Chapter 42: Blue Scars

Chapter 42: Chapter 42: Blue Scars

The phone rang at 3:07 a.m.

Elias was awake before the second ring, the way he always was now, the way gates had taught him. He grabbed it off the nightstand. The screen said Merridan General.

"Elias." It was Nurse Ruiz. Her voice was calm, the way it was calm with frightened families, and that was what scared him. "You told me to call. Day or night. You need to come in."

He didn’t remember getting dressed. He remembered the stairwell, all twelve steps in two strides. He remembered the street outside, empty and wet under the streetlights, and the bus stop with no bus.

He didn’t wait for one.

Quick Step carried him down Larch Street faster than he’d ever run anywhere outside a gate. Two kilometers through the sleeping city, across empty intersections and red lights, past a startled man walking his dog, and every stride was longer than it had any right to be. Twenty-four agility points and a skill multiplier, and he’d never once used them for something that mattered more than this.

He made it in four minutes.

The fourth floor was too bright. Mira wasn’t in her room. A nurse he didn’t know pointed him down the hall toward the double doors marked INTENSIVE CARE, and he went through them without slowing down.

She was in the third bay, behind a half-drawn curtain.

There were more machines than he’d ever seen around her bed. The filtration unit stood beside them, but it was wrong. Its crystal filters weren’t glowing the clean, faint blue he’d learned to love watching. They were blazing, packed so full of captured mana that they hurt to look at, and a red light was blinking on the control panel.

And Mira.

The blue scars had climbed past her shoulders. They ran across her collarbones now, branching up the sides of her neck like frost creeping across a windowpane. Under her skin, where the lines were thickest, they glowed faintly from inside, a slow pulse of pale light. Her breathing was shallow and fast. There was a mask over her face.

Nurse Ruiz was adjusting a line in her arm. She looked up when Elias came through the curtain, and her face softened.

"She’s stable," she said quietly. "For now. Sit with her."

Elias sat. There was no cracked chair in the ICU, just a hard plastic one, and he didn’t know which side to sit on. He took Mira’s hand. It was cold, and through the skin of her wrist, he could feel the faint, hard ridges of the crystals underneath.

Her eyes opened halfway.

"Eli," she whispered behind the mask. "Your hair’s still terrible."

He laughed. It came out broken.

"I know," he said. "I know."

Dr. Hollis came in at eight. She didn’t ask him to sit down this time. She stood beside him at the window of the family room down the hall and looked out at the grey morning instead of at him, which was worse.

"The filtration was working," she said. "I want you to know that. It slowed the new growth exactly the way it should have."

"Then what happened?"

She was quiet for a moment, choosing her words the way he’d seen surgeons choose instruments.

"Gate sickness has a tipping point," she said. "For years, the crystals in her body grew slowly, one at a time, from the free mana in her blood. The filters catch that free mana. But once enough crystals have formed, they start to seed each other. They pull mana straight out of the tissue around them and grow new branches on their own, faster than any filter can catch." She folded her arms. "Mira reached that point last night. It isn’t anything you did, or anything she did. It’s just time."

Elias stared at the window. Rain had started to run down the glass in thin lines.

"How long?"

"Months," Dr. Hollis said gently. "With the filtration and everything else we can do, maybe six. Maybe fewer."

The word sat in the room between them like a stone.

"There has to be something," Elias said. "Something else. Awakened healers. There are healing classes. Hunters with restoration skills."

"There are. A handful in this city, all A-rank or higher, all under guild contract, and I’ve already called every one I know." She shook her head. "Healers repair wounds. They close cuts and knit bones. But the crystals aren’t a wound. They’re part of her now. You can’t heal them away any more than you could heal away her bones."

"Then what could?"

Dr. Hollis hesitated. For the first time, she looked at him directly.

"When I was in medical school," she said slowly, "there was a footnote in one of the gate-medicine textbooks. A case study from overseas, decades ago. An awakened with a skill nobody could classify, something that let them take things out of a body. Not cut them out. Draw them out. A poison, a curse, raw mana. Like pulling a thread out of cloth." She shook her head. "One case. Never replicated. The awakened died a few years later, and the skill died with them. It’s not a treatment, Elias. It’s a rumor in a footnote."

Elias didn’t say anything.

But somewhere behind his ribs, in the grey place where three people were waiting for him, a thought had started to take shape. A thought about doors and offerings, and about how the Threshold answered what was offered.

Draw it out. Like pulling a thread out of cloth.

"Thank you," he said. "For telling me."

Dr. Hollis studied his face for a long moment, as if she’d seen something there she didn’t understand. Then she nodded, touched his shoulder once, and left him alone with the rain.

Mira woke again around noon. The mask was off, and the color had come back a little into her face, though the blue lines on her neck were still there, glowing faintly whenever she breathed in.

"Dr. Hollis told me," she said before he could say anything. "So you don’t have to."

He sat down in the hard plastic chair and took her hand again.

"I’m not scared," she said, and her voice wobbled on the last word, and she glared at him as if daring him to point it out. He didn’t. After a moment, her glare crumpled. "Okay. I’m a little scared."

"Me too."

"You’re never scared."

"I’m always scared," Elias said. "I just don’t tell you."

She looked at him for a long time. Then she turned her head on the pillow toward the window.

"I never saw the ocean," she said quietly.

"You will."

"Eli."

"You will." He squeezed her hand. "I promise. A real one. Not a picture. I’ll take you, and Tobin will cook something that tastes like it, and you can tell him if he got it right."

Mira frowned. "Who’s Tobin?"

He’d said it without thinking. For a second, he didn’t know what to say.

"A friend," he said. "You’ll like him. He’s the best cook in two worlds."

She didn’t ask what he meant by two worlds. She was too tired. She just held on to his hand and closed her eyes, and a few minutes later, she was asleep.

That night, in Tobin’s kitchen, the whole family sat around the scarred oak table, and nobody ate.

"Months," Elias said. "Six, maybe fewer." He told them everything Dr. Hollis had said: the tipping point, the seeding crystals, the healers who couldn’t help. And the footnote. A skill that could draw something out of a body like a thread from cloth. "The next summon has to be someone who can help her. Not a fighter. Not a cook. Someone who can do that."

"Then that’s what you offer for," Aveline said simply.

"You’re one level short," Marcus said. "Level fifteen opens the next slot. You’re fourteen."

"Then we find a gate that gives me one." Elias opened the laptop and pulled up the bounty board. He’d already looked. He scrolled down past the E-ranks and the D-ranks and the C-ranks and stopped.

Hollow Mines — B-rank — Unassigned 21 days — Bounty: 14,000.

B-rank. One full grade above his status.

Marcus looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at the chalkboard on the far wall, where Elias had copied the rules from the range. Rule two. One rank at a time.

"Rule two," Elias said quietly. "I know."

Marcus was silent for a moment.

"Rule two is there to keep you alive," he said finally. "It’s not there to keep her from living." He stood up and picked up the chalk. Under rule two, in small block letters, he wrote: Except once.

Then he turned around.

"One gate," he said. "One level. We go in careful, we go in fed, and we come back out. Everybody comes home."

"Everybody comes home," Aveline agreed.

Tobin was already on his feet, rolling up his sleeves.

"Fire stew," he said. "And something cold. And something for a long night." He paused at the hearth. "And you’re going to eat every bite this time, lad. No arguments."

Elias clicked CLAIM.