July, 1096

The 2nd. I've been on Rhodes Island for exactly half a year.

I stare at the date at the top of the page, my tail curling lazily against the edge of my mattress. Six months since I woke up in those bruised orange ruins.

I'm finally allowed to work again today, but not before a morning of examinations.

The laboratory is blindingly bright. I sit on the padded chair with my sleeve rolled up and a cotton ball taped to the crook of my elbow, watching Dr. Warfarin swipe through the scrolling columns of my own blood. My legs don't reach the floor. They never do.

"Stable," she announces, without looking at me. "Disappointingly stable. Go away."

I don't move.

I told Dr. Kal'tsit I'd report everything, and for three weeks I have. Every episode, written out on my slate in my careful new handwriting and filed before breakfast — including the ones that arrive with no staff in my hands and no artifact anywhere near me. Nobody has asked me a single question about any of it.

"Dr. Warfarin," I say. "She's still there. Every day."

Her fingers stop on the glass. She doesn't look surprised. That's the part that stings.

"Elaborate."

So I give her the episodes I left out of the reports. Not all of it, never all of it, but enough. That the woman in my head screamed both their names on the first morning, before anyone had spoken a single word to me. That she knew Ms. Closure worked in engineering before I'd ever seen the workshop. That when I met the enormous Phidia in the corridor outside the cafeteria, she made a sound like something breaking.

I keep my hands flat on my knees the whole time so they don't shake.

Dr. Warfarin taps the comm without taking her eyes off me. "Kal. My lab, when you have a moment."

Dr. Kal'tsit comes in twenty minutes later with my file already open on her slate, which means she has read all three weeks of it and has never once mentioned that to me.

They make me say it again. Then Dr. Warfarin leans back against her diagnostic monitors and explains it to me with a dry, clinical smirk and terrible, perfect logic.

"I have read every entry you filed," she says. "Twice. Now consider what you were that first morning. You woke with nothing. No memories. No past. No context whatsoever. A blank child alone in a Catastrophe field with her Djall empathic Arts wide open. And then three strangers in gas masks carried you onto a landship and handed you to me. And to her." She tips her head at Dr. Kal'tsit. "What did I taste like, little anomaly? That first morning."

"Copper," I say. "And wine."

"And her?"

"A glacier."

"To a starving child with no frame of reference, those are not personalities. They are threats." She spreads her hands. "So your brain built something to warn you. It had no memories to build from, so it improvised. It gave the alarm a voice, and a name, and a history, and it has been screaming at you to run ever since. It is an extremely elegant symptom. I have honestly never seen a better one."

I sit very still.

She is wrong. I know she is wrong the way I know my own name. Iori is not an alarm. Iori is a woman who threw a tablet onto a nightstand in the rain and closed her eyes for a moment.

And there is no sentence I can say that proves it.

If I argue, I'm a Sarkaz child insisting her hallucination is a person, which is exactly what they just finished telling me a sick brain would do. The harder I stick up for her, the sicker I sound. If I ever want them to believe me about anything again, I have to agree that the one true thing about me is a spot on my brain scan.

"Okay," I say.

Dr. Kal'tsit watches me for a long moment. I can't taste anything from her at all.

"You are cleared," she says.

I thank them both with a deep bow, the way Erika taught me, and I go out into the corridor and stand against the cold wall for a while.

I did exactly what I promised. Every episode, in full, filed before breakfast for three weeks, and all I got for it is the same diagnosis in bigger words.

Telling the truth didn't make anyone believe me. It just got me a fancier file.

Stepping through the heavy glass doors of the Convalescent Garden later that morning is a welcome change of scenery.

The smell of damp earth and blooming flora and clean water washes over me and takes the sting of Warfarin's needles with it.

"Lethe!"

The chiming voice comes through the hanging ivy before I'm even down the path.

Lisa bursts out from behind a row of potted ferns, her nine tails swishing in a blur of joy. She bounds over, abandoning whatever botanical task she'd been assigned, and wraps her arms carefully around my waist.

"Welcome back, Lethe! Miss Lena told us you can start working again," Podenco calls out, waving at me from behind a row of freshly planted greenery.

Miss Lena steps away from her counter with a small pruning shear in her hand and gives me a welcoming smile.

