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"Are you hurt?"

"Nothing that matters."

Her hand found mine, weak but deliberate. "That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I've got right now." I pressed my forehead briefly against hers, careful of the fever still burning under her skin. "Stay with me a little longer. We're almost through."

"I'm trying."

"I know you are."

Her eyes slid shut again before I could say anything else, and I made myself let her go under rather than fight to keep her present, because whatever energy she had, spending it on me wasn't worth the price if it meant she had less left for fighting.

"Through," Nykos called from the gap. "Move, now."

We cleared the blockage with the sound of boots on stone close enough behind us that I didn't look back to check how close, and the tunnel beyond opened into a straighter climb, air noticeably fresher than anything we'd breathed in the last day.

It happened without warning, the way most real changes do.

Nykos staggered mid-step, one hand flying to his own temple like something had struck him from the inside.

"I can feel them," he said, voice cracking. "Minds. All of them, everyone below us, everyone still coming, it's-" He cut himself off, breathing hard, visibly fighting to control a sense that had apparently just roared back to full strength after a full day of silence, eyes wide with the particular shock of a man readjusting to a sense he'd built his entire life around.

Corian's hand came up on pure reflex, and this time the air in front of him shimmered, a faint, wavering barrier flickering into existence before fading again just as fast.

"That's mine," he said, something close to disbelief in his voice. "That's actually mine."

He tried again, more deliberately this time, and the shimmer held longer, solid enough to catch a thrown stone Alex tossed at it half a second later without either of them planning the test in advance.

I felt it too, a familiar pressure gathering somewhere beneath my own skin, patient and waiting the way it always did before a shift, present again after a full day of nothing. I didn't test it. Some old caution held me back from actually changing shape this close to a fight that might not be finished yet, but the readiness alone felt like something solid returning to a place that had gone hollow.

Alex cupped one hand and a small, uncertain flame caught in his palm, guttering weakly before steadying into something real. Water beaded along his other palm a moment later, then a scatter of loose dust lifted an inch off the ground before settling again, each element answering in turn like instruments tuning themselves back into a single chord.

"It's back," he said, staring at it like he'd forgotten what fire actually looked like. "All of it. It's actually back."

Relief hit all of us at once, sharp and dizzying, and for one full breath I let myself believe the worst of this was over.

Then I looked down at Jade.

"She'll heal now," Alex said, already reaching for her. "Right? It's back for her too, it has to be-"

Nothing happened.

Her breathing stayed the same shallow, uneven rhythm it had held for hours. The wound at her side, visible where the bandage had slipped, stayed exactly as raw and open as it had been the last time I'd checked it. Whatever ability had roared back to life in the rest of us sat silent and useless in her, unconscious and unable to reach for a thing that should have answered the moment the Null field released its hold.

"Why isn't it working," Nykos said, kneeling fast beside her, two fingers pressed to her wrist like he could will her pulse into something steadier through touch alone.

"The crystal," Corian said, grim. "It's not just lodged in the wound. It's Null crystal, Halver. As long as it's touching her, it doesn't matter that we're clear of the null vein. She's carrying a piece of that cavern with her."

I understood, with a cold, sinking certainty, exactly what that meant. Her ability hadn't failed to reach the wound. It had never actually come home to her at all, not fully, not while a shard of the very thing that stole it in the first place still sat buried under her own skin.

"Then we pull it out," I said.

"We can't." Alex's voice cracked on the word, raw in a way I hadn't heard from him all day. "I looked at that wound back in the alcove. It's sitting close enough to the ribs that pulling it free without her ability to close the bleed behind it could open something we can't stop with a strip of cloth and pressure. If we pull it and she still can't heal the second it's out, she bleeds out in front of us. That's not a risk we're weighing. That's just what happens."

"And if we leave it in?"

"Then she stays exactly like this. No ability, wound open, fever climbing." Alex's jaw tightened. "And we're still seven days from the Citadel and anyone who actually knows how to do this properly. Seven days, Halver. She doesn't have seven days like this."