Chapter 107: The Healers Would Not Bury Either Aylin

Glass stole Aylin’s next breath before she had finished the last one.

Mist streamed from her mouth, crossed the ruined side of Pava’s healer screen, and entered a clear tube strapped along its roof. Another white strand came from the woman on the shutter. The two strands twisted together inside the glass.

Pava Linn slapped her palm over the tube’s lower joint.

"Two patients," she said. "Two breaths. I watched both of them arrive."

The Glass Healer bell answered from uphill. Its clear note pulled hard enough to make Aylin stagger.

Outside the screen, Hest Sorn gave ground one boot at a time. Without his shield, he fought with an iron gate bar tucked across both forearms. Each time a loose piece of roadglass tried to rise from the flooded street, he drove it back under a warder’s heel.

"Keep moving!" he called. "The bell has the lane marked."

Pava’s healers lifted the three surviving corners of the screen. Roots dragged beneath it like broken toes. The open side faced the street, so Aylin walked there with a forge spike in one hand and the hot salt wrap in the other.

She held the heat near the wounded woman’s feet. She did not touch her.

Jiang rode in a cloth sling tied beneath the screen’s crossbar. The sling held his injured flipper snug to its cradle and kept the rough floor away from his open shoulder. A wrapped salt brick pressed warmth against his belly. It felt good enough to make him angry at every jolt that moved it.

One of Pava’s assistants offered him another piece of oily cavefish.

Jiang opened his cracked beak carefully. The fish hurt going in. He swallowed it anyway.

"That is the first sensible thing I have seen anybody do today," the assistant said.

Jiang looked past the fish at Aylin trying to breathe.

"I did say anybody."

The tube above him clouded until the women vanished behind its fog. Inside that whiteness, something drew a head with two mouths.

Pava saw it. "Do not let the tube reach the tower joint."

Valea ran beside the screen on the other side of the warder line. A bronze cable had wrapped around her road knife and was pulling her uphill. Her root hammer lay in pieces back by Westbell, so she hooked the knife under a paving lip and dragged the cable sideways with both hands.

"I can bend the route," she said through her teeth. "I cannot stop the bell from wanting it."

"Wanting is its problem," Pava said. "Direction is yours."

The screen lurched left as Valea turned the bronze pull around a forge drain. The glass strand from Aylin bent with it. The strand from the woman on the shutter did not. It tightened straight toward the tower and cut a pale line across her throat.

Pava dropped beside her.

"Your wrist is bleeding again. May I take it?"

The woman looked at Pava’s hands before she answered. "Above the scar. Not over it."

"Your shoulder?" Pava asked.

"Ask me after we are not moving."

"I am asking now."

The woman almost laughed. Pain stopped it halfway. "Yes."

Pava supported her shoulder while another healer bound the forearm above the raw seal outline. Aylin kept the salt wrap at her feet and watched that familiar face refuse to flinch.

"I need names for the breaths," Pava said.

"Aylin Vale," she said.

Pava looked to the shutter.

The answer took time. "Ninebell called me Kedra."

Aylin’s grip tightened around the warm cloth.

Kedra noticed. "Use that name. Not Aylin. Not while those bells are listening."

There were a hundred questions behind Aylin’s teeth. She swallowed every one.

"Kedra, then," she said. "Tell me where you need the heat."

"My feet. Unless you can warm a year I do not remember."

"Feet I can do."

Pava tore two cords from her sleeve. Green went around Aylin’s wrist. Red went around Kedra’s uninjured hand.

"Green breath and red breath," she told the healers. "If the glass shows you one color, the glass is lying."

Above them, the two fog strands had already merged into one white cord.

From Jiang’s low sling, the fog did not hide the underside of the tube. Condensation gathered there whenever either woman exhaled. The bell was pressing both strands into the same rhythm, but their bodies refused to follow it.

Aylin’s chest rose sharply, held, then emptied against the pull.

Kedra breathed around her injured shoulder. Her inhale shivered at the end and her exhale came in two soft releases.

Two chests. Two patterns. The glass head above them opened both mouths at once.

Jiang struck the crossbar with his beak when Aylin breathed. He slapped one webbed foot against the sling when Kedra followed.

Beak against wood. Foot against cloth. Then the same uneven pair again.

The assistant tried to steady him. "You will tear your shoulder."

Jiang barked and did it again.

Aylin heard the rhythm first. "He is counting us."

