Mithra led Leah back to the cave. She helped her stand up, but the woman recoiled at the touch and shuffled awkwardly away. Her movements were stilted by the pieces of her armor solidifying where they very much shouldn’t, but she could walk, or at least stumble forward. Menace dragged its broken wing on the sand as he followed them, wary and in pain.

  The corpse of a T-Rex still blocked the entrance. Mithra had forgotten about it entirely. She stood, not sure what to do, when Leah suddenly dropped to the ground in the shade of the creature’s massive ribs. Deeming the place as good as any, Mithra collapsed next to her.

  Her arm was beyond pain. The dead, burned skin was sloughing off in layers, blood and shattered bone still painfully encased inside. There was no saving the limb, Mithra decided. She’d die of sepsis or internal bleeding long before she could muster the energy to repair it properly. And it hurt. It hurt so much she wanted it to just be gone. Her mark had regrown bone before with her bitten off fingers, it could probably do the same for her arm. Probably.

  “Can you help me?” she asked and turned to Leah, but got no answer. The woman was lying face down in the sand. “Hey, are you—” Mithra stopped herself from asking the question. She was obviously not okay, not after taking a pillar of flames head on.

  Mithra turned Leah onto her back, using the dead skin on her arm to do so. Leah’s armor was still red hot, but she breathed. It rose and fell without rhythm, short, ragged breaths rocking her body. Mithra put her own injuries out of her mind—she’d survive, but Leah needed immediate attention.

  “We need to get you out of that armor,” she said. The task was harder than it seemed. The armor had no visible clasps or straps holding it together, and the slits between plates were filled with molten metal. Mithra struggled with the steel, burning her good hand. She tried to find any leverage points, anything to help her peel away the metal shell cooking Leah alive.

  Leah opened her eyes. She let out an awful, rasping sound, halfway between a cough and a growl. As if that were the magic words holding the armor together, the steel fell off in sections with a hiss of air. Mithra gagged as the putrid stench of burnt flesh hit her anew. Leah closed her eyes again.

  Leah’s vitals were covered by plates of what looked like frozen smoke, almost like clouds trapped inside glass. It was dry to the touch, indents forming even under light pressure. Underneath Leah wore a black bodysuit, miraculously intact despite the heat. It covered only her torso—her limbs were entirely metal.

  The solid air seemed to protect the vital areas from damage, but Mithra checked anyway. She prodded Leah’s abdomen and was surprised to feel the solid resistance of metal and not flesh. With her knife she cut the front of the bodysuit open. A steel plate was fused with Leah’s skin from sternum to pelvis. It didn’t look like a covering, but like a natural part of her body, a simple extension. Well, whatever it was, it seemed intact. Vitals checked, Mithra moved to the rest of Leah’s body.

  Wherever the solid air didn’t cover, there were vicious burns that made Mithra wince. Not all of the metal armor fell off. Some, particularly the parts on the shoulders, were melted into the flesh. But the worst by far were the arms. The metal limb ended just above the elbow, where flesh went through a whole range of colors from red to black the closer it was to the metal. Mithra turned away and vomited, seeing pieces of charred bone fused with steel in places where the flesh burned off entirely.

  Hearing about Fire Mages fighting was one thing, but seeing the aftermath up close was another. In the stories no one ever elaborated on the victims of pyromancers any further than ‘they burned’. The sight was gruesome and it was hard to reconcile an image of her uncle with the sight of a person’s flesh sloughing off.

  It was even harder to come to terms with the fact that it was her fault. If she was more careful, if she thought for a second instead of running straight into the Guardians’ hands, hell, if she didn’t go for a stupid run in dangerous territory, Leah wouldn’t have had to suffer protecting her. Wouldn’t have to be dying.

  And there was no doubt that Leah was dying. Her vitals were safe, but this kind of large scale damage to arms and legs was surely lethal if untreated. And Mithra had no way to help. They couldn’t go inside the Veil, and she didn’t know where the Enclave was beyond vague directions. Besides, she doubted Leah was going to survive the night, much less weeks of travel.

  There was one thing she could try. Mithra visualized her divine energy and gathered it in her regeneration mark with an effort of will. She’d never used her mark that way, so she didn’t know if it’d work, but she had to try. She touched her palm to Leah’s charred flesh and clumsily pushed, the same way she usually did with tendrils of her mind magic. The energy resisted the manipulation, not wanting to leave her body, but Mithra powered through.

  It finally left her body, but took clean air with it. Her lungs burned with ash, the same way they did on her first day outside the Veil. She fell to the ground, clutching her throat and coughing, desperate for a breath.

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  As soon as she stopped pushing them out the divine sparks filled her lungs again, bringing with them a fresh rush of air.

  It didn’t work. Leah’s injuries were still there, burnt flesh and charred bone all. Glancing at her intact arm, Mithra choked back a scream of irritation. The burns she suffered when touching Leah were already healed.

