Chapter 241: Slow and Ugly

The flower that had closed last night was open again by dawn.

Ren sat on the rise above the beach and watched it finish. Petal by petal, the same slow order as before, just backwards. No panel came. No number moved. He hadn’t expected one.

"Big day," Kaia said from the heart of the tree. "Go."

He went.

— • —

The Alliance medical district sat on the far side of campus, past the law halls, in a row of long, low buildings that smelled of clean stone and boiled herbs. Cassian’s room was on the second floor of the treatment wing. Ren had been there twice. The cohort had been there so many times the healers had stopped asking for names.

He knew the day’s history before he reached the bed, because the family had left it all over the room.

A pile of snack wrappers in the bin by the door, folded into small angry squares. That was Yuelan, first shift, sunrise. A sheet of paper on the side table with the healers’ rotation written out in neat blocks, times underlined twice. Iris. A page torn out of a notebook and pinned under the water jug — a drawing of Mistwhisker, all teeth. Vesper. A blanket folded over the back of the visitor’s chair, corners square. Lyra folded blankets like that. And the chair itself had been moved. It sat by the door, turned to face the corridor instead of the bed.

Kaelen had sat there. Facing out.

Nobody had made a schedule for this. Nobody had asked anybody to come. They had just come, one after another, all day, and Ren had drawn the evening.

Eira was already inside, of course. Her field kit was open on the tray, the same kit she’d carried since Orien, and she was writing numbers off a healer’s slate into her own book without looking up.

"You’re late," said the man in the bed. "The contractor already said ’hm.’"

— • —

Cassian Rook lay in the cradle.

That was the healers’ word for it. It looked like a long bed made of pale wood and metal, with thin lines running from the frame into both his arms and down along his spine. A slate on a stand beside it showed a row of lines, most of them flat, one of them red.

His channels had burned out the night Ren’s world was born — the night at Orien when Cassian held a teammate together with his own energy until there was nothing left in him to hold with. The healers on Edius had called it permanent. General Halvern had called that wrong and put his own name behind it. The channels could grow back, he’d said. With treatment, and operations, and money most nations didn’t have. Slow, he’d said. And ugly.

This was the slow and ugly.

"Renovation update," Cassian said. "Today they’re doing the load-bearing walls. Very exciting. Sit down, you’re blocking the light."

Ren sat. He took the chair Kaelen had turned, and turned it back.

The lead healer came in a minute later — a short woman with ink on her fingers who said "hold still" the way other people said hello. She checked the lines, checked the slate, and nodded at Ren like he was a delivery that had arrived on time.

"Family?" she asked.

"Family," Cassian said, before Ren could answer.

Ren ran a scan while she worked, because he checked everything.

[SCAN: CASSIAN ROOK. PATHWAY: BLOODLINE PLANT LORD. STAGE: SPROUT — DORMANT. CHANNELS: BURNED OUT.]

[TREATMENT: CHANNELS ARE REBUILT ONE THREAD AT A TIME. EACH THREAD MUST SEAT, HOLD, AND CARRY LIGHT BEFORE THE NEXT CAN BE LAID.]

[VOID TAINT: PRESENT. IT FIGHTS EVERY THREAD.]

[ESTIMATE TO FIRST WORKING CHANNEL: YEARS.]

Years. He’d known that. It still read badly in capital letters.

— • —

The work looked like nothing.

The healer drew a thin thread of light out of a vial, laid it along the inside of Cassian’s forearm, and pressed it down into the arm with two fingers, and then she held it there. That was the whole job. Hold it there. The slate counted. The red line on the slate twitched, and settled, and twitched.

"Seated," she said, after a long time. She let go. The line stayed settled.

"One," Cassian said. "Write it down. I want a plaque."

She laid the next one.

The afternoon went like that. Thread, press, hold, count. Cassian talked through most of it — about Yuelan’s wrappers, about the drawing ("she gave the cat my eyebrows"), about how the Alliance had clearly hired the slowest contractor in the galaxy on purpose. Eira wrote numbers. Ren sat.

He had fought a mad garden the size of a country, down in the dark of a dead sea, and it had been easier than this. Down there, he’d had something to do.

— • —

The fourth thread tore loose.

