Chapter 2 Rael #3
The healer set down her weapon and picked up a cloth and a container of liquid that smelled of sharp alcohol. She knelt beside me — close, closer than any non-Lucian had ever voluntarily come — and looked at the wound on my ribs.
"This is deep," she said. She was not speaking to me.
She was speaking to the wound, the way I had watched her speak to other injuries throughout the day — narrating her own assessment as she worked.
"Two and a half inches at least. Needs cleaning, closure, and monitoring for infection.
Assuming your biology even works the way infection works. "
She looked at my face. Directly. Without flinching.
"This is going to sting," she said. "Not that you'd tell me if it did."
The liquid she pressed to my wound was fire.
I held myself very still. I knew pain. Tyvor had made certain of that.
But this pain was different. Clean. Purposeful.
Pain with the intention of healing behind it, and I had not experienced that distinction in so long that it took me a moment to remember it existed.
She worked quickly and with precision, her hands small and steady against my skin.
She did not touch me more than she needed to.
She did not touch me less, either. There was an economy to her movements that I found unexpectedly beautiful — no wasted motion, no hesitation, every gesture calibrated to accomplish exactly what needed accomplishing and nothing more.
I watched her face as she worked. It was a disciplined face.
A face that had practiced stillness until the stillness became permanent.
But underneath the discipline, in the small muscles around her eyes and the set of her jaw, I could read exhaustion and something else — something I recognized because I carried it myself.
The particular weariness of a person who had been keeping others alive for so long that they had forgotten to keep themselves alive too.
A sound from behind. The tent's entrance flap moved, and a small face appeared in the gap — a child, young, maybe four or five in human years, with wide dark eyes and a curtain of tangled hair. The child stared at me with the frozen terror of a small creature confronting something from a nightmare.
I became aware of my own luminescence. In the dim tent, my skin was producing the faint glow that Lucian skin generated in low light, an involuntary biological response, like the human phenomenon of goosebumps.
The glow was faint, but in the shadow of the tent it would be visible, and to a child who associated pale glowing things with the monsters that killed people in the dark, it would be terrifying.
I dimmed it. Consciously suppressed the luminescence until my skin was simply pale, simply skin, nothing glowing, nothing alien.
The effort was small but the effect was immediate.
The child's rigid posture softened by a fraction, and after a moment the small face withdrew and the tent flap fell closed.
The healer had noticed. Her hands had paused on the bandage she was wrapping around my ribs. She was looking at me — not at the wound, at me — with an expression I could not read.
Then she finished the bandage, stood, and gathered her supplies.
"Don't move," she said. "Don't try to get up. If anyone comes in here that isn't me, don't give them a reason to kill you, because they won't need much of one."
She turned to leave.
I spoke.
I should not have. Speaking aloud to a non-Lucian was...
there was no human word for what it was.
An act of exposure. Of intimacy. The psychic network existed so that we would never have to resort to the crudeness of vibrating air to convey meaning.
To speak aloud was to strip yourself bare, to push your thoughts through your throat and your mouth and out into the world where anyone could hear them, where the words hung in the air unprotected and could not be taken back.
But I spoke.
"Brecca," I said.
Her name. Just her name, offered into the silence of the tent in my voice, which I had not used aloud in...
I was not certain. Years, perhaps. The sound came out wrong.
Layered. My vocal apparatus was designed for psychic resonance, not speech, and when I spoke, the harmonics doubled — one frequency carrying the word, another carrying the undertone, the emotional register that among my own people would convey meaning beyond the word itself.
What the undertone carried, I was not prepared to examine.
She stopped at the tent's entrance. Her back was to me. I watched her shoulders tighten and her hand grip the canvas flap and her heartbeat — which I could feel now, faintly, through the barest edge of the psychic web — accelerate to a speed that meant either fear or something adjacent to fear.
She did not turn around.
She left.
And I sat in the dim tent with black blood seeping through the bandage she had wrapped around my ribs, and I thought: I have made a terrible and irreversible mistake.
But I did not think it with regret.