"Not counting," Pava said. She bent until her eyes were level with Jiang’s. "Separating."

She pressed a tuft of root fiber beneath Aylin’s nose, then another beneath Kedra’s. The fibers moved exactly when Jiang’s beak and foot said they would.

"Keep that beat," Pava ordered. "Do not follow the bell. Follow your own lungs."

The Glass bell struck again.

The thing inside the tube inhaled with both women.

Its clear head forced itself through a cracked joint above the screen. Shoulders followed, made from glass fog with black-green veins. It had Aylin’s jaw on one side and Kedra’s scar on the other. Where its chest should have been, their two breath patterns fought inside one cage.

The youngest healer froze beneath it, still carrying the open corner of the screen.

"Get down!" Pava shouted.

The copy reached for her mouth.

Kedra rolled off the shutter.

She hit the healer across the knees and knocked her clear. The copy’s glass hand closed on Kedra’s bound wrist instead. She twisted free, but her injured shoulder struck the paving stones. The sound she made was small and involuntary.

Aylin dropped the forge spike and caught her before the next pull dragged her under the screen.

"I have you," Aylin said.

"Then move me," Kedra gasped.

Aylin did. No embrace, no claim. She hauled Kedra behind the hot brick while Hest stepped through the open side and put his iron bar across the copy’s throat.

The bar passed halfway through.

Black-green veins wrapped it and began shaping another arm.

"Pava, now!" Hest roared.

Pava stared at the long preservation tube above her. Tiny names had been fired into its clear wall. Chips and repairs marked years of carrying final breaths from Westbell to the healer tower without losing one on the street.

Her assistant understood before anyone else. "If you break the clean tube, Westbell has no catch route."

"I know what it costs."

"The next guild worker who dies out here--"

"These two are alive now."

Pava took the fallen forge spike.

She waited through Aylin’s sharp inhale and Jiang’s beak striking wood.

Kedra’s broken exhale followed, answered by Jiang’s foot against the sling.

Then she drove the spike into the glass between the rhythms.

The old tube burst.

Clear shards and white breath filled the screen. Hest turned his back and took the pieces across his coat. Aylin covered Kedra’s face. Pava threw herself over the healer who had fallen.

Jiang tucked his beak to his breast. The assistant wrapped both arms around his sling and kept the hot brick from crushing his failed flipper.

The fused copy split along the chest.

One half collapsed against Hest’s bar. The other reached toward Kedra with a hand that had too many clear fingers, then broke into wet fragments before it touched her.

Aylin’s breath snapped back first. She coughed hard enough to fold over Kedra, one hand pressed to her own throat.

Kedra’s did not return.

A narrow strand had passed the break before Pava struck. It climbed through the upper joint, white inside glass, and vanished into the pipe running toward the main tower.

Valea cut the bronze cable from her knife and scrambled onto the drain wall. "I can pull it back if I reach the next turn."

"No," Pava said. "That route is carrying her breath through broken glass. Pull now and you shred what we are trying to return."

Kedra lay rigid in Aylin’s arms, drawing thin breaths that never seemed to fill her. Her wrist had bled through the new binding. One shoulder sat lower than the other.

Pava knelt where Kedra could see her. "May I check the shoulder now?"

Kedra shut her eyes once. "Yes."

"Thank you," Pava said, and touched only what Kedra had allowed.

She checked the joint twice without pretending the damage was small. It stayed swollen and wrong. Pava padded the shoulder, tightened the support only after Kedra approved it, and ordered the shutter lifted again.

Hest watched the last of the glass copy drain between the stones. "Did we stop it?"

"We stopped it from making one corpse out of two patients," Pava said. She looked uphill. "We did not get all of Kedra back."

The broken screen moved on.

Jiang stayed in the sling with dry cloth beneath his breast, warmth beside his belly, and the taste of fish caught in his cracked beak. His shoulder still burned. His failed flipper still failed. Nothing inside him had returned except enough comfort to know how cold the street remained.

Above Ninebell, the Glass Healer bell turned by itself.

The strand of Kedra’s breath entered its clear mouth. Frost raced across the bell from bottom to crown, carrying fired letters through the glass.

Pava stopped when she read them.

"What does it say?" Aylin asked.

The healer did not answer at first.

Kedra forced herself upright against Aylin’s arm. "Read it."

Pava looked from the woman on the shutter to the date burning above her in the bell.

"It says this is your final breath," she said. "Taken on the last frost of next winter."