Kataria’s face was almost part of the scenery, so unchanged was it. As much as Asper searched, as much as she prayed for a twitch of lips or flutter of eyelids, she found nothing. The shict seemed more in a deep dream than a breathless coma, more at peace than in pain.
That might be a sign, her thoughts flooded her head like a deluge, that’s Talanas’s mercy to you. What do you know about this, anyway? You can tie up scratches and kiss scraped knees, but you can’t heal a damn thing without bandages.
She pressed her fingers against Kataria’s throat; no pulse . . . still.
It’s not so bad. You can’t save them all. Remember the last one? She was in so much pain, but you managed to take that away. Her left hand twitched involuntarily. You can do the same for your friend, can’t you?
‘Shut up,’ she snarled, ‘shut up!’
She forced her mind dark, silenced the voices in the rhythm of chest compressions and the futile monotony of breathing. There was solace in monotony, she knew, comfort in not seeing ahead. She forced her gaze away from the future, focused on the now, the lifeless shict and the quiet muttering.
‘I can do this,’ she whispered, ‘I can do this,’ she told herself as she had for so long, ‘please, I can do this . . .’
She drew in her forty-third breath and leaned closer to the shict’s lips. She hesitated, hearing a sound so faint as to be a shade more silent than a whisper: a choked, gurgling whisper.
‘Please,’ she whispered again.
The lifeless muscles in Kataria’s body twitched. Asper forced herself to continue, biting back hope.
‘Please.’
The gurgle came again, a little louder. Kataria’s body jerked, a little livelier.
‘Kat . . .’ She was terrified to raise her voice. ‘Please . . .’
A smile wormed its way onto Asper’s face. The shict’s pale lips parted, only slightly, and drew in the most meagre, pathetic of breaths.
‘Yes,’ her giggle was restrained hysteria, ‘yes, yes, yes!’
Her eyes widened with a sudden dread as she saw something bubble in the shadows of her companion’s mouth.
‘Oh, no! No, no, WAIT!’
As though possessed, the shict’s body shuddered violently, her mouth stretching so wide as to make her jaw creak threateningly. A torrent of translucent bile came flooding out of her, arcing like a geyser as her lungs were brutally evacuated.
Groaning, Kataria rolled onto her side and expelled the last traces of the muck with a hack. Body trembling, she had barely the strength to fall upon her back. The sun seemed bright and harsh above her, her breath foreign and stagnant on her lips.
Through fluttering eyes, she became aware of a shadow falling over her. She tensed, her voice forgotten, a scream bursting from her lips as only a faint, ooze-tinged squeal.
Two wicked blue moons stared down upon her. Her heart raced, head glutted with fragmented imagery: grey flesh, silver hair, two blue eyes burning like cold pyres, pupilless.
She opened her mouth to scream again, but caught herself. Or rather, a pair of strong hands caught her by her arms, pulling her closer. She writhed in the grip, unwilling to stare into the eyes that shifted before her. As dizziness and half-blindness faded, she beheld a gaze that was dominated by two big, hound-like pupils.
‘Fine,’ she repeated as she took in his face, his pink skin and blinking eyes. ‘I’m fine.’ She paused to cough, forcing a weak smile on her face. ‘I mean, as far as nearly dying goes.’
‘Fine.’ He nodded. ‘Just don’t strain yourself. Take breaths as they come.’ He raised her to a sitting position as he eased a waterskin into her hands. ‘Drink. You’re sure you’re well?’
‘A damn sight better than some of us,’ someone snarled from behind.
Asper’s scowl burned two holes in the mask of viscous sludge covering her face. Her lips quivered from behind the vomit, as though she sought to scream but thought better of it. Fuming so fiercely as to make the bile steam, she resigned herself to grumbling indignantly and mop-ping the substance with her sleeve.
‘Oh, you messy little sow.’ Denaos giggled as he joined his companions. ‘Gone and eaten your pudding like a fat little baby, have you?’
Artfully dodging the glob of vomit she hurled at him, he approached Lenk and Kataria with all the candour of someone who had not just