Chapter 782: Choice

Thepes looked away from Alex.

"Let me change the sample," he said.

Mingyue did not move her blade.

"Without pulling through her."

"I heard her."

The words came out more harshly than he intended.

He did not apologize. His hands pressed against the ice as Alex moved freely on the other side of it.

But he turned his attention to the blood he had already released.

The sample carried more than the arrangement around his core. His will was still in it, ready to force the next part to follow whenever it resisted.

He loosened that pressure.

The drops began losing the shape he had given them.

Vesa shook her head.

"The part we need is fading too."

Thepes steadied the drops before their useful shape collapsed.

"Leave the pattern here," Alex said, indicating the space inside his boundary. "Let us carry the call past it."

Thepes understood. He would have to hold the sample without treating everything beyond it as another limb.

He disliked giving up that reach. Being able to hold a connection felt like strength, and he had lost enough of his strength already.

The woman tried to speak again.

Thepes kept the sample steady and withdrew his intent from the part beyond it.

"Now."

Mingyue opened a narrow space beside her blade. Alex moved the inherited power through it while Vesa held to the response that had begun to fade.

The uneven pulses met the sample, and Thepes wanted to correct the part that still moved badly. He stopped himself before the correction became another pull.

The woman’s voice returned.

"Are you there?"

"We’re here," Vesa said. "Can you move your hand yourself?"

A pause followed.

"Yes."

Thepes kept his eyes on the blood instead of looking at Mingyue.

The woman breathed quickly. Someone beside her asked whom she was speaking to, and she told him to wait.

"My arm moved before. It pulled against the wound."

"That movement has stopped," Mingyue said. "Tell us if you feel it again."

Thepes said nothing.

He could still feel the connection. The frost hadn’t stopped him from reaching along it, but he kept his will within the sample.

Alex leaned toward the call.

"Where are you?"

"Below the old pump room. The water conduit broke when the fighting reached the next block. We got out of the lower passage, but I can’t stop the bleeding."

Vesa asked which part of the city, then repeated the directions to someone beyond the room.

Thepes listened while keeping the sample steady.

The woman had been cut along her forearm. The man with her had tied it, but each time she tried to draw blood back toward the wound, the flow broke and forced the cut open again.

Her voice weakened as she explained.

Thepes looked at his own left wrist.

He knew what it felt like to push power toward an injury and have another part of the body pull it away. Since the fight, he had been choosing which damage to repair because he could not close everything at once.

"Stop drawing from farther inside," he said.

Alex looked toward him.

Thepes ignored the look and spoke to the woman.

"You’re trying to pull the flow across the damaged part. Keep what is already beside the cut there. Let the man hold pressure over it while you stop dragging more toward it."

"How?"

"Slowly. Don’t try to mend the whole arm at once."

Mingyue watched the faint response.

"We haven’t seen her injury," she said to him.

"Then she tells us if it gets worse."

He hated having to explain something he could feel in his own flesh. But the woman’s blood was not his body, and the place where her pattern broke was not in exactly the same position.

He waited instead of forcing the rhythm he thought she needed into the call.

For the first time, the man’s voice came through clearly enough to understand.

"I have it held."

The woman let out a long, unsteady breath.

Thepes watched the sample above Alex’s hand. The response still carried the same damage. Helping her keep blood at the wound had not repaired the rest of it or made her power move like his.

"Less is coming out," the man said after a while.

"Keep holding it," Mingyue answered. "Help is coming to your position."

The woman’s next words were stronger.

"I tried to answer before. I could hear something, but every time I spoke it went away."

"We heard part of it," Alex said.

"Is it just me?"

Thepes looked toward Vesa.

She did not pretend to know how many people had the same damage.

"We’ve only tried a limited call," she said. "We know this response was different. We don’t know how many others there are yet."

The woman went quiet.

Then she gave a more exact direction for the rescuers, including a broken gate they would need to pass and the dry ledge where she was waiting.

Thepes kept his blood still while Vesa relayed it.

A few minutes later, another voice called from the woman’s side of the connection. Vesa confirmed that Dorian’s people had found the gate and brought a healer from the shelter attendants.

The woman answered aloud, guiding them around the broken conduit.

Thepes heard their steps reach her.

"Someone else has her arm now," the man said. "They’ve brought what she needs."

Thepes heard her breathing ease. Her next answer came without the strain he had heard while she tried to keep the wound closed and speak at the same time.

Vesa turned toward Thepes.

"They have her. You can let the sample settle."

He eased his effort. The woman’s voice faded until he felt only his own blood moving inside Alex’s boundary.

Thepes waited for the pair to claim that helping had proved something about him. He was ready to reject whatever name they tried to put on it.

Alex looked at Vesa instead.

"Keep the part that let her answer. Leave out the pull."

"I have the difference," she said.

Mingyue lowered her sword, though the restraint around his body remained.

Thepes looked at the place where his blood had joined the call.

The connection had worked without his control reaching the woman. Alex was already studying the boundary. Thepes knew that intent look; he had worn it himself.

"Don’t use my pattern to make them come," he said.

Alex’s gaze shifted from the rune to him.

"No," he said. "We have enough people trying to kill us without adding the ones we’ve just found."

"Then keep it that way."

Thepes let his head sink back. His body still hurt, and there were people outside who would have preferred to see him destroyed.

He had not become their servant by helping one voice reach the room.

When Vesa asked him to hold the sample once more so she could preserve the useful shape, he raised the blood himself.