Page 154 of Bone Year

I drive the needle through the muscle. Tie. Cut. Second pass. Tie. Cut. Third.

“Good. Step back.”

Bale places a gloved hand over the diaphragm. The faintest shimmer of gold rises from his fingers, pale and threadlike, and settles into the muscle along the line of my sutures. The current finds the silk. It seals the tissue around the stitches in a way I cannot explain and have not yet been taught.

The shimmer fades.

“Sealed. Good work, Miss Rose. I will lay current as we go to accelerate the muscle and minimize the skin scar. You take the muscle layer.”

It is the longest stitching I have done on a living person, and Bale moves alongside me, his hands hovering an inch above mine. Where I close, he follows. The gold rises again, faint as candlelight, sinking into the running stitch behind my needle. The muscle knits quickly. By the time I tie off the last loop, the layer underneath is already pink and on its way to healing.

The fascia goes faster.

The skin layer Bale takes himself, and his hands glow steadily now, the gold deepening into something close to amber. He weaves the needle and lays current at the same time, the kind of compound technique only senior healers and Veilguards can perform. The line of the wound seals behind him as he goes. By the time he ties off, the only mark on Ellavee’s side is a thin pink line about the width of a fingernail.

“It will fade further by morning. Demons heal quickly, and my current will help.”

The relief is overwhelming.

“You did good work.” He pulls his gloves and mask off.

“I had a good teacher.” I smile even though he can’t see it under my mask.

“Mender Theo and I will take it from here. Go rest. There’s nothing more to be done.”

I take one last look at Ellavee, still sedated, and go to the sink to clean up. Gloves off. Gown off. Mask off.

“Hell, girl. Sounds like you need to go sleep it off.”

I told Cael everything that happened today while I rewrapped my ankle. I fear I have done more damage to it while running up and down the stairs ignoring the pain. I think adrenaline took over for the past few hours numbing the pain.

The wards have calmed down, and I was going to head to my dorm when Poppy appeared and made a run straight for Cael’s room, probably hungry for whatever scraps he’d saved for her. I let her go, figuring it’d be nice to vent to someone disconnected from all of this.

I let out a sound that is closer to a laugh than I have made in hours. It doesn’t last long.

“I’m not going to sleep.”

“I know you’re not.”

He is propped against the pillows, Poppy on his stomach, feeding her dried meat from a tin in his nightstand. She takes each piece from his fingers like he is family.

I sit in the chair I have sat in every week for months and put my face in my hands.

He lets me sit.

After a while, he says, “Listen to me before I let you go. What happened in the Shorelands today is not a fixed fissure failure. I don’t care what your professors are going to call it tomorrow.”

I lift my head.

“I lived through Thornwall, Maelis. I know what the wards on a building feel like when the world starts to bleed. I have been feeling it for months, and what happened today is loud enough that even a man in a bed can feel it.”

“Is the cycle coming soon?” I ask, though I already know the answer, and after getting my first taste of a fissure and what comes out of it, the cycle is terrifying.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Cael.”

“It is not a thing anyone can say for sure. The world is like a body. A wound that bleeds can be the body clearing itself, or it can be the surface of a deeper tear that has not finished happening. You can’t tell from the outside. Sometimes not for weeks or years.”