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East. It had definitely been east. I was fairly certain it had been east.

"East," I said, and hoped my voice hadn't wavered enough to notice.

Corian studied me a beat longer, and I held perfectly still under it, the same stillness I'd perfected at ten years old standing in front of men who outranked everyone I'd ever meet, waiting for a verdict I had no power to change. Whatever he saw, or didn't see, he nodded and looked back at the map.

I let out a breath.

The heat came on slowly at first, then all at once, a wrongness crawling up from somewhere under the bandage and spreading through my chest like something had opened a door that should have stayed shut. I knew this feeling. I'd catalogued it in a hundred patients over the years, read about it in texts older than the Citadel itself, watched it kill people who'd waited too long to see a healer.

Fever. Rising fast, faster than a body should generate heat this soon after an injury, which meant this wasn't my body simply responding to trauma the ordinary way.

Infection. Already. From wounds packed with crystal I hadn't been able to pull free, sealed shut with nothing but cloth and rope and Alex's steady hands.

I ran the diagnosis the way I'd run a hundred others, clinical, detached, the part of my training that never fully switched off no matter how frightened the rest of me got. Elevated heart rate. Rising temperature. The faint, sour taste starting to build at the back of my throat that I recognized now as my own chemistry shifting somewhere it shouldn't. Skin gone tacky at my hairline despite the cavern's cold. A tremor starting in my good hand that had nothing to do with the arm I'd already lost the use of.

Textbook progression, the kind I'd read about a hundred times in dry Citadel medical records and never once expected to diagnose from the inside. Wound contamination, likely from crystal fragments too deep to clean, compounded by however many hours had passed since the injury without proper irrigation or debridement. Systemic response building fast, faster than it should this early, which told me whatever had gotten into those wounds wasn't ordinary cave dust and grit.

Left untreated, an infection like this killed slowly and then all at once, fever climbing until the body simply stopped being able to keep pace with whatever it was fighting.

I had no way to treat it. Not out here. Not with my hands empty of the one thing that had never once failed me in my entire life.

That thought arrived with a kind of clarity the fever hadn't managed to blur yet, and underneath it, something colder than the heat climbing through my chest.

I was scared.

Genuinely, completely scared, in a way I hadn't been in longer than I could remember.

Tayvin had hurt me for years. He'd broken bones to watch me set them. He'd opened wounds just to study how fast I closed them, cut deeper the next time when the first cut healed too quickly for his taste, treated my body like a problem he got to keep solving however he wanted for as long as it amused him to keep solving it.

I remembered one session clearly enough that it surfaced now uninvited, needle-sharp against the fog trying to claim the rest of my mind. Twelve years old, strapped to a table because he'd said stillness mattered for the reading he wanted, watching him draw a line down my forearm with something that wasn't quite a scalpel and wasn't quite anything else I'd had a name for at the time. It had hurt. It had hurt in a way that should have terrified any child strapped down and helpless in a locked room.

I hadn't been afraid. I remembered that with total clarity now, the strange, cold comfort of knowing exactly how the pain would end, my own ability sitting patient and certain just beneath my skin, waiting for the moment he finally let go of my wrist and allowed me to reach for it.

I had spent years of my childhood in rooms with that man, and I had never once, not through any of it, been afraid the way fear was supposed to feel.

Because I'd always known. Whatever he did, however far he pushed, the collar would eventually come off, and when it did, I could fix it. Every single time. There had never been a version of that suffering that didn't end the moment I was allowed to reach for what lived inside me, waiting, patient, absolute. Pain was temporary when you owned the tool that erased it. I hadn't understood, back then, how much of my own courage had actually just been that certainty wearing a braver face.

Here, there was no collar to wait out. No Council decision that might eventually go my way. No quiet, private reach that would answer if I just endured long enough to try it again.

Here, my body was doing exactly what an untreated infection did to any ordinary person who'd never once had an ability to hide behind, and for the first time in my entire life, I understood precisely how frightened I should have been all along.

"Jade."

The voice came from further away than it should have, though I hadn't moved.

"Jade, look at me."

I tried. My vision had started doing something strange at the edges, a soft, spreading blur that ate into the crystal light until Corian's face and Alex's face and the stone wall behind them all ran together into one indistinct shape I couldn't quite separate back into parts.

"I'm listening," I said, though I wasn't entirely sure that was true anymore.

"You're not." Alex's voice, closer, edged with something sharp enough to cut through the fog a little.

"You've gone the color of the wall behind you."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."