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"Because it keeps being true."

It wasn't, and some distant, still-functioning part of my mind noted the lie with mild professional disappointment, the same way I'd have noted a patient insisting they felt wonderful three breaths before they stopped breathing at all.

Ashter made a sound against my hip, small and pained, and some instinct older than my own fear reached for him before I'd consciously decided to move, my good hand finding his side, checking.

"Still with me," I said, though I wasn't sure whether I meant it for him or for myself.

Cold hands found my face then, careful and certain, cupping my jaw and tilting it up before I'd registered anyone moving toward me at all. I knew them instantly, the particular shape of those fingers, the specific weight of that touch, familiar enough by now that I'd have known them blind and half-conscious in a room full of strangers.

Halver.

"Jade." His voice had lost every trace of its usual steadiness. "Your skin's burning. Look at me."

I tried to focus on his face and found it swimming, features sliding in and out of focus like something viewed through moving water, and the fear I'd been holding at arm's length finally broke through whatever careful distance I'd built around it.

"I think it's infected," I said, and heard how thin my own voice had gotten, stripped of every clinical distance I'd been hiding behind a moment ago.

"The wounds. I can feel it. I can't fix it, Halver, I don't have anything to fix it with."

"Okay." His thumb moved along my cheekbone, the same slow, grounding motion he'd used a dozen times before for entirely different reasons.

"Okay, we hear you. We're not leaving you here."

"I didn't say leave me."

"You were thinking it."

I had been, somewhere underneath the fever, some old reflexive math running itself without my permission, weighing my own worth against the squad's speed the way I'd been taught to weigh things my whole life. He'd caught it anyway, the way he seemed to catch most things about me lately whether I offered them or not.

"Corian." Halver's voice sharpened, pitched toward the rest of the group without ever fully leaving me. "She's spiking a fever. Fast. This isn't just the wounds anymore."

Movement around me, fast and close, more voices layering over each other until I lost the thread of which words belonged to which person. Corian's hand found my wrist, checking my pulse.

"That's too fast," he said, low.

"I know." Nykos, somewhere near my other side, closer than I'd realized he'd gotten. "Jade, can you hear me?"

"Yes." The word came out slower than I wanted it to, too much effort required for one syllable.

"Good. Stay with that. Stay right there."

I had never once seen this particular combination of expressions on all four of their faces at the same time, not even during the worst of the Water Rift. Corian's careful command voice had a crack running under it now, thin but unmistakable. Alex had stopped talking entirely, which frightened me more than almost anything else happening, since silence had never once been a place he went comfortably. Nykos's jaw had locked, and even through the fog closing in around my vision, I understood that whatever calm any of them were managing right now was costing considerably more than it looked like from the outside.

I wanted to tell them I was sorry for costing them that. I didn't have the breath left to spend on it.

I wanted to tell him that staying anywhere felt increasingly like a decision my body wasn't fully consulting me on anymore, that the alcove had started tilting gently in a way the actual stone certainly wasn't doing, that some distant, detached part of me was still running the same diagnosis over and over like reciting it enough times might change the answer.

"Leave the pack lighter," I managed instead, the words coming out thick and slow. "Go faster without me. I can hold the alcove, I've held worse, you don't need to slow the whole—"

"Stop," Corian said, sharp enough that it cut straight through the fog. "That sentence doesn't get to finish."

"We need to move," he said again, and I'd never heard his voice carry quite that particular edge before, controlled on the surface and something close to frantic underneath it. "Now. Whatever's past that fork, we go through it or around it, but we are not sitting in this alcove while this gets worse."

"Agreed," Alex said, already moving, already gathering whatever gear had been set down during the brief stop we'd apparently decided was over. His hands weren't quite steady doing it, small and fast the way they got when he needed to be doing something with them or risk falling apart instead.

"Halver, can you carry her?"

"Already doing it."