"Welcome back to work, Lethe," she says, soft over the rustle of the leaves.

I smile back at them, my hair swaying over my shoulders. "It's good to be back."

Lunch is a quiet affair. Erika lets me stray from my monitored cafeteria diet and brings me a few humble hand rolls wrapped in clear paper, bought from an Ursus vendor out of Lungmen who's set up a cart near the logistics bay. I only caught a glimpse of him: a tall, drooping man wielding a fillet knife with terrifying precision, with bags under his eyes deep enough to suggest he hasn't slept in a decade.

The vinegared rice and the fresh-sliced fish are a simple comfort. When I finish the last piece I straighten my dark grey jacket and make the familiar walk down the metal corridors toward the high-security wards.

It's been just over three weeks since I last stood in front of these doors. The doctors wouldn't let me visit her during my time off.

My chest tightens with guilt. Three weeks in a sterile, silent box; she must have been so scared.

The door parts. I step inside with the twisted, petrified branch of my Arts Unit.

Opal is sitting up on the mattress with her knees pulled tight to her chest. Her long ears droop against her shoulders and her eyes are fixed on the far wall.

"Opal?" I ask, and my voice chimes in the quiet room.

She blinks slowly. Her head turns, and her dull eyes trace the Rhodes Island Medic symbol on my thigh, the jacket, and finally the black monitor at my neck. Her small fingers twitch against the white medical blankets.

"Lethe…" she whispers, in a voice like thin, cracking glass.

Relief goes through my chest and loosens the knot of guilt. She remembers me.

I step closer and stop near the edge of her bed. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here," I murmur, giving her a small smile. "I was sick for a little while. The doctors made me recover so I could get better. But I'm here now."

Opal doesn't say anything, and she doesn't pull away either. Her gaze drops back down to her knees.

My eyes go to the metal nightstand beside her bed. On the brushed steel is a warm ceramic bowl of broth and noodles, a wisp of steam curling into the sterile air. Untouched.

"What is your lunch today?" I ask gently, hoping a mundane question might anchor her in the present.

Opal turns her head and stares at the bowl.

"It is… water with flavor," she murmurs.

It isn't soup to her. It isn't a meal made with care, or a comforting warmth. Her mind is still fractured down to the most literal fragments of reality.

I look into her dull eyes, hoping to catch some glimpse of the girl who cried with me three months ago, the one who found the strength to whisper her own name.

There's nothing. The same freezing, hollow void.

"You have to eat, Opal," I say, taking a step closer to the bedside table and pointing at the bowl. "Even if it just tastes like water right now. It's important."

My hand closes on the petrified branch of my Arts Unit, my thumb tracing the dark grooves. I remember what Dr. Warfarin told me at a check-up shortly after that day. She theorized that the tearful breakthrough in this room might not have been Opal's doing at all — that as a Djall, my passive empathy might have induced the release, dragging the buried grief up by sheer biological proximity.

The thought still twists my stomach. Was it real, or did my biology manipulate a broken girl into crying?

Warfarin shrugged it off with her usual morbid pragmatism. "We got a name out of her, little Djall. Since then she has been eating her paste and accepting her treatments without fighting the staff. In my department, we call that a win. Take it."

Before I can coax Opal into a spoonful of the broth, the door opens with a snap.

Erika steps into the quarantine ward and comes to the bed with an encouraging smile.

"Good afternoon, Opal and Lethe," she says, bright and professional, tapping commands onto her slate and checking the monitors mounted above the bed.

"How are you feeling, Lethe?"

"I'm fine. Getting back to work feels nice." I flash her a bright smile.

Erika pats me on the head between my horns, then turns to Opal, her smile softening into pride. "The rocks are stable now, Opal. The medicine is working, and the crystals aren't spreading. You're doing a very good job resting."

Opal doesn't look up from her knees, but her long ears twitch at the praise.

"And," Erika goes on, coaxing, "once you're feeling a little bit better, we can get you out of this room. You can go to the Convalescent Garden, stretch your legs, get some actual fresh air. It's very beautiful there. Don't you agree, Lethe?"

I nod, my heavy tail swishing slowly behind me, and lean in to try to catch her downcast gaze.

"I work in the garden," I say, keeping my voice as soft and steady as I can. "Miss Lena and the others take very good care of it. If you come visit, we can show you so much. There are plants as tall as you, and it smells like warm earth instead of… bleach and medicine."

