I press off the tile again, using the bed as a fulcrum. The first crawl is ugly—my palms scraping the floor, nails catching on grit I didn’t know was there. I taste iron in my mouth and the old noise presses at my ears. I feel ridiculous. I feel human. I feel small like a pup scuttling after bigger wolves.
She kneels beside me where I stop and breathe. She doesn’t make a show of help. She doesn’t hover. She looks at me like I’m a problem to be solved, not a spectacle. That’s the thing about Jaela—her compassion is a tool, not a sermon.
“You’re not the only one with ghosts,” she tells me. No pity. Just a fact.
“Good,” I mutter. “I prefer company.”
Her hand is warm on my shoulder. “You don’t have to do it alone.”
“What does that even mean?” The words come out rough. “Warrior? Criminal? Patient? Where do I fit, Jaela? In their files I’m an incident. On the street I’m a headline. In my head I’m a pile of parts.”
She exhales slow, like she’s measuring every syllable before she lets it loose. “You fit where you want to fit. Right now you fiton top of this patch of tile, putting one foot in front of the other. You can make a thousand other categories later. Or not. Right now we make progress.”
“Words,” I grumble. “Easy words.”
“You do the hard part,” she says. “I’ll do the mechanical advocacy.”
The room holds our small argument like a third party. The night light throws soft relief across the metallic sheen of my scales; Jaela’s face is a slit of pale in the dark. For a moment something unwinds in me—so small it could be a thread—and I let it.
She waits until I’m steady enough to stand without nauseous stumbles. She positions her hands at the small of my back, not enough assistance to be condescending, just to anchor.
“Okay,” she says. “Count with me.”
“One,” I breathe. “Two.”
Shit—my stomach flips. But my foot finds purchase. The servo in the prosthetic hums soft like a purr. I don’t collapse. I keep my jaw tight and I keep my eyes on the door because the night freaks always like to creep in from the corners.
“Three,” she says, and I take it. For the first time since the explosions, since the tribunal, since the dark, I wobble into a stance that is not surrender.
She releases her hands. “You want to try the stability bar tomorrow?” she asks.
I snort. “I’ll try anything that prevents me from faceplanting in front of the staff.”
She gives me that tiny half-grin she tries to hide—one that suggests victory or amusement or that she just enjoyed baiting me. “Good. Be ready, and sober.”
“Sober,” I echo. “Because I was drunk yesterday when I threw a tray at the wall?”
“You nearly broke the tray. That’s a wasted instrument.”
I bark a laugh. “You sound like Rolth.”
“Don’t mention Rolth,” she says sharply. “He’s not even worth your scorn.”
I want to tell her to leave it alone—to keep her voice away from the thing that burns in me—but instead the words that come out are small, the kind I never say aloud.
“Thanks.”
She rolls her eyes so hard it’s almost theatrical. “Don’t get soft on me, Vakutan. You’ll ruin your street cred.”
We move through the dawn in a messy tandem. I don’t sleep again, not properly. The rehab wing fills with the smell of hot caf and disinfectant and the low hum of people pretending everything is normal. When the staff start trickling in, some drop sideways glances at us—survivor and healer, literally.
They whisper. Humans always whisper. They don’t mean much compared to a Vakutan’s grunt, but the noise grates like sand in a wound.
“Look at him up,” a nurse says, too loud, like it’s a show for the morning shift.
“Yeah,” another responds. “He’s... different.”
I sharpen my gaze at anyone who dares mouth off. The nurse, a freckled kid named Horan, flushes and tries to smooth a chart. He hums a nervous, high-pitched sound and excuses himself. I almost admire the speed of his retreat.
