She spent the next morning with three cockroaches and a stopwatch.
The roaches came from the gap behind the communal kitchen's dishwasher. She'd found them on day six when she was looking for something to practice on that wasn't a person. She kept them in a glass jar with air holes and fed them crumbs and did not think about what that said about her.
Test one: she pressed her right index finger to the jar wall for exactly one second. The nearest roach continued walking. For forty minutes it continued walking, while she sat on the floor with the stopwatch in her lap and watched. Then at the forty-two-minute mark, it stopped. Pressed its legs against the glass as though trying to gain purchase, and then tipped over, still.
She wrote: 1 second contact, glass barrier, delay 42 min. Estimate: 30-35% efficiency loss through barrier.
Test two: she picked up the second roach with her full right hand, held it for three seconds, then set it down. It was dead before she finished writing the previous note.
Test three: she held the third roach for one second with her left hand only. Nothing happened. She held it for another thirty seconds. Nothing. She set it down, pressed her right index finger to its abdomen for half a second, and it was dead in eleven minutes.
The decay was in her right hand only. Specifically: she could feel the difference when she focused on it. Left hand was warm. Right hand had the cold running through it like a seam in stone, constant, baseline. She could push more of it or suppress it, but she could not make it zero. It was always there.
She thought about the fourteen patients.
* * *
She had not intended to think about the Rift this morning. She had put it in the box and the box was supposed to stay closed while she worked. But her eyes landed on the scar on her left arm — the one that wrapped from wrist to elbow in a pale ridge, where the bone had been broken and she had set it herself with a strip of her jacket as a brace — and the box opened anyway.
Three weeks ago.
Dark Flame. A-rank Rift, "Ash Valley." She had been on shift for seventy-two hours, treating an unbroken string of fighters who came back injured and went back out and came back injured again, and none of them said thank you. She had been down to about 15% healing capacity when Han Roar gathered the core team.
"Full offensive push," he had said. "We clear the boss room tonight."
She had begun to collect her kit to follow. Moira — Deputy Guild Master, A-rank mage, the most efficient woman Vera had ever met — had put a hand on her arm.
"Healers stay back," Moira said. "Rear support position."
The way she said it. Not a request. A category. Healers stay back the way you'd say chairs don't walk. Vera was a piece of equipment to be repositioned, and the repositioning was purely tactical.
She had been put in a side chamber with two other healers, both of them newer than her, both of them looking at her because she had seniority and she should know what to do. She told them to sit down and conserve energy. She sat down herself.
Then the fighting sounds receded. The team moved forward. And the two newer healers got a message on their communicators — a pulse, the extraction signal, come now — and they looked at her again, and she checked her communicator.
Blank. Her communicator screen was blank.
She checked it three more times. Still blank. She looked at the two younger healers, who were already moving. One of them looked back at her. "Maybe yours is broken," he said, and then he was gone.
She sat in the side chamber with her broken communicator for approximately ninety seconds, which was how long it took for the tremors to start. The whole Rift shaking in that particular way, deep in the bedrock, that meant the boss had been engaged.
Then the tremors changed pitch. Not boss-fight tremors. Structural failure.
She got up and ran.
* * *
She had found the egress tunnel by following the airflow. She ran through a stone corridor while pieces of ceiling fell around her, turned left at an intersection that her instincts said was wrong but her nose said was right, and came out into a larger chamber just in time to see the Grey-Bone Lizard come through the wall.
A-rank boss. Twelve meters from snout to tail. Bone-white scales and dead eyes and a jaw that had more teeth than any living thing needed.
Her healing energy was at 8%. She had no attack abilities. She had a broken communicator and a combat knife she'd never actually used in combat.
The lizard charged.
She ran. She was good at running — three years in Dark Flame had made her excellent at running. She made it to the far wall before the lizard cut off her path. She turned. The chamber was a box. The lizard was between her and every exit.
It charged again.
