Chương 51: [B2] Chapter 9: Skin Deep

The next morning, Zero and Viria set out to find a place to make a camp. The hollow at the base of a fallen tree offered enough cover from the wind that Zero judged it worth stopping for, and Viria didn't argue, which told him more about her condition than anything she'd said in the last hour.

"Sit," he said.

"I'm fine."

"You have favored your left leg for the last hundred paces. You are not fine, you are compensating." Viria opened her mouth to argue further, then sat, which Zero understood as capitulation dressed up as choice. He crouched and checked the ankle carefully, pressing gentle pressure along the joint until her breath caught at exactly the point that told him what he needed to know.

"It's sprained," Zero said.

"Likely when you fell off of me before you went unconscious." He paused.

"Sorry about that, by the way. I didn't know what else to do."

"It's okay, Zero. I'm fine. Trust me."

"You said that before I checked it."

"That's how confidence works."

"Just… humor me?" Viria sighed, but she didn't argue, which was her way of giving Zero the go-ahead without needing to say it aloud. Zero shifted a section of skin along his forearm into something soft and cool, then pressed it gently against the swelling, holding it there while she watched him with an expression that hovered somewhere between annoyance and something close to relief.

It was while he held that position, close enough to notice details a longer distance would have missed, that he saw the second thing. It was a small raised welt at her ankle's inner curve, no larger than her fingertip, faintly discolored at its center in a way that had nothing to do with the sprain. He hadn't seen it that morning.

Zero ran Identify: IDENTIFICATION ACTIVE: Skincrawler Classification: Embedded Type: Subdermal Parasite Traits: Continuous blood and ambient energy draw from host, Currently in early feeding stage Removal recommended before energy draw increases. Zero went very still.

"What is it?" asked Viria.

"Remember when you stepped in that puddle? The one that was deeper than it looked."

"I remember. We dried it off and moved on."

"Well, something got under the skin before you dried it off." He kept his voice level, the register he used for anything that required calm more than sympathy right now.

"It has been feeding since. Slowly. That is likely part of what you have been attributing to heat." Viria looked down at her own ankle like it belonged to someone else.

"There is a thing living under my skin?"

"There is a thing living under your skin," Zero confirmed.

"It needs to come out now. Before the draw increases further."

"How does something like that even—" She stopped herself, visibly deciding she didn't actually want the mechanism explained in detail.

"Can you… get it out safely?" This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Zero considered for a moment.

"Yes."

Zero reshaped one fingertip into something narrow and precise, thinner than a needle, blunt-edged rather than sharp, built for separating tissue rather than cutting it. It was a configuration he'd never had reason to build before, but the principle was the same as everything else his body did on command: understand the shape a task required, then become it.

"This will not be comfortable," he said.

"That is an understatement I can already feel arriving. Bring it on." He worked with a patience that came almost too easily to him, tracing the welt's edge until he found the narrow channel the creature had made, and drew it out slowly and steadily. It was a pale, segmented thing, no longer than his own smallest finger. Membrane-thin and still faintly twitching where it had been severed from whatever had anchored it.

Viria made a sound that wasn't quite a scream and wasn't quite anything else either, and gripped a fistful of moss hard enough to tear it.

"Done," Zero said, once it was fully clear, setting the thing aside on a broad leaf where neither of them needed to look at it further.

"The wound should be cleaned. I do not have proper antiseptic, but boiled water would reduce infection risk considerably, once we can build a fire. For now, cover it with some clean cloth." Viria breathed hard for a moment, staring at her own ankle like she expected to find another one.

"Is that why I've been so tired?"

"Likely a contributing factor. It has been drawing from you continuously for days."

"Days, huh?" She let her head drop back against the fallen tree's bark.

"I thought it was just the heat. That I was just handling it worse than the rest of you."

"You were handling something none of the rest of us were carrying," Zero said.

"It's not your fault."

Viria was quiet for a while after that, watching the last of the light fail through gaps in the canopy, and Zero busied himself building a small fire in the hollow's shelter, using flint from his pack and patience he'd learned to have plenty of.

"It almost had me," she said, eventually, once the fire had caught.

"At the river. If you hadn't pulled me."

"I did pull you, though."

"I know. I'm not asking you to confirm it happened. I'm saying–" Viria paused before starting over.

"I'm saying that I felt the water move before I understood what it meant, and there wasn't time to be afraid yet, and then you'd already grabbed me." Viria exhaled, "And… I keep thinking about the half second where I would have just been… standing there if you hadn't." Zero considered the shape of what she was telling him.

"You are afraid now," he said.

"Retroactively."

"Is that a diagnosis?"

"Just an observation." Viria stared at the fire for a while before speaking again.

"It's a stupid thing to be afraid of, I know. It already didn't happen."

"Fear does not require permission to be logical," Zero said.

"I have observed it operating on delay in others before. It is not stupid. It is simply how the feeling functions." Viria looked at him for a long moment in the firelight, something in her expression he couldn't fully read.

"You've gotten good at that," she said.

"Explaining feelings back to people like you're reading them through a system window."

"Is… that a criticism?"

"No," she said, softer than he expected.

"It's really not."

"Can I ask you something?" she said, after a silence that had stretched long enough that he'd assumed she'd drifted toward sleep.

"Yes."

"Do you… ever think about what you'd wish for? If we win?" Zero considered the question with the same seriousness he gave everything she asked him, though this one required longer than most.

"I did not have desires before this," he said.

"Desiring something requires believing it is possible to want things that have not already been assigned to you. I am still learning what that feels like in practice."

"That's not an answer."

"I know. I do not have the answer yet."

"What about now, though? Not the wish. Just, right now, in this jungle, lost, with a bad ankle, a parasite you just pulled out of my leg, and a monster that's way out of our league somewhere behind us. What do you want?"

Zero looked at her in the firelight, at the exhaustion and the fear she'd just admitted to feeling on a half-second delay, at the fact that she'd asked him a question this large while sitting in a hollow neither of them had chosen, and found that the answer arrived without needing to be searched for the way most of his answers still did.

"For you to still be here to ask me questions like that tomorrow," he said. Viria didn't say anything for a while. When she finally did, her voice had gone quieter than he'd heard it in weeks, all the performance stripped out of it entirely.

"That's a good answer, Zero."

"I did not construct it to be good. I simply meant it."

"I know," she said.

"That's what makes it good."

Viria was asleep within the hour. Her head eventually found his shoulder the way it had before deployment, requiring no discussion either of them needed to have about it. Zero stayed awake, feeding the small fire in careful increments, watching the dark beyond the hollow for anything that moved with intent. He thought, some time past midnight, of the small pale creature discarded on a broad leaf, still and lifeless now, and found he felt nothing resembling guilt about it.

It had been feeding on someone he'd decided, somewhere across a world and a half, that she mattered more to him than almost anything the laboratory had ever tried to convince him was important. He understood, cataloguing the thought carefully, that this was probably the clearest answer he had yet to the question she'd asked him.