Chapter Seventeen
Fortunately for Ezra and not-dead Julian, dizziness eclipsed my rage. Even with a barb of radiance jutting from my palm, I didn’t have the strength left in me to fight Julian’s iron grip on my wrist
“I just saved your life.” Julian rattled my arm until the radiance crawled back into my body, properly chastised. “This is a highly unreasonable response.”
“You lied to me!” My voice was something between a scream and a sob. I was shivering so hard, my knees threatened to buckle, but I pulled myself up to my full height and thought hard about kicking him in a soft place.
“Is that what I did? Are you certain?” Julian caught my other wrist, frowning. He looked over at Ezra as if hoping for some kind of support in the matter. His expression abruptly shifted to subdued horror, and he let me drop directly onto my backside in the mud. “Ezra. What did you do?”
Stunned, it took a moment to see what he’d responded to. Ezra had stumbled back against a tree, his hand pressed hard to his middle.
“I didn’t do it,” Ezra muttered.
A dark stain blossomed down his shirt, between his fingers.
“You’re bleeding,” I said on an exhale.
Julian caught him by the elbow as he swayed. “When?”
Humming thoughtfully, Ezra allowed himself to be directed to the edge of the bank, where the sand was dry and soft. “Before. Marshall and Ike.”
I crawled after them, shaking with more than a chill. Everything was happening too quickly for my mind to catch up.
I knew one thing clearly: We were all cold.
There were dry sticks and piles of dusty leaves on the narrow beach sheltered by a high bank.
This was a thing I could do. This was a thing I could focus on.
Scrambling around, I gathered a respectable pile of kindling and lit it with a modest plume of radiance.
In moments, the flames cast heat and a small glow.
Ezra was pale in the firelight, gaze too unfocused for my liking. “No fire,” he mumbled. “Someone will see it.”
Julian glanced over his shoulder at me, surprise softening to gratitude. “Ignore him. Come here. I’ll show you how to cauterize a wound with radiance.”
“How to what?” Ezra’s attention snapped up.
I shifted to kneel beside him opposite Julian. “Won’t that hurt him? He doesn’t do well around radiance.”
“It won’t hurt him as much as bleeding to death will,” Julian said.
“His doesn’t hurt me,” Ezra said with a loopy, baffling grin. Absurdly, he winked at Julian.
“What—How do you two know each other?” I asked in a sputtering voice. I would have a thousand more questions once we were dry and no one was bleeding out, but this one felt urgent. I needed to know exactly how angry I should be at both of them.
“We don’t,” Julian muttered.
“Liar,” Ezra said. He shook his head like an agitated horse, his eyes briefly fluttering closed. “I know you.”
Pain crossed Julian’s features as he tried to get Ezra to move his hand away from the wound. “Not right now, Josephine.” He swallowed. “Please.”
I couldn’t argue with the aching in his voice. If all three of us were lucky, I’d have time to sort them out later. Watching Julian roll Ezra’s wet shirt up, I asked, “Are you sure we can cauterize his wound right here? It’s hardly sanitary.”
“Shall we walk to town first?” Julian asked in a mild tone.
Ezra made a sound somewhere between a groan and a growl. The steep riverbank behind him, which I was certain had been dusty with dry roots, sprouted a soft bed of grass. He made no notice of it, instead saying quietly, “I told you to put that fire out.”
Julian rolled his sleeves up and wiped his palms on his thighs. “You will both die if you don’t get warm.”
“I’m not going to die,” I argued. How dare he make such an evaluation of my current state? I wasn’t dying. I was only miserably cold and vaguely considering lying down beside the fire for a week or two.
Julian’s voice became quieter. “He will die if I cannot see what I’m doing.”
A twisty sensation made itself known alongside my heart. While I was not sure what I felt about Ezra, I knew for certain I did not want to watch him die beside this cold river in the dark. “Show me,” I urged.
Ignoring the way Ezra mumbled a slurred protest, Julian lifted his shirt to expose the wound above Ezra’s hip.
I gasped. “Are there important things there? Organs and such?”
Ezra looked down. His arms had gone still, and his hands rested at his sides, only twitching. “No,” he said simply.
I clenched my jaw briefly. “Is that your professional assessment?”
“Yes.”
“He’s right, I believe,” Julian said, gingerly pressing his fingers around the small dark puncture that steadily bled a dark rivulet.
“Of course I’m right.” Ezra wagged his finger absurdly. “I’m the healer. Not you.”
“Apprentice,” I reminded him.
Ezra glared and dropped his hand. “You’re right. I’m an apprentice healer. And I know better than to do a medical procedure on a riverbank.”
