Dave didn't sleep.

  He lay on the narrow bed in the room he had rented in Drevhan and watched the ceiling shift through the dark hours and thought about the specific geometry of a ledge thirty meters below the bowl's edge. The angle had been wrong. That was what he kept returning to. The angle had been wrong, which meant he hadn't been able to see what was on the shelf — which meant he hadn't seen a body, which was different from having seen one.

  He thought: I knew him for two days.

  He thought: it doesn't matter. That's not how it works.

  He thought: I haven't seen a body.

  By the time the bioluminescent ceiling-strips in the corridor outside his room cycled to their pale morning register, he had made the decision that he had probably made at the edge of the bowl and simply hadn't acknowledged yet. He packed what he had — herb-collection tools, the silvar root they had gathered before the creature appeared, wrapped carefully in the cloth meant to preserve volatile compounds, the bone deterrent clubs, water and provisions for two days. He thought about this second calculation — two days of provisions — and understood, in thinking it, that he was not going back to look for a body.

  He was going back to look for someone alive.

  — ★ —

  The mountain was different in the early hours. The wrong-blue sky had that particular quality it had before full light — more blue than usual, the bioluminescence that ran through Cosmulo's atmosphere catching the low angle and producing something that was almost beautiful if you didn't think too hard about what it meant. The lower slopes were quiet. Whatever territorial fauna had been active the previous afternoon had cycled into whatever passed for night behavior here, and Dave moved through the treeline and up onto the open rock without incident.

  He moved faster than he had with Taric. His body knew the route now — the split boulder, the band of pale rock, the ridge — and the familiarity produced a pace that the previous day's caution hadn't allowed. He reached the bowl's entry point before full light and paused there, listening.

  Nothing. Wind. The specific acoustic quality of high rock.

  He crossed to the northern edge of the bowl and looked down.

  The ledge was visible in the morning light in a way it hadn't been the previous evening — the angle catching it differently, shadows working for him instead of against. Thirty meters below. A narrow shelf, perhaps four meters wide, ending in another drop that disappeared out of his sightline.

  On the shelf: something.

  Dave went very still.

  The something was a shape. A human shape. Lying on its side against the rock, not moving, but there — present, the specific occupancy of a space that an absent person didn't have.

  He found the descent route that he'd assessed at the bowl's edge the previous evening and hadn't used. It was not a good route. It required committing to a traverse where the holds were shallow and the drop below each one was significant, and it required doing this while carrying a full pack, and it required trusting that the rock, which was an unfamiliar variety and had a surface quality he couldn't fully read, would hold his weight. He did these things without making them larger than they were and descended.

  It took twenty minutes.

  — ★ —

  Taric was alive.

  This was immediately apparent and immediately complicated by everything else that was apparent. He was alive in the specific sense of: breathing, heart beating at a rate Dave could establish through brief contact with his wrist, responsive to stimulus in that his eyes opened when Dave said his name. But the quality of that life was wrong in ways Dave had not encountered before and did not have a full framework for.

  His skin was too hot. Not fever-hot in the way Dave understood fever — human fever, the kind he'd treated with herbal compounds, had a wet warmth and a consistent distribution. This was dry and uneven: his arms and upper chest radiated heat at a level that should have been alarming, while his hands were cold. And at his forearms, visible through the tears in his clothing from the fall, there were lines. Not injuries — something that ran with the muscle structure rather than across it, following the line of the blood vessels but different from them. They glowed. Faintly, intermittently, with a blue-white quality that had nothing to do with any light source Dave could identify.

  Dave looked at these for a moment and thought: the creature. The creature had been Emissor-type. They had been in direct physical contact — blood contact, almost certainly, given the fall and the grip. He had read, in the briefing documentation in his first week, about involuntary integration. He had read it the way he read everything in the briefing documentation: carefully, with the understanding that it might become relevant. He had not expected it to become relevant this quickly.

  The documentation had been brief. Involuntary integration occurred when biological material from an evolved creature came into direct contact with human biology during high-stress conditions. The survival rate, the documentation noted with the same affectless precision it used for everything, was low.

  The documentation had not elaborated on what low meant.

  "Taric," Dave said.

  The blue eyes opened. They were wrong too — the irises were more vivid than they had been, a deeper blue, as though the involuntary integration had found the color first and turned it up. The eyes focused slowly, with effort, and when they found Dave's face something moved through them that was recognition but came in stages.

  "Dave," Taric said. His voice had been reduced to something hoarse and concentrated. "The creature—"

  "Is dead," Dave said. He didn't know this with certainty, but the creature was not on the shelf and the shelf was not large, and a creature that had fallen thirty meters onto rock and had not been moving when he reached the area was almost certainly not a significant concern. "Don't move. Tell me what you feel."

  Taric appeared to do a genuine inventory. "Hot," he said. "Wrong. Like my body has decided to do something without asking me." He paused, and in the pause one of the lines on his forearm pulsed — a single visible charge moving along the channel — and the rock near his hand warmed suddenly and then cooled. "That," he said. "That keeps happening."

  "How often?"

  "More than before." His jaw tightened. "I don't know how to stop it."

  "You're not going to stop it right now," Dave said. "Right now you're going to help me get you upright and then we're going to figure out how to get off this shelf." He was already working through the silvar root and the other compounds in his pack — not for this specifically, nothing he had was specifically for this, but there were compounds for metabolic shock and for heat regulation and for nervous system stabilization. He knew what he had and he knew what it might do and he made the decisions that seemed most likely to help and moved.

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  "There's something wrong with me," Taric said.

  "Yes," Dave said, applying the first compound. "There is. We're going to deal with that once we're not on a ledge on a mountain."

  Something that might have been a short laugh. "Practical."

  "It's working better for me than the alternative." Dave assessed the compound's contact and nodded to himself. "Can you sit up?"

  It took three attempts. On the third, Taric was upright, and one of the channels discharged into the rock beside him with enough force to leave a scorched circle the size of a fist. Taric looked at this with an expression of someone receiving confirmation of information they already had but had hoped was wrong.

  "The route up is harder than the route down," Dave said. "I'll tell you where to put your hands and feet. Follow exactly what I say and don't use the— don't use the channels unless you have to." He looked at Taric. "Ready?"

  "No," Taric said.

  "That's fine," Dave said. "Start anyway."

  — ★ —

  The ascent took the better part of two hours.

  Taric was functional in the practical sense — he could climb, he could follow instructions, he could make the decisions that climbing required. But the integration was active and ongoing and his control over it was essentially absent, which meant that every point of high physical exertion produced a discharge. Most of them were small — a spark at the fingertips, a pulse along an arm, the rock warming under a handhold. Two were not small. The first knocked Dave off the traverse he was on and he caught himself three meters lower with the concentrated focus of someone who has trained himself not to panic when falling. The second happened at the bowl's rim and left a scorch mark on the stone large enough to read from ten meters away.

  Dave noted both of these and said nothing about either. There was nothing useful to say. What Taric needed was not commentary on the things going wrong but concentration on the path ahead, and the path ahead required his full attention.

  They reached the bowl.

  Taric sat down on the nearest flat rock. He was grey-pale under his skin tone and his breathing was the controlled breathing of someone managing pain rather than recovering from exertion. The channels at his forearms were active continuously now — pulsing in a rhythm that was irregular, not like a heartbeat, more like the rhythm of something trying to establish itself and not quite finding the pattern.

  "How far is Drevhan?" he asked.

  "Three hours, if you can maintain the pace." Dave looked at him. "Can you?"

  Taric did the honest assessment rather than the optimistic one. "I don't know. Maybe."

  "Then we move when you can move and stop when you have to stop." Dave was already recalculating provisions. "I have enough."

  They rested for twenty minutes. During those twenty minutes the channels discharged four times — twice small, twice significant, one of which hit the rock face of the bowl and left a crater the size of a hand. Taric looked at each result with the expression of someone watching themselves do something they did not choose to do.

  "The briefing documentation," Dave said, during the rest. "Did you read the section on involuntary integration?"

  "I don't remember a section on involuntary integration."

  "Page eighteen. Subsection four." Dave paused. "I read everything. Twice. The documentation was thin on detail but it was there."

  Taric looked at him. "What did it say?"

  "That it happens when biological material from an evolved creature enters human biology under high-stress conditions." A pause. "And that the survival rate was low."

  A silence.

  "But I'm surviving," Taric said.

  "So far," Dave agreed. "That might mean something or it might be a very short so far. I don't know enough to know which." He looked at the channels. "But you're integrating, not collapsing. Which is different from the failure mode."

  "You're using failure mode as if it's a technical term."

  "The documentation used it. I'm borrowing the frame." Dave stood and offered a hand up. "Let's move."

  — ★ —

  They had been walking for perhaps an hour when the man appeared on the path ahead of them.

  He was old in the specific way of someone whose body had been enormous and had been reduced — the frame still broad, the width of the shoulders still present, but the mass beneath them managed and diminished. He moved with a staff and with the particular careful precision of someone who knew which parts of themselves were reliable and which required attention. His hair was white, cut short, and his face had the deep weathering of someone who had spent decades outside in extreme conditions.

