Evelyn's hands would not stop shaking.
She pressed her palms to Rem's chest and called the soft, practical light she reserved for wounds that would listen. The crater hissed with settling dust. The air smelled like cold iron and stone rubbed to powder. Nothing else in the chamber moved. There was only the slow, stubborn rise of Rem's ribs and the thin line of breath that kept choosing to continue.
"Stay," she said. Her voice sounded wrong, as if she had borrowed it from someone who was not exhausted.
The healing light soaked the bruised scaffolding of his body. Ribs that had argued with a force larger than law agreed to hold a little longer. The worst tears closed to something a human could survive. She did not reach for the sealed thing she had woken. She did not even think near it. Her rings dimmed to a dull glow. The next spell arrived a beat late. She pushed it anyway.
"Strong body," she whispered, repeating what she had said to him before the world learned its new shape.
Her legs trembled when she stood. She coaxed a carrying field into being, a low, humming cradle that lifted Rem a handspan above the torn slate. It took all the steadiness she had left to keep the cradle level. Each step toward the exit felt like putting promises back into a room that had run out of them.
The corridor waited with its long throat and tired shadows. Water dripped somewhere, a patient metronome. Where the dungeon had once tried to lie, there were only scars now. The heptagram was gone. The ribs of petrified wood were black dust in the seams. Her lights followed like birds that did not want to fly anymore.
Halfway to the old fork, voices slid into the corridor. Boots. Metal on leather. A lantern's clear, unmagical glow.
"Association rescue," someone called, and the words unknotted something inside her. Figures rounded the corner in layered coats, hands empty and visible. One carried a collapsible stretcher. One had a medic's bag with the Association sigil stamped in dull steel.
Evelyn's cradle faltered. She steadied it once, twice. Her vision whitened for a breath and returned in too many edges.
"Please," she said, and the word came out as breath. She tried again. "Please save him first. He is badly injured."
They moved. Efficient hands took the cradle's weight. The medic's palm hovered, then pressed. A quick mirror showed heartbeat, breath, damage. Shock foam hissed. An IV blinked into existence with clean, non-magical tubes.
"Got him," the medic said. "You can let go, miss."
Evelyn let go. The corridor tilted. She saw the stretcher lift and turn toward the light, and she followed it one step, then another, then folded to one knee and then to none. The last thing she felt was the cool of the slate against her cheek and the relief of not having to hold anything up anymore.
Everything went dark, but not the old dark. A simple one. A human one.
Three days later, Rem learned how a ceiling looks when you are alive.
White panels. A hairline crack like a road on a map. The steady whistle of a wall vent. The antiseptic sweetness of a place where problems are meant to be solved. He knew the smell from other rooms, other breaks. He knew it as the opposite of a dungeon.
"What happened," he said, because the mind likes beginning in the middle.
A door clicked open as if the building had been listening for the line. A man stepped in with the kind of precision that makes chairs sit straighter. Blue tie. Dark suit. Glasses with lenses that did not catch glare. He carried a folder in his left hand and certainty in his right.
"That is also what I would like to know," the man said, and the consonants landed very gently. "We have Madame Evelyn Verran's report and deposition. I would like yours."
Rem propped himself on his elbows. Every muscle voted no. He did not count votes. He took inventory. Ribs held. Forearm was splinted. Skin pulled in places where it had been convinced to return to being skin.
"Rem," he said. "Porter. F rank. I carried packs and did not die, mostly."
The man did not smile. "Mr. Smith," he said. "I investigate dungeon incidents for the Association."
"Mr. Smith," Rem repeated, and left the name in the air to see if it would grow.
It did not. Smith stood at the end of the bed with the posture of a measuring instrument.
"Tell me," Smith said.
Rem told him, because avoiding long stories is a habit, and because the parts he could tell were simple. Misranked run. Roaming effigy. Evelyn's procedures. His redirection and her windows. The fall into phase two. The strike that should have ended him, which did not because she put a barrier into the absence. The decision to try mana infusion, and then nothing until now. He kept his voice even. He did not embroider. He did not speculate.
"You do not remember anything after the infusion began," Smith said.
"No," Rem said. "I woke up here."
Smith's jaw moved once, a muscle thinking. For a moment he looked like a man who had been expecting a story he did not receive. He opened the folder, glanced at a line, closed it again without reading.
"Evelyn Verran's account is… detailed," he said, and there was something in the pause that could have been amusement if the rest of him had permitted it. "It will suffice. I have what I need."
He turned. Rem let him take two steps.
"You did not give me your first name," Rem said.
Smith looked back. The smile that appeared was too smooth to be a habit and too quick to be honest. "Mr. Smith is enough. Three veterans dead, a D-ranked raid that was not, and a dungeon sealed by two young people, one of whom is an F rank porter with no recorded mana. It is unusual. Unusual things are my work."
The smile vanished, removed like a glove. The face underneath did not offer opinions.
Rem held his gaze. "Then I suppose you have what you need, Mr. Smith. Farewell."
"Get well soon," Smith said. It sounded like a very correct answer to an exam question.
He left. The room kept his absence.
Rem let out a breath he had not admitted to holding. He watched the door a moment longer than needed, because he never liked suits in rooms where people bled. He had learned to trust tools, not titles.
The next visitor wore a coat with sleeves rolled to the forearms and an expression that admitted to sleep but not to defeat. The badge on his pocket read DOCTOR, and below it a name Rem did not catch.
"How are we feeling," the doctor asked in a voice that assumed people could feel.
"Like I borrowed parts," Rem said.
"That is accurate," the doctor said. He flipped through a chart that glowed for him and not for anyone else. "You had a lot of help. Healing in situ prevented the worst outcomes. Credit to Madame Verran. