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Nobody said anything for a long moment, the weight of the choice sitting square on all our shoulders.

"There has to be something between those two options," Corian said. "We're not choosing between watching her die slow or killing her fast. Find me a third one."

"Terra Garrison B," Nykos said, quiet, like the thought had only just finished arriving. "It's on this island. It's a Crown post, which means it has combat medics on staff, people who deal with battlefield wounds as a matter of routine, not a squad healer with nothing but rope and cloth."

"How far?"

"I don't know exactly. Closer than Greymantle, though. We came in from the coast on the wrong side of the island for that route to make sense anymore."

Corian looked down at Jade a long moment, jaw working like he was running the calculation twice to make sure he hadn't gotten it wrong the first time.

"We leave the crystal exactly where it is," he said finally. "We pack the wound as tight and clean as we can manage, and we move for Terra Garrison B instead of backtracking the way we came. If she wakes up before we get there, we deal with the extraction properly, with her awake and able to close what we open."

"And if she doesn’t wake up," Alex said.

"Then we get her to people who can do this the hard way, the way soldiers have always done it, and we pray we're fast enough."

Nobody had a better plan to offer instead. I wasn't sure one existed.

We broke out into daylight forty minutes later, a rockslide exit tumbling down into a stretch of scrubland well outside anything Greymantle's maps had ever shown us, sun bright and clean and almost obscene after so many hours underground.

Nobody cheered. Nobody had the breath left to spare on it.

I carried Jade the last stretch myself, unwilling to hand her off again now that my arms had answers waiting in them even if her body couldn't yet use them, and laid her down in the shade of the nearest rock outcrop while the others fanned out to check the terrain around us. Ashter settled beside her the moment she was down, solid weight pressed close against her uninjured side, and for the first time since the fall I let myself actually look at the daylight instead of the dark we'd just climbed out of.

Scrub grass. Distant tree line. No sign yet of anyone following, though that told us less than I wanted it to.

"Clear," Corian said, though his voice carried none of the relief the word should have brought. "For now."

For now. I understood exactly how much weight those two words were carrying, and how little comfort they actually offered. We'd gotten out of the mine. We hadn't gotten Jade out of danger, and somewhere behind us, whatever operation we'd stolen evidence from was almost certainly still looking, with resources and reach none of us had any real measure of yet.

Nykos crouched near the tunnel mouth, eyes distant in the way that meant he was sweeping the area properly for the first time in a full day, and the tightness in his shoulders when he straightened told me the answer before he said it out loud.

"Nothing close," he said. "But there's activity. Distant, moving, organized. They're searching a wide area, not just the tunnels."

"How long before they reach us here."

"Hours, maybe. I can't be more precise than that yet."

Alex crouched beside Jade, checking her pulse with two fingers the same, careful way we'd all learned to do it over the last day, and looked up at the rest of us with an expression that had none of his usual easy humor left in it.

"Rewrap the wound before we move again," he said. "Tighter this time. If we're betting on Terra Garrison B instead of removing the crystal, we need that bleed as controlled as we can get it for however long this takes."

"Then we do that first," Corian said, "and we don't stop moving again until we're there."

We found better cover a quarter mile on, a shallow overhang cut into the hillside that hid us from open sky without boxing us into anything as vulnerable as another tunnel, and Corian called the stop the second he'd checked the sightlines twice.

"Here. Just long enough."

I laid her down as gently as the ground allowed, and Alex was already pulling his own shirt over his head before I'd finished settling her, tearing it into long, even strips with a practiced efficiency that had nothing left in it of the man who used to make a joke out of every task that felt this grim.

"Hold her still," he said. "I need the old wrap off before I can see what I'm actually working with."

I held her, one hand steady against her uninjured shoulder while Alex peeled away hours of soaked, stiffened cloth, and the wound underneath looked worse in daylight than it had anywhere we'd checked it before, dark and swollen around the place where the crystal still sat buried, the surrounding skin gone an angry, hot red that hadn't been there this morning. Black veins spreading out from the wound.

"That's spreading," Nykos said, low.

"I know." Alex didn't look up. "Pass me the clean strips."