The room goes quiet except for the thrum of the landship's engines under the steel floor grates.

For a long moment I think she's just going to keep staring at the white blankets. Then, very slowly, her chin dips. It's a tiny, weak nod.

"I want to," Opal says, almost too soft to hear.

Erika and I look at each other and nod. Opal is getting better.

Eventually Erika ushers me out of the ward, saying she has work to do and that I have work of my own instead of loitering.

Evening comes and I'm in the cafeteria again. It's loud, a clatter of metal trays and overlapping conversations, but my own table feels isolated.

I stare down at my dinner — a bowl of roasted root vegetables and rice — and I haven't taken a bite in ten minutes. Next to the tray, my slate sits dark and stubbornly silent.

I sent Erika three messages. All unread.

The icy knot of anxiety starts turning in my stomach. Where is she? She did sort of dismiss me back in Opal's ward. Did Kal'tsit deploy her on a Field mission without telling me? Is she stuck in the triage bay again with someone's shattered bones?

Before the thoughts can swallow me, two hands settle onto my shoulders.

The touch is warm. I gasp and whip my head around. "Erika!"

The name dies in my dry throat. The woman standing behind me is a Liberi, but she isn't my Medic. Her feathers are different, her posture carries a different gravity, and her face is older, lined with a quiet strength.

Static crackles deep in my brain. The sickness in my head whispers through the noise. Raidian. She's Raidian. She is very maternal to the younger Operators.

I wince, shut my eyes for a fraction of a second, and push the static down. It isn't real, I remind myself. The black crystals are misfiring. The tumor is making up stories to keep me from panicking around a stranger.

I open my eyes and make myself meet hers.

"Hello, Lethe," she says, in a voice that is smooth and grounding. "I am Raidian."

My breath catches. As she steps around the side of the table my eyes drop from her kind face to the crisp fabric of her uniform, and to the emblem stitched onto her shoulder. An Elite Ops patch.

My heart hammers a bird-like rhythm against my ribs. Elite Ops are the walking titans of this landship, the towering scarred veterans like Ace and Scout who go willingly into the mouth of a Catastrophe. They're the strongest fighters Rhodes Island has.

I shrink back in the blue cafeteria chair. What does an Elite Operator want with a twelve-year-old palliative care assistant?

Have I done something wrong? Did Dr. Kal'tsit send her to monitor me? Or is it the company I keep — that Amiya holds my hand, that I shared a secret slice of apple pie with Rosmontis, who can level city blocks with her mind?

Raidian smiles, warm and fond, and pats my shoulder again, her touch feather-light.

"Don't look so nervous, little one," she murmurs, with the effortless authority of a mother who has watched over a great many children on a brutal battlefield. "I just wanted to come over and take a look at Rosmontis's new playmate."

Before I can work out how to answer her, a familiar breathless voice cuts through the cafeteria clatter.

"Lethe!"

I whip my head around. Erika is hurrying through the rows of metal tables. Her feathers are ruffled, and there's an anxious pinch at the corners of her eyes.

The moment she sees Raidian standing next to my chair, the tension bleeds out of her.

"I'm so sorry I wasn't here, Lethe," Erika exhales, stopping beside her and resting a hand on the back of my chair, her light purple eyes full of apology. "I was with…"

She pauses. Her gaze flicks away for a fraction, down toward the yellowish epoxy floor, then back to me.

"…a patient," she finishes, her voice smoothing out into its usual professional cadence. "There's been a recent deployment. Some Operators got hurt, and I was needed."

I taste it. What spikes in the air around her is sharp and tangy and uncomfortably sweet, like biting into a piece of unripe fruit.

She's lying.

My fingers curl around the plastic fork. Why would Erika lie to me about a medical emergency? Is she trying to protect me from something?

"I'll leave you two to your dinner, then," Raidian says, and looks at Erika with real respect. "You have done a great job taking care of her so far, Erika."

She looks down at me and gives me a gentle wave. "And your work in the Convalescent Garden is very valuable to us, Lethe. Keep it up."

"Th-thank you, Miss Raidian," I stammer, bowing from my seat as she turns and weaves her way back into the crowded cafeteria.

