint, and right now those were the only tools left in the whole world that were going to work.

I packed the deepest puncture first, folding a strip of her ruined shirt tight against it and pressing until the bleeding slowed to something manageable, then checked the two embedded shards Halver held the light steady on. Neither sat shallow enough to pull without risking more damage than it fixed, so I left them exactly where they were, wrapped the wounds around them, and moved on before I could think too hard about carrying her out of here with crystal still buried in her side.

Her arm came next, swollen along the forearm in a way that only meant one thing. I set it as gently as I could manage, Halver holding her still while she made a sound that gutted something in my chest, and splinted it against a length of broken rope I'd have called useless an hour ago.

"I know," I said, mostly to her, mostly to myself. "I know. Almost done."

By the time I finished wrapping her ribs tight enough to give the break some support, my hands had stopped shaking, which felt like the only useful thing that had happened since the floor gave out beneath us.

Corian crouched at Jade's other side, checking my work with a critical eye before he looked up at the rest of us, and I watched him do the thing he always did in the worst moments, drawing something steady up out of himself for our benefit whether he felt it or not.

"Here's where we stand," he said, voice even, deliberate, the kind of calm that cost something to produce. "No abilities. No way to call for help, no way to signal the surface, and from what I can see of those walls, no way to burn, blast, or shield our way out of here either. Whatever gets us out of this cavern, it isn't going to be magic."

Nobody said anything.

"We're going to have to survive on what we actually know how to do," he continued. "Rope. Hands. Whatever training we had before any of us ever manifested a single ability. That's what's left, and it's going to have to be enough."

"And if it isn't," Nykos said, quietly.

"Then we find more."

Nobody argued with that, mostly because nobody had anything better to offer in its place. Halver knelt to help me shift Jade more comfortably against a folded blanket, careful of her arm, careful of the wrapped ribs, and Ashter pressed his solid weight against her uninjured side, breathing hard now in a way that matched hers too closely to be a coincidence, like he could hold some of the damage together through sheer proximity alone even as it cost him.

I looked down at Jade, pale and shaking against the stone, held together by cloth and rope and nothing else, and thought that enough was going to have to stretch a great deal further than any of us wanted it to. Whatever was happening to her was happening to him too, one heartbeat behind, and I didn't know which of them we were actually racing to save.