Dying had gone badly, and the infirmary ceiling offered no explanation.
I stared up at it for a long while.
Someone had painted it white a decade ago, and a brown water stain in the shape of the Visayas had spread across one corner.
A fluorescent tube hummed overhead.
The air smelled of rubbing alcohol, clean sheets, and the sweet, grassy scent of the herbal poultices that Pia brewed on the hot plate by the window.
Alive, I concluded.
Inconvenient.
I tested my body piece by piece, the way I always did after a bad night.
Fingers, toes, wrists.
I drew a slow breath and waited for the knife in my ribs.
It never came.
I lifted the blanket.
Where a claw had opened my side, a pale pink scar ran from ribs to hip, tidy as a seam, new skin still tight and shiny.
I pressed my thumb against the left side, where the bone had cracked in the Hound’s first strike.
It held.
A faint ache lingered, the way a muscle aches after long use, and that was all.
Nine years of Pia’s work had made me forget how strange a healing looked from the inside.
“Do not touch it,” said a soft voice.
“It is still setting.”
I turned my head.
Pia Lacson sat on a wooden stool beside the cot, a bowl of warm water on her knees and a folded towel across her arm.
She wore the Council jacket over a gray sweater, and her hair hung loose around her shoulders, damp from some recent wash.
Dark circles shadowed her eyes.
She looked as if she had slept for an hour sometime last week and found the experience disappointing.
“Morning,” I rasped.
“Afternoon.” She wrung out the cloth and laid it against my forehead.
“You have been out for fourteen hours.”
“And you have been sitting there for fourteen hours.”
“Thirteen. I took a break to shout at the vending machine.”
I huffed a laugh, and it hurt in a good way, a clean way.
“Did the machine apologize?”
“It gave me two packs of crackers. I consider that a victory.”
She dipped the cloth again.
Her hand slid up to rest against her left side while she worked, flat and quiet, the way a person touches something sore without noticing.
I had seen that gesture a hundred times over the last three years.
I never asked about it.
The Council did not ask each other about their injuries, because the answers were always worse than the questions.
I closed my eyes and listened to the water.
* * *
At some point, Pia began to hum.
It was a gentle, absent-minded sound, the kind that people produce when their hands know a task so well that the mind drifts away.
A soft winding tune rose through the quiet.
It climbed lazily in the middle and dipped at the end, as if the singer kept forgetting the last line and smiling about it.
My teeth began to ache.
The pain started at the back of my jaw and slid forward, dull and deep and hollow, like biting down on foil.
My eyes opened by themselves.
I found that my fingers had closed around the edge of the blanket, and I could not remember closing them.
“Stop,” I said.
Pia froze.
The hum died in her throat.
“Did I hurt you?”
“No.” I swallowed.
The ache in my teeth faded slowly, leaving an odd emptiness behind, like the space where a door had been.
“Who taught you that song?”
She blinked at me.
Her face held honest bewilderment.
“Nobody,” she said.
“It arrives with the job.”
“With the job?”
“Whenever I start healing, I hum it. I always have. I never learned it from anyone.” She laughed uncertainly.
“Strange, I know. Sean says it sounds like a lullaby. Dom says it sounds like a cat in a washing machine.”
“Dom would.”
“Does it bother you?”
I looked at her small tired hands, folded in her lap, and then at the pale ceiling.
A hundred answers rose and fell inside me.
None of them made sense.
“It sounds familiar,” I said at last.
“Does it?” Her eyes softened.
“Then maybe you heard it from me. I have been patching you up for years.”
“Maybe.”
“Probably.”
Her fingers drifted back to her ribs, and she pressed them there for a second, as if holding something in.
Then she smiled at me, small and wobbly, and reached for the cloth.
I let the matter rest.
There were too many of them to carry on a bad day.
* * *
“Where is she?” I asked.
Pia tilted her head toward the next cot.
I had not noticed it before.
A screen of pale cloth stood half-drawn between the beds, and behind it, a girl lay curled on her side under a gray wool blanket.
Her braid had come loose and spread across the pillow in a dark tangle.
She looked very small.
A scarred gray cat lay beside her head with his paws tucked under his chest, his yellow eyes fixed on me with a stare that could have peeled paint.
Kalasag had never looked at me like that.
This stare held new, specific, personal hostility.
“Sorry,” I told him.
“I will try to avoid dying near her in future.”
The cat’s whiskers twitched.
He turned his head away with elaborate contempt.
“Is she hurt?” I asked Pia.
“Exhausted. Her shoulder needed stitches, and I closed them.” She smoothed the wet cloth between her palms.
“The rest is a different matter. Aris, do you understand what she did?”
“She shared her life force.”
“She gave you fourteen hours of herself, in one go, with no training, no anchor, no tether.” Pia’s voice dropped.
“Most Tier-1s I know could not manage that. Most would not survive it. I checked her three times through the night.”
“Is she…”
“Fine. Just tired. Her reserves are running back on their own.” A frown pinched her brow.
“That is what worries me. They are running back too fast. A person should not refill like that.”
I did not answer.
I knew what it meant.
I had known the moment I saw the golden light spill across the reading-room floor, and I had spent the last fourteen hours refusing to put it into words.
A color from the oldest page of an oldest book.
A power the Board had hidden from every student for a hundred years.
The source.
A girl from the provinces had poured it into me like water into a cup, and nobody had noticed except me.
I turned my face toward the ceiling and counted the cracks in the plaster.
* * *
The door banged open at the worst possible moment.