Erika takes the empty blue chair across from me and sinks into the plastic with a long, exhausted sigh. She looks at my half-eaten bowl of vegetables, then up at my face, and a fond smile touches her lips.

"So," she begins, resting her elbows on the metal table, steering us away from the missing hours. "How are your savings going, Lethe?"

I blink, thrown off balance by the pivot to my finances, and reach up to touch the fabric of my jacket, where my Rhodes Island ID card sits in the inner pocket.

"I'm… still a bit away from my first plushie," I admit, and it comes out disappointed. I'd pictured three of them stacked on my recessed bed, but the internal credits trickle in much slower than I expected.

Erika's smile widens. "Well," she says, leaning forward, "you'd probably reach your goal a lot faster if you bought fewer snacks from Ms. Closure's vending machines."

I freeze. My fork clatters against the edge of the metal tray.

My eyes go wide. I'd been so careful — timing my trips to Engineering for when she was on duty, smuggling sour gummies and milk teas back to my dorm.

"How…" I squeak. "How… how did you know?"

Erika laughs, a bright sound over the noise of the cafeteria, and reaches across the table to tap the tip of my nose.

"Trade secrets, little Lethe."

Erika pauses, then points at my half-eaten bowl. "Finish your dinner and let's head back to your dorm."

The walk back to the dormitory block is quiet. My mind isn't. It loops.

Why would she lie?

We turn the last corner into my residential block, and I stop so suddenly my sneakers skid against the floor.

"Oof!" Erika gasps, crashing into my back, her hands flying out to catch my shoulders and steady us both before I can tip over. "Careful, Lethe. Did you trip?"

I don't answer. I'm staring straight ahead at the door of my dorm room.

Sitting upright on the cold steel floor, propped against the threshold, are two plushies. Beautifully made, stitched from rich brown fabric, with long floppy ears and bright blue button eyes. They look exactly like Amiya.

Soft, innocent toys in the middle of a militarized landship corridor. My breath hitches.

"Erika…?" My voice wavers in the quiet hall.

She steps around me, a sheepish smile spreading across her face.

"I had to make a very quick stop at Ms. Closure's general store before I met you at the cafeteria," she says, and her pale feathers fluff up a little. She kneels down, picks up the two brown bunnies and holds them out to me. "One is for you. And the other… the other is for you to give to Opal, the next time you visit her."

That was the lie.

I don't reach for the plushies. I spin around and throw myself at her instead, arms around her waist, face buried in her shirt, squeezing as hard as this small frame allows, my tail wrapped around the back of her calf like a lifeline. I breathe her in and let the warmth of her override the clinical bleach of the corridor.

"Thank you," I sob into her shirt, muffled and wet.

Erika lets out a soft, surprised breath, then her arms come around my shoulders and pull me flush against her. She doesn't say anything about the tears soaking into her uniform.

"You're welcome, my little Lethe," she murmurs, resting her cheek against the top of my hair. "You're welcome."

The door of my dorm seals the noise of the landship outside. The room is bathed in the dim amber of the night cycle.

I'm lying sideways on the mattress with my head on Erika's lap, my share of the plushies — the soft brown one with the bright blue eyes — hugged against my chest. Her fingers comb through my hair in a slow rhythm, careful around the bases of my horns.

The quiet is peaceful. Then the movement of her hand stops.

I blink and shift against her thighs to look up. Her eyes are soft, reflecting the dim light, but there's a heavy thoughtfulness pulling at her features.

"I have been thinking, Lethe," Erika murmurs, her voice dropping to a hush. "About how much you have been contributing since you officially joined the Convalescent Garden. You've done so much for the Operators here."

I squeeze the plushie a little tighter.

"It's just my job, Erika," I say, resting my chin against the top of its head. "It's all I can do."

"No, Lethe. It's incredible," she insists, her thumb tracing a line down my pale cheek. "You're willingly sacrificing your own memories to take away their pain. For most people, their memories are the dearest thing they have. They're the foundation of who they are. To choose to discard them to heal someone else… that's a profound sacrifice."

Erika sighs, her gaze dropping from my face to her own hands resting on my shoulder.

