POV: Kael
The medical room was quiet in a way that was not quiet at all.
The small lamp ticked on the wall. The kettle of clean water cooled on the brazier. Vedran breathed low and steady on the heated pallet. Sylra stood at the foot of the bed with her hands at her sides and her face doing something I had not seen her face do before.
She turned to me.
"Sit down," she said. "Across from me. I need the full picture and I need it without editing."
I pulled the second chair to the small table by the window. She sat across from me. She did not look at Vedran while we spoke. That was deliberate. She was making herself one kind of person for this conversation, and looking at him would have made her another.
I was sick with shame and I was also a healer. I could be both at once. I had been being both at once for months.
I cleared my throat once and gave her what she had asked for.
"The compound is a slow binding agent," I said. "It does not attack the body the way a normal poison does. It attacks the regulation mechanism that keeps the wolf bound to the man — the part of him that makes the wolf answer when he calls and rest when he tells it to rest."
I held her eyes.
"That mechanism is what is degrading. Every day it degrades a little more. The wolf becomes harder for him to hold. As the wolf weakens at that interface, the compound moves faster, because the compound feeds on the gap between them."
"It accelerates," she said.
"Yes. The weaker the regulation, the faster the next stretch of degradation. It is not a straight line. It curves down."
"How much time is left, Kael?"
I had been waiting for the question. I had answered it for myself a couple of dozen times in the last day and not liked any of the answers.
"From where he is on the pallet right now, before the curve steepens past the point where any antidote can hold against it — a couple of weeks. Maybe a little less."
I made myself say the rest.
"If he is unlucky with the curve, less than that. If the curve flattens for any reason, slightly more. I cannot give you a number that does not have a margin. The honest version is, weeks, not months."
She did not blink.
"Say it again so I know I have heard it."
"He has weeks. Not months. The ceiling is somewhere short of a fortnight if the curve runs the way I expect it to run, and the floor is shorter than that."
She sat with it. She did not move. She did not put her hand to her mouth.
She did the thing she did at council when a vote went wrong — she let the information arrive, and she did not perform her reception of it for anyone in the room.
The absence of performance was the worst thing about watching her receive it.
I had to keep going. I kept going.
"The window for the fifth attempt — assuming Ithara gets a fifth — is shorter than the window for life. Whatever we make has to be administered while there is enough of the regulation left to anchor it. Once the curve passes a certain point, the antidote does not have anything to bind to. It can be in his blood and do nothing."
"How long is that window?"
"Days. Inside the weeks. I would not stand on a number for that one, but it is shorter than the life window by a meaningful margin."
"Days inside weeks."
"Yes."
She held my eyes.
She was furious. She was frightened. She was holding both as work, the way she held everything as work, and she was paying for it inside her body in a way I would have to watch all night and not name.
"Why did he tell you to keep it from me?" she said. "His exact words, Kael. Do not paraphrase him for my comfort."
"He said you had enough on your back already. He named the items. The Conclave still active. The petition against Harren. Lyra in moonlight recovery."
I held her eyes.
"He said he expected to fix it before it became your problem. He said if I told you, you would carry it, and there was no version of you carrying it that helped him, and there was no version of him watching you carry it that he could function inside of."
"He decided that for me. And you decided it with him." She closed her eyes for a count of one.
"Yes."
She did not say anything to that. She did not have to. The silence between us was already saying it.
I looked down at my hands and looked up again, because looking down at my hands was a thing I did not get to do in this room.
"I am going to sit in that chair as long as you need me in it," I said. "And I am going to bring you the next thing the second I have it. That is what I have to give you. I know it is small."
"Stop," she said. Not loud. "Stop apologizing inside the technical answer."
She held my gaze.
"I will deal with the apology when there is time for it. There is no time for it now. You owe me the apology and I will collect it. Right now you owe Ithara everything you know."
"Yes."
"Every formula. Every variable. Every measurement. Every failed batch and what failed inside it. If a fifth is possible she does not start it from zero. She starts it with everything you have already paid for."
"I will give it to her tonight."
"Tonight. With your notebooks. With your margins. Even the parts you did not write down because you thought you would remember them."
"I will write them down before I bring them. I will not arrive empty."
She nodded once, and the effort of it passed through her jaw and her throat and settled somewhere I was not invited to follow.
I stood.
I turned to the door to find Ithara, because finding Ithara was the next operational task in front of me and I was going to live inside operational tasks until I was permitted not to.
Ithara was already in the doorway.
She had a text open in her hands, finger holding her place. Her sleeves were still up. Her eyes went past me to Sylra and back to me and stayed on me.
"The compound adapted to the fourth," she said. "I can read the adaptation in the markers from the dose. It learned. It will keep learning."
She held my eyes. Behind her, Sylra was already standing.
"A fifth antidote does not get to be a better version of the fourth," Ithara said. "It has to be something the compound has never seen. Or the compound will eat it the way it ate the others."