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He worked fast, packing the deepest part of the wound the way he had back in the cavern, wrapping tight and even, murmuring something low and steady to her the whole time, the kind of running commentary that seemed to matter more for his own hands than for her ears.

He was halfway through the second wrap around her ribs when his fingers went still against her skin.

"Alex?"

He didn't answer. His hand moved, fast, back to her throat, two fingers pressing hard against the same spot he'd checked a dozen times already today, and something in his face emptied out completely.

"No." His voice came out small, nothing like him at all. "No, no, no-"

"What's wrong?" My own voice sounded far away, like it belonged to someone standing outside my body instead of inside it.

"I can't find a pulse."

The words didn't make sense for a full second, my mind simply refusing them, and then Alex moved, fast and sure in a way his voice hadn't been, tilting her head back and starting compressions against her chest with both hands locked together, counting under his breath in short, clipped numbers that cut through everything else in the world.

"Corian, breaths, now. I count, you breathe on four."

Corian dropped to his knees on her other side without a single wasted motion, and I stayed frozen exactly where I was, one hand still on her shoulder, watching Alex drive his weight down against her chest again and again while some distant, useless part of my mind kept insisting this wasn't real, couldn't be real, not after everything we'd already survived to get her this far.

"Halver." Nykos's hand closed hard on my arm. "Halver, look at me."

I couldn't. I couldn't look away from her face, slack and pale and utterly still in a way that had nothing left of the woman who'd found my hand in the dark an hour ago and told me to stay with her.

"One," Alex counted, voice cracking. "Two. Three-"

I had shifted into a dozen different animals in my life, faced Rift creatures twice my size, held a line alone against armed men with nothing but my own two hands, and none of it, not one single moment of any of it, had ever come close to the raw, hollowed-out terror clawing through my chest right now, watching Alex's hands work against a heart that had simply stopped, with nothing left in any of us, no shield, no shift, no ability on this entire earth, that could make it start again.

"Come on," Alex said, to her, to the sky, to whatever was listening. "Come on, Jade. Come on."

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I just watched, and waited, and prayed to the elements that her chest would rise on its own before Alex's count reached ten.

It reached seven.

Her back arched off the ground, a single, violent, beautiful convulsion, and a sound tore out of her that was somehow the best thing I had ever heard in my entire life, wet and desperate and unmistakably alive. Alex rolled her onto her side on pure instinct, one hand steady between her shoulder blades while she coughed and gasped and fought her own body back into some kind of rhythm, ragged but real, real, real.

"There." Alex's voice broke completely on the single word, all the clinical control finally cracking under whatever he'd been holding back to get through the last minute. "There you are. Stay with that. Stay right there."

I hadn't realized I was crying until I tasted salt, and I didn't care, not even slightly, not with her chest still rising and falling under my own eyes.

Corian was on his feet before the rest of us had finished processing what had just happened, already moving with the particular speed of a man who understood exactly how little time this reprieve was likely to buy us.

"That's not going to hold on foot," he said. "Not fast enough, not with her heart already proving how close it is to stopping again. Halver."

"What do you need?"

"Something fast. Faster than any of us can carry her. Whatever you've got."

I didn't hesitate. Years of studying every animal that crossed my path, every stable and pasture and hunting ground I'd ever walked through with more attention than anyone realized, all of it narrowed down to one clear, obvious answer, the animal I'd spent more hours around than almost any other in my entire life.

The shift came fast, faster than it ever had, bones stretching and reshaping themselves into something built for exactly one purpose. Ground that had been at my eye level rose up beneath me, my vision widened and shifted, and the last thing that stayed entirely mine through the whole transformation was the singular, burning need to move.

"Get her up," Corian said. "Alex, you're riding. You know her condition better than any of us, you'll catch it faster if something changes."

Alex didn't argue. He lifted her with a care that belied how little time we actually had, settling her carefully in front of where he swung up onto my back, one arm locked secure around her waist, her head tucked against his shoulder where he could watch her breathing without looking away from the ground ahead.

"Go for Terra Garrison B," Corian said, already backing toward the tree line with Nykos beside him. "Straight line, fastest route you can manage. We'll cover your trail and catch up as fast as we can on foot."

"You're splitting us up," Nykos said, though it wasn't really a question.

"A horse can't carry four. It can carry two, fast enough to matter." Corian's eyes found mine, human eyes meeting whatever strange new shape mine had become, and something passed between us that needed no words at all. "Get her there, Halver. Whatever it takes."

I tossed my head once, the closest thing to a nod this body could manage, and Alex's grip tightened.

"Ready," he said, low, right at what would have been my ear. "Go. Go as fast as you can."

I went.

The ground opened up beneath me in a way it never had on two legs, scrubland blurring past in long, powerful strides, every ounce of fear and fury and desperate, burning hope I had left pouring straight down into muscle built for exactly this kind of running. Alex's weight shifted with the gait behind me, steady, balanced, his voice a constant low murmur against Jade's ear that I couldn't make out the words of and didn't need to.

I ran like the whole world depended on it, because as far as I was concerned, right now, it did.

Terra Garrison B sat somewhere ahead of us, past hills and scrubland and however many miles neither of us had bothered counting, and I put everything I had left into closing that distance, hooves eating up ground with a speed no human legs could have matched, carrying one of the only things that had ever actually mattered to me toward whatever chance still waited for her on the other side of this run.