She dove left and it grazed her. The second pass, she didn't dive fast enough. Its jaw closed on her left arm at the elbow, and she heard the bone snap, and the pain was enormous and very distant at the same time, the way pain gets when your body is already running on adrenaline and fear.
She hit zero.
Healing energy: zero. Not low, not critical. Zero.
Her right hand was on the lizard's lower jaw. She didn't remember deciding to put it there. The cold came out of her hand — not like the healing warmth, which she had always thought of as pouring outward from her palm like water, but different. A current. Something that went in rather than out.
The lizard's jaw began to soften.
She watched it happen without understanding it. The bone turned grey at the point of contact, then porous, then the grey spread up the jawline in a branching pattern like frost on glass, and the teeth loosened, and the bone powdered, and in three seconds the entire front half of its skull disintegrated and fell away.
She was left standing with her right hand extended, her left arm hanging wrong, and a cloud of bone-ash settling around her feet.
The Rift was still shaking.
She picked up her knife with her right hand and walked toward the exit.
* * *
She came out of the flashback sitting on her floor with her jaw tight and the cockroach jar in her lap.
She breathed out. Set the jar aside.
The two remaining cockroaches — the ones she hadn't experimented on yet — were pressed against the far wall of the jar. Hiding. She wondered if they could sense the cold in her hand through the glass.
She set the jar down on the windowsill. "I'm not going to test anything else on you today," she told them. They did not respond.
She opened the notes app on her phone.
Han Roar. Guild Master. S-rank swordsman. Gave the order to leave her behind. Personally coordinated the extraction with the team's communicators still active — which meant the blank screen on hers was deliberate.
Moira. Deputy Guild Master. A-rank mage. Had An transferred off Vera's squad three weeks before the Rift. Had An assigned to a solo mission in the same time period. An had died on that mission.
An had died on that mission because An had found something.
Zack Sharp. A-rank assassin. An had sent Vera one message, seven weeks ago, that she hadn't understood at the time: If something happens to me, ask someone who runs Dark Flame's finances where I was on AR-2094. Be specific about the date.
Vera had gone to the records office of the healer's association after she left the Rift. She had pulled An's mission report. Left chest, puncture wound. The original wound profile: blade, 4.2 centimeters, angle consistent with attack from behind. Penetrating depth 18.3 centimeters.
The monster listed in the mission report — a stone golem — struck with blunt force. Shattered bones. Did not leave puncture wounds.
Zack Sharp was the only A-rank assassin in Dark Flame whose mission log for AR-2094 was blank.
Lyra Lin. B-rank amplifier. Dark Flame's financial officer. She had processed every form that classified Vera as equipment. Every "resource allocation" form that had Vera's healing output logged against a daily quota. She had known. She had looked at the numbers and known exactly what the numbers meant and continued filing the reports.
Sol Song. B-rank archer. Who had called her Battery. Who had a grey ring spreading up her arm from a wound that Vera had touched six days ago, trying to heal her.
The sixth name was still blank.
An had said there was someone above Han Roar. An had been killed for finding that name. Vera didn't have it yet.
She had five. It was enough to start.
* * *
The guild-wide bulletin came through her phone at noon.
Dawn Bell Announcement: Guild inspection visit from Dark Flame Operations Division, Thursday. All members please attend the briefing at 14:00. Inspector: Zhou Quan, Operations Director.
She read the name twice.
Zhou Quan. He wasn't on her list — she hadn't been sure of his role, hadn't known where exactly he sat in the chain of command. She had kept a blank sixth slot because she didn't have enough yet. But she knew the name. Zhou Quan. The one who had taken over An's old post, after An was dead.
The one who had been assigned to fill the gap An left.
She sat with this for a moment.
Dark Flame's Operations Director was coming to Dawn Bell in three days. He would inspect the guild. He would talk to the staff. He would, almost certainly, meet the healers.
She had not come to Dawn Bell because she thought Dark Flame would come to her.
She looked at the grey ring on the second cockroach, still spreading slowly through the glass jar.
Three days. She had three days to decide if she would shake his hand — or dissolve it.