“SENIOR!”
Dom Reyes stumbled into the infirmary with a plastic bag in one fist and a large pink balloon in the other.
The balloon read GET WELL SOON in glittery letters.
A smaller line underneath, written in marker, read WE LOVE YOU PO.
His taped forearms trembled with emotion.
Behind him came Sean, carrying a thermos, with the expression of a man who had tried to stop this and failed.
“Dominic,” Pia said, in a tone that could have frozen soup.
“I brought siomai!” Dom whispered loudly.
“And a balloon! The vending guy had one left. I told him it was an emergency!”
“It is a hospital,” Pia said.
“A quiet one.”
“I will be very quiet.” He tiptoed across the floor, knocked a tray of bandages off the counter, froze, and picked them up one by one with an expression of deep apology.
Then he planted himself at my bedside and thrust the balloon forward.
“Senior! You are alive!”
“So I am told.”
“When I saw the blood I thought, no. Not Senior. He has survived worse. The Intramuros incident. The Great Bell Tower Fire…”
“There was no fire.”
“A small fire.”
“A candle.”
“A strong candle.” Dom’s eyes were shining.
“I cried a little, Senior. Is that okay? I cried like a baby. Cheska recorded it. I made her delete it.”
“She did not delete it,” Sean murmured.
“She did not delete it,” Dom agreed miserably.
I looked at the balloon.
It swayed gently in the draft from the window, with the glitter shedding onto my blanket.
Something unfamiliar moved in my chest.
It took me a full three seconds to recognize it as the beginning of a smile.
“Put it on the bed rail,” I said.
Dom beamed like sunrise.
* * *
Sean sat on the stool Pia had vacated, and the humor drained from his face one inch at a time.
“We need to talk,” he said quietly.
He glanced at the sleeping girl behind the screen, and Kalasag’s ears flattened.
“Perhaps outside.”
“She is asleep.”
“Perhaps outside anyway.”
We stepped into the corridor, a long white hallway lined with old metal lockers.
Sean closed the door gently behind us.
The fluorescent lights buzzed above our heads.
“The Dead Zone broke at twelve nineteen,” he said.
“I saw.”
“The Board saw too.” He held out a folded sheet of paper.
“This arrived at six this morning, addressed to you.”
I unfolded it.
The note was short.
It had been typed in the cold, precise font that the Registrar’s office used for formal notices.
The letterhead was familiar: a plain crest with the small, tidy initials D.M.
at the bottom.
Mr. Valeriano.
Your review is cancelled.
You are requested, together with Miss Lira Espiritu, to attend Room 404 at noon tomorrow.
— A.
Beneath it, in pencil, in a different and spidery hand:
Do not come alone.
I read the pencil line twice.
“Who wrote this?” I asked.
“I assumed you did.”
“I would never write that.”
We looked at each other.
Sean raised an eyebrow, and then he shrugged with the quiet, grim humor of a man who had served on the Council for four years and stopped being surprised.
“Somebody wants you to bring the transferee,” he said.
“And somebody else wants you to bring a witness. I would side with the second somebody.”
“Agreed.”
“Then I will be your witness.” His voice grew gentler.
“Aris, I am not asking this to be difficult. You almost died. The girl nearly burned herself out. If the Dean is going to ask questions, the Council will stand behind her. I would like you to know that.”
I stared at the paper for a long moment.
Sean had never offered me anything before.
He offered me orders, reports, and the occasional granola bar.
This was a new kind of gift, and I held it clumsily, like a man handed a baby.
“Thank you,” I said.
Sean blinked.
“Say that again. Dom, come here, I need a witness.”
“Do not,” I said.
He grinned and ducked back into the infirmary, laughing.
* * *
The room grew quiet after they left.
Pia went to refill the hot plate.
Dom had fallen asleep on the visitor’s chair, hugging the plastic bag of siomai to his chest.
The late sun slanted through the window in long gold bars and settled across the second cot.
I sat on the edge of my own bed with my feet on the cold floor and watched Lira sleep.
I ought to have been planning.
I had a summons to answer, a lie to maintain, and a girl whose power could set the entire Board alight if the wrong person noticed.
A sensible man would have used the time to prepare.
Instead I took my black notebook from the bedside shelf, uncapped my pen, and turned to the last page.
The lines of lost things stared back at me, row after row.
I wrote:
A girl poured herself into me.
I do not know why.
After a moment I added:
I saw a porch and a mango tree.
I am not sure whose.
I stopped.
My pen hovered above the paper.
Then, much more slowly, I added a third line, in handwriting that did not look like mine.
Pia hums a song I cannot name.
It makes my teeth ache.
The ink sat on the page like a bruise.
“Aris.”
I looked up.
Lira had opened her eyes.
They were dark and unfocused and swimming with sleep.
Her braid lay across her cheek.
She stared at me for a long moment, not quite awake, as if she were looking through a window at a very distant light.
“You are alive,” she mumbled.
“Seems so.”
“Good.” A tired smile touched her mouth.
“I told Lola. She will say that you do not know how to cook.”
“I am told that is true.”
Her eyes drifted shut, and I thought she had fallen asleep again.
Then her lips moved once more, slow and soft, in the voice of someone speaking from deep inside a dream.
“The kitchen was yellow.”
My heartbeat stopped.
“And your mother had a very nice laugh,” Lira whispered, “even though I never saw her face.”
The notebook slid from my fingers and landed on the floor.
From across the room, in the golden light, Kalasag lifted his head and looked straight at me.