“Present an alternative,” Julian said. “I’m willing to entertain suggestions.”
Silence stretched between them long enough that I blurted out, “Hurry up and fix him!”
A flash of amusement crossed Ezra’s face, endearing and infuriating all at once. He watched Julian with fondness. “You let your apprentice talk to you like that?”
“By all means,” Julian was saying, his attention on a filament of radiance as thin as a thread of silk. It stretched slowly between his thumb and pointer finger. “Continue to recklessly distract me from the delicate task at hand.”
Ezra’s eyes closed with a soft wince. “This is going to hurt,” he said with bald sincerity that caused another little twist in my chest.
Julian huffed a breath. “I told you. The alternative would feel worse.”
“Not for particularly long.”
“Stop wiggling,” I said in a hissed sort of whisper. “Let him work.”
“Hold him down,” Julian said.
I thought I’d misheard Julian, but sure enough, as soon as the radiance pulsed into the wound at Ezra’s hip, he bucked forward with a ragged sob.
I had no choice but to shove his shoulders back into the bluff.
He struggled for only a moment before his head lolled to one shoulder and his body went limp.
“He passed out,” I whispered.
“Good.” Julian’s voice was strained despite the relative simplicity of the work. He took a moment to steady his breathing. “Now watch. This is careful work. You must feel for the margins of the wound and stop the bleeding.”
“Feel? How?”
“When you allow the radiance to become an extension of yourself, it functions like an insect’s feelers. You’ve done it with machines without realizing it, I’m sure. I’m gently sealing the bleeding veins by burning them.”
“Like feelers? I’ve never heard of that,” I said, trying not to gag. The smell of singed flesh brought back the memory of Marshall’s screams and Ike’s messy death.
“Because no one’s ever taught you. And you never asked.”
His criticism stung. But he was right. I’d been a curious student, but only within the framework of Progress. I’d been so focused on being a good Conductor that I’d never asked the right questions.
“Even if I had, where would that have gotten me?”
Julian laughed. It was a surprisingly gentle sound. “You make a good point. All my questioning has led me to the same place. This stars-forsaken riverbank.”
Ezra’s fingers twitched, but he didn’t move, and within a second, the fine thread of radiance from Julian’s fingers extinguished. Using his sleeve, Julian wiped up Ezra’s blood. Only a small amount continued to trickle from the wound. Nothing like before.
“Will that save him?” I asked.
“I believe it will. And being out here in the woods ought to help him, too. The literature on Animators says—”
“The literature?” My voice was too loud, sputtering and incredulous. “You’re supposed to be dead, and now you’re talking about Animator literature like that’s perfectly normal reading material. None of this makes sense. And we don’t even know if he’s going to wake up again!”
To his credit, Julian allowed me to finish my distraught rant before he gently stated, “You’re cold. And you need to get warm. Sit beside him.”
Scowling, I shifted to sit hip to hip with Ezra. “There.”
Julian studied me, frowning. “We need to keep moving as soon as he can walk. I may need to dry your clothes with radiance.”
“With radiance?” I looked at my scraped, dirty hands. “What if you set them on fire?”
“Then you’ll be naked,” Julian said, busy using a large stick to push the burning kindling closer to me and Ezra.
He added more wood, moving with far more ease than I would have expected.
This wasn’t his first time in the wilderness.
He looked as comfortable in homespun, common clothing as he had in his stuffy uniform. Did I know him at all?
When he glanced over and found me silently glaring, he went on: “Drying wet clothes is not as difficult as you’re making it out to be. I’ll coat your garments with a fine layer of radiance until they’re dry. Feelers. Like I told you.”
I looked down at Ezra. Even unconscious, his brow was furrowed with discomfort. “Are we hurting him by using radiance near him?”
Julian paused, a stick held in one hand as if he’d lost track of what he was doing.
He frowned thoughtfully. “I’ve been trying to determine the mechanics of the synergy between our radiance and his magic.
I’m sure you’ve noticed he doesn’t respond well to being startled by radiance.
If he consciously welcomes it, it doesn’t clash with his magic.
When he’s unconscious … I suppose we’ll have to see. ”
“And how exactly did you discover all that?” I asked as pointedly as possible.
Julian’s breath stuttered. Even in the dim firelight, I could tell he was blushing. “I don’t think the nature of my research is relevant to this conversation,” he said.
“I think it’s pretty relevant.” When he remained stubbornly silent, I asked the next question on my mind. The one that felt like a livid bruise. “What about everyone else? Is radiance killing people?”