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“Tavi!”

He emerged from the supply room at a run.

“Condenser solvent. Composition.”

“Mineral alcohol, heat salts, antifungal suspension—”

“Which fungus?”

Tavi named something the translator rendered awkwardly as blue-root. Sera’s head snapped around.

“Allergic constriction.”

Kesta felt for the child’s pulse. Too fast. Weak.

“Do Kharovians respond to epinephrine analogs?”

“In adults,” Sera said. Concern tightened the older healer’s mouth. “I do not know in children.”

Neither did Kesta. The child convulsed. Dreven moved toward the cot.

“Hold her shoulders.”

He obeyed immediately, positioning his hands where Kesta indicated rather than gripping wherever was easiest. His palms looked enormous against the child’s small body. Kesta searched the imperial kit. No pediatric injector. Of course not. She calculated by body mass, reduced for uncertain Kharovian metabolism, then reduced again because Sera’s expression said the adult dosage curve could not be trusted. Dreven watched the injector fill.

“Will that kill her?”

Kesta looked at him. Fear had changed his face. Not panic. Dreven did not seem built for panic. But the controlled commander who had fought a raider barehanded was looking at a child who could die beneath his palms, and for the first time Kesta understood exactly how little control mattered in a room like this.

“It might.”

His hands tightened fractionally around the child. Kesta held his gaze.

“It may also save her. I don't have a safer answer.”

His jaw worked.

For one second she thought he might refuse.

Then his fingers deliberately relaxed.

“Do it.”

Kesta injected the medication. Nothing happened. One heartbeat. Two. Three. The child sucked in a ragged breath so deep her entire body lifted beneath Dreven’s hands. Sera exhaled. So did Kesta. Dreven closed his eyes for half a second. When he opened them, he looked at Kesta. No argument. No gratitude.

Just naked relief before he managed to pull the expression back under control.

“Again?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

He nodded. The next hour dissolved into work. Kesta debrided the machinist’s hands while Sera stabilized the woman with the lung injury. Dreven remained because there were too few hands and too many patients. He carried water, held pressure over a bleeding line, shifted a treatment platform when Kesta needed more room and moved exactly where she told him to move without turning medical instructions into a test of command. That did not make him passive. She understood the difference now. This was her field.

He knew it. When a frightened worker tried to crowd the treatment table demanding information, Dreven stepped between them and sent him three paces backward with a look. When a damaged support brace began slipping beneath the coughing woman’s cot, he caught the entire frame one-handed before it struck her. When Kesta asked for a clamp, he handed her the correct one before Tavi found it. Competence recognized competence. Kesta liked that more than she wanted to. She noticed other things too.

Dreven was far too large for the infirmary. He had to duck beneath two hanging lamps, and his horns nearly caught a suspended fluid line every time he turned. His tail, which she had previously considered largely ornamental except when used to knock opponents off their feet, turned out to be extraordinarily precise. Twice it stopped instruments rolling off the treatment cart without interrupting what his hands were doing.

By the time the emergency finally eased, blood, solvent and dirty water streaked the floor. The child slept beneath a warming cloth, breathing steadily. The machinist had lost skin but would keep all four hands. The coughing woman’s lungs remained damaged, though the blood in her sputum had begun to decrease. Kesta leaned back against the counter. Fatigue dropped over her all at once.