There was no warning on the slate. One second the red line was settled, and the next it jumped, and Cassian’s whole body locked in the cradle — back arched off the wood, jaw shut, a short sound through his teeth that wasn’t a word. The thread of light along his arm came away from the skin like a hair pulled out of a wound and went dark in the air.

The healer’s hands were already moving. Two fingers on the arm, hard. The other hand on the slate. "Hold still. Hold still. Breathing. Good."

Eira was on her feet with the kit before Ren had finished standing up.

It took a while. Ren couldn’t have said how long. The line on the slate came down one twitch at a time, and Cassian’s back came down with it, and then he was lying flat again, grey in the face, breathing through his nose.

"Torn," the healer said, flat. "The seat’s gone. We start that one over next week."

Nobody answered her.

Cassian didn’t say anything for a long stretch after that. He lay in the cradle and looked at the ceiling, and the jokes didn’t come, and nobody in the room asked them to.

Eira sat back down. Her kit shook once in her hands when she closed it. Then it didn’t.

Ren stayed in his chair. There was nothing in him that could fix this. He had a whole world inside him, with an ocean in it, and none of it was any use in this room. So he sat, with his hands on his knees.

— • —

The healer gave the bill before she left for her break, because that was her job too.

"No day-passes this week," she said. "No walking to the window tonight. The seat needs to close before anything else goes near it."

"Cancel my dinner reservations," Cassian said to the ceiling. It was the first thing he’d said in an hour. It was a small one, but it was there, and Eira’s shoulders came down.

— • —

Evening. The last thread of the day.

The healer laid it along the back of his left hand this time — a short channel, one of the first they’d ever rebuilt, a thread that had seated weeks ago and held ever since. She pressed. She counted. The slate twitched and settled.

"Seated."

She let go.

And the thread lit.

Not the healer’s light. His. A line of pale gold ran the length of the channel on the back of Cassian’s hand, from wrist to knuckle, thin as a hair, and it came from inside him. Ren saw it. Eira saw it. The healer had frozen with her hand still in the air over the slate.

[ONE CHANNEL: LIT.]

[SOURCE: THE PATIENT.]

[DURATION: ONE BREATH.]

Then it went dark.

Nobody in the room moved. The slate’s line sat perfectly flat, as if nothing had happened, because the slate measured the treatment, and this had not been the treatment.

"Write that down," Cassian said. His voice was very steady. "First light. Very romantic."

The healer wrote it down.

Ren had been inside the channel for that breath — not with his hands, with the part of him that read things. He’d felt the thread take. He’d felt Cassian’s own energy find it, like water finding a crack, and run the whole short length of it, and stop at the end because there was nowhere yet to go. Then he’d felt it let go.

’Not never,’ he thought. ’Still not yet. But not never.’

He didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything. Eira had her two fingers against her chest, the tap the whole cohort had picked up from him without deciding to, and she was looking at the back of Cassian’s hand like it might do it again if she watched hard enough.

It didn’t.

"He’s trying so hard," Kaia said, very softly, from a whole world away.

— • —

Cassian slept after that, or did a good impression of it.

Ren stayed. The wing went quiet one door at a time. Eira packed her kit and left with a hand on his shoulder and no words. The healer looked in twice and said nothing either time.

Past midnight, Ren’s slate buzzed on his knee.

It was the group chat. One message, from two meters away, sent instead of said.

Cassian: Update. One channel lit for one second tonight. Statistically, that’s a trend.

Ren read it twice. He did not look over at the cradle. He put the slate face-down on his knee and kept his eyes on the window.

— • —

Yueying came in for the night shift a little after that, with tea.

She set the pot on the tray, next to the drawing of Mistwhisker. She checked the slate. She nodded at Ren, and sat, and took out her own slate to read, and for a while the only sound in the room was Cassian breathing.

Then her slate chimed.

A single soft note. An official one. Ren knew the sound — every request the academy approved made it. She’d been waiting on this one since before the expedition — the deep-archive request she’d filed then, chasing records that kept getting older and stranger every week.

Yueying read it once.

She went completely still.

"Ren," she said, and her voice had gone very quiet and very careful. "What I’ve been looking for has a name."