"Sometimes I feel so helpless next to all of you," she confesses, with a bitter edge of self-deprecation. "I can only perform the most basic, textbook healing Arts, and even then I have to rely on the Originium dust inside my wand to process the energy. I don't have the deep connection to the Arts that Lena does because of her Oripathy. And I certainly don't have the natural manipulation of a Sarkaz like you or Dr. Warfarin."

The air around us goes grey and thick — a Medic who thinks she's falling behind — and it tastes like stagnant water.

I hate it. I don't want her to feel small, and I don't want her envying the glowing black crystals that are eating my mind. I need to pull her out of this before the dread puts her warmth out.

I shift on her lap, turning onto my back so I can look up into her face.

"I've never actually asked you, Erika," I say, pitching my voice bright and curious to cut across the gloom.

"You aren't infected. You don't have the black crystals in your blood, and you don't need the medicine," I point out, widening my eyes. "Rhodes Island is a very dangerous place. We walk right into Catastrophes, and everyone in the world hates the Infected. If you're safe… why are you here?"

I wait. For a moment she just looks down at me, her eyes distant.

"I am from Columbia," Erika says at last, her voice a steady murmur. "From Trimounts, specifically. My parents managed to escape Iberia when I was very young, looking for a better life across the continent of Terra."

She pauses, her fingers resting lightly against my shoulder. "Before I came to Rhodes Island, I was working as a researcher. At Rhine Lab."

"But… isn't Columbia a very, very wealthy place?" I ask. "And I read on the terminal that Rhine Lab is a huge company. Far bigger and more powerful than Rhodes Island. Why would you leave?"

Erika lets out a slow sigh, and her fingers resume their path through my hair.

"It is wealthy, Lethe. And it is powerful," she murmurs. "But working there changes you. You see things that make you question what all that progress is actually worth. When Saria, one of our Directors, suddenly left… there were rumors she had gone to a pharmaceutical company called Rhodes Island."

She looks down at me with grief and resolve together in her face. "When she walked away, a lot of us grew disenfranchised. I realized I couldn't stay in Trimounts any more. I wanted to heal people, not be a cog in a machine that didn't care who it crushed."

She brushes a stray lock of hair off my forehead, and her smile comes back.

"You'll understand one day, little Lethe," Erika says into the quiet of the dorm room. "What things look like on the surface is often very, very different from the truth."

The amber safety of my dorm eventually fades into the crisp, unforgiving daylight cycle of the landship.

Today isn't my scheduled day to visit Opal. But before I'd finished my quick breakfast of warm oats in the cafeteria, I sent a message to Miss Lena on my slate.

She understood. She always does.

So I'm standing in the high-security quarantine ward, the soft brown plushie with the bright blue button eyes clutched against the dark grey fabric of my jacket.

Opal is sitting up on her mattress. On her bedside table is her own warm bowl of oats.

Her dull eyes track me as I step closer to the bed.

I stop near the mattress and hold the plushie out to her. "This is for you," I say, and my voice chimes in the sterile air.

Opal stares at the stuffed toy. Its floppy ears and bright blue button eyes stare innocently back at her. Her small hands stay where they are on the white blankets.

"It's a representation of our boss," I explain, with a small encouraging smile. "Her name is Amiya. She's a very brave, very strong young Cautus girl, just like you."

Opal's long black ears twitch. Once. Twice. The movement is deafening in the quiet ward.

She shifts on the mattress and reaches out with trembling fingers to take the plushie from my hands. As she pulls the fabric against her chest she ducks her head, letting her long black hair fall forward like a curtain to hide her face.

A small, fractured sob gets out of her, and it echoes off the brushed steel walls.

I take up the twisted, petrified branch of my Arts Unit and wait for the drowning ocean of grief to flood the room, for the dam to shatter the way it did months ago.

But the dam doesn't break.

She just clings to the stuffed animal, anchoring herself to the comfort in her arms. She's hurting, and she's holding herself together.

"Amiya," Opal whispers from behind the curtain of her black hair.

She says it again, barely a breath, testing the shape of it on her tongue like a talisman.

"Yes," I answer, and rest my hand over her trembling fingers where they grip the plushie.

I look down at her and project as much steady, quiet reassurance into the room as I can.

"Amiya watches over you, Opal," I murmur, and it's a promise in the cold medical ward. "She watches over everyone on this landship. As long as you have her… you are safe."

I don't tell her that I check, every night, that I still remember her name.