Merric nods slowly. His eyes don’t leave my face.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time in that corridor,” he says. “More than you need to for standard care.”
“He’s a complex case.”
“He is.”
The silence stretches. I don’t fill it. Merric doesn’t either. We stand there in my small office with the herb jars between us and the afternoon light coming through the window.
“You know what you’re doing?” he asks finally.
“Yes.”
Another pause. Then: “All right.”
He pushes off the doorframe. Starts to leave. Stops.
“Sable.”
I look up.
“If that changes,” he says, “you’ll tell one of us.”
“I will,” I say.
He leaves. I go back to counting jars. My hands are steady. My heart isn’t.
I finish the inventory, then work through the afternoon the way I always do: steadily, thoroughly, my voice even and my grip firm on every bottle and bandage I touch. Under my sleeve, the bruises darken from red to purple while the hours pass.
I keep seeing his hand opening. The deliberate slowness of it. One finger, then another.
My wrist aches every time I reach for a shelf.
The afternoon light is long and low by the time I finish rounds and walk back to the locked room. I stand outside it with the key in my hand and count the hours since the last dose.
Five.
He shouldn’t surface for another three.
I unlock the door anyway. Step in. He’s where he should be: flat on his back, breathing slow and even, the blanket pulled up to his chest. His face is turned toward the window, and the late light catches the bruise I left on his arm with the needle this morning. A small purple mark over the vein. My mark on him, to match his on me.
I cross to the cot and press two fingers to the inside of his wrist.
Sixty-eight beats per minute.
It should be fifty-five. Maybe sixty if his metabolism is running hot.
Sixty-eight means he’s climbing.
My fingers stay on his pulse longer than they need to. The warmth of his skin seeps into my hand, and I feel it again: that settling, the tension in my shoulders easing, my breathing slowing to match his. I’ve felt it every time I’ve touched him. Every single time. I thought it was adrenaline dropping. I thought it was the relief of routine. But it happens when there’s no adrenaline to drop and no routine to settle into. It happens the second my skin meets his, and it stops when I pull away.
I pull away.
Full protocol. I haven’t changed the dose. I’ve done exactly what Brenna told me to do, and his body is burning through it anyway.
One early surfacing is an anomaly.
Two in the same day is a pattern.