  His eyes were dark brown and they assessed Dave and Taric in approximately two seconds, without drama.

  "I was watching the slopes," he said. Not a greeting — context. "Through my scope. I saw the altercation yesterday." He looked at Taric — at the channels, at the heat haze that was faintly visible above his skin in the morning air. "And I see what happened."

  "Who are you?" Dave asked.

  "Someone who knows what involuntary Emissor integration looks like and how long he has if he doesn't get stabilization." The brown eyes moved to Dave. "And someone who has a Cell Weaver twenty minutes from here." A pause. "You have perhaps six hours before the integration hits cascade. After cascade, stabilization becomes impossible." He looked back at Taric. "Can you walk?"

  Taric looked at Dave. Dave looked at the old man and thought: this is either exactly what it looks like or a different kind of danger, and there are not currently options that don't involve trust. He thought: he came to us, which means he had to decide to be visible, which means he chose this.

  He thought about the briefing documentation and six hours.

  "He can walk," Dave said.

  "Then walk," the old man said, and turned back up the path.

  His name, he told them as they moved, was Nick.

  — ★ —

  The walk to Nick's house took thirty-five minutes. During those thirty-five minutes the channels discharged seven times — Dave was counting, for no particular reason except that counting was the thing his mind did when it needed to be occupied. Nick registered each discharge with the specific quality of attention that was not alarm but was thorough and continuous. On the fifth discharge, which was the largest, Nick spoke without breaking stride.

  "Don't fight it," he said. "Fighting it directs more energy to the point of resistance. Let it go where it wants to go."

  "It wants to go everywhere," Taric said.

  "Then let it go everywhere."

  The eighth discharge happened three meters from the door of the house and blew out a section of low scrub in a five-meter radius. Nick looked at this with the expression of someone reviewing a calculation that came out slightly worse than projected.

  "Inside," he said. "Now."

  The inside of the house was warm and ordered — the specific order of someone who had lived in the same space long enough to have solved every organizational problem the space created. There was a medical table that was not medical in any official sense but had the layout of someone who worked on biology regularly: instruments, compounds in careful storage, clean cloth in folded stacks. Standing at the table was a young woman who had the absolute, focused stillness of someone who had heard them approaching and had already assessed the situation and begun preparation.

  "How long?" she said. Not to Taric — to Nick.

  "Six hours, approximately. Integration is active, not yet cascade." Nick set his staff against the wall with the ease of long habit. "His channels are fully opened. IC is—" He looked at Taric. "Ninety-one, I'd estimate. Perhaps ninety-two."

  The young woman turned from the table. Her eyes moved across Taric with an intensity that had nothing of the visual in it — she was looking through, assessing cellular architecture the way a person with different kinds of eyes read faces. "Ninety-three," she said. Her voice was precise and not unkind and had no panic in it. "Get him down."

  Taric went down before Dave or Nick could respond to this — not a dramatic fall but a simple one, the specific collapse of a body that had spent its last available reserves getting through the door. Dave caught part of it. It wasn't enough to prevent the floor from happening but it was enough to prevent the floor from being worse than it needed to be.

  The young woman was already there, both hands on Taric's forearms, her eyes focused on something Dave couldn't see.

  "Eight days," she said. To no one in particular, as if the number were a measurement she'd just made. "Minimum."

  Dave looked at Nick.

  "Lana," Nick said. "She's a Cell Weaver. She's kept people alive through worse than this." He paused, watching her work. "Not many, but worse."

  Taric was unconscious. The channels were still pulsing — they didn't stop with consciousness, Dave noted. But the quality of the pulse was already slightly different. More regular. As if the presence of the Cell Weaver's attention had introduced an organizing principle to something that had been trying to find one.

  Lana looked up briefly. Her gaze moved to Dave — quick, thorough, the same look she'd given Taric but briefer, with different categories.

  "You're the one who went back up," she said.

  "Yes," Dave said.

  She nodded once, as though filing this. "You should eat something and sit down. He's going to be here for a while and you look like you've been awake since yesterday."

  Dave thought about arguing with this and recognized that it was accurate and found a chair.

  Outside, the wrong-blue sky continued its patient indifference to everything happening beneath it. Inside, Lana worked, and Taric breathed, and Nick moved quietly to the kitchen to prepare food with the ease of someone for whom hospitality was a practice rather than a performance.

  Dave sat down and ate and watched Taric not die, which was the most useful thing he could do for the moment.

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