  Gathering the energy again took her minutes. Pushing it into Leah took seconds. Writhing on the ground, breathless, took minutes again. But she tried again. And again. And again. She drifted between consciousness and dream with one thought filling her mind.

  Leah wasn’t dying today.

  ?

  Leah wished she could turn off her sense of pain, just like she could her hearing. But pain was too important a stimuli, the way for the body to communicate something was wrong. And there was a lot wrong with her body right now.

  She couldn’t feel her limbs at all, and as far as she knew that was the only positive about the situation. Her shoulders and upper thighs burned, the metal armor searing painfully into them. It was an entirely new sensation for her, being cooked alive, and it definitely wasn’t a pleasant one. Her forehead burned too, but she knew her face was protected by a dense layer of aerogel so she brushed it off as fever.

  All told, it could’ve been way worse. She could’ve died fighting the purple robes. Instead, Leah could boast about crippling one and surviving a master Fire Mage’s assault. Not for long, of course, but for a few hours at least.

  The muscles in her neck were intact and she craned them to the side. Her mask dug into the sand, but one of her eyes was uncovered. She could see Mithra next to her, curled up and shivering. Poor thing. Menace was poking the Veiler with his beak, trying to wake her up to no effect.

  Another flex of the only muscle group she could move, and Leah was looking at sand again. She drifted off.

  ?

  Mithra woke up with a start. It was the middle of the night and she was shivering from the cold. Leah was still breathing, thank the Gods. Menace was next to her, nursing his broken wing. Deeming the risk of Leah dying in the next five minutes low, Mithra moved to help the animal.

  “Okay, buddy,” she said, trying to make her voice as soothing as she could. “It’ll hurt a bit, but it’ll be better after, I promise.” She packed her words with smells of calm and relief. She hated using her mark like that, but it was necessary. Setting a bone was hard, harder with only one working hand, and harder yet if the owner of the bone was thrashing violently about.

  Menace seemed to understand her intention, however, and reached out his wing. Mithra struggled for a solid grip, but found it. The break seemed relatively clean. She couldn’t feel any bone fragments under the animal’s skin, only two parts of the bone shifted to the side. With a crack, she set the bone in place. Menace screeched and recoiled, but didn’t take her head off with its massive beak.

  “See? Better already,” Mithra said, more to herself than to him. It was time to take care of herself, now. Her sword was in pieces, so she used her knife. She found the spot in her shoulder when the arm bones connected with cartilage, and made the first cut.

  It turned out too shallow. Mithra grit her teeth. It was hard to force herself to cut her own arm off. But it had to be done. Like a wild dog chewing through its leg to free itself from a hunter’s trap, Mithra sawed with her knife, painful inch after inch. She probably screamed, but she couldn't hear herself over the sound of her parting flesh and tearing ligaments. Over the crunch of bone and cartilage and over the dull thud of her arm hitting the ground. With her last effort she directed her energy to close off the bleeding, and lost consciousness again.

  ?

  The voice in Leah’s mind was talking to her again.

  WARNING. Vital signs outside the normal range. Seek immediate help.

  The voice was weird. It wasn't her voice, for one. And it wasn’t her AI’s either.

  NOTIFICATION. Trying to establish connection...

  Leah could remember it talking to her when she was little, helping her sleep in her glass ampule.

  NOTIFICATION. Permission denied. WARNING. Seek immediate help.

  It felt familiar. Like an old friend, or family.

  WARNING. Overriding safety protocol. Securing transmission...

  Definitely like family.

  NOTIFICATION. Transmission secured. Switching to manual mode.

  A family she had never known.

  ?

  Mithra woke up and started the cycle of gathering her energy and pushing it into Leah, again. She’d make sure the woman survived, at least. She owed her that much.

  Minutes passed, then hours. Maybe days, but Mithra wasn’t sure about anything, much less something as fleeting as passage of time. Constantly on the verge of consciousness, the only thing that mattered to her were the slow, shallow breaths of Leah.

  Menace left at some point. She couldn’t tell when exactly, but she missed his warm, feathered presence. As if to replace him, shambling figures appeared on the horizon, but she was too weak to process the information, much less do anything about it. They were humanoid, their movements jerky and mechanical. They smelled like oil and blood.

  One of them picked up Leah, and at that Mithra tried to protest. She wasn’t done healing her. But then another figure lifted her up, and she couldn’t even protest anymore. It placed one cold arm under her knees, the other supporting her under the armpit and resting her weight on its chest. She got a good look at the other figures as it carried her: at their skin held in place by screws; at their fingers elongated into sharpened claws; at the fluids dripping out of their mouths and staining the sand black.

  She probably should’ve been more alarmed than she was, but her body refused to supply her with the proper chemicals for that. Instead, she slept as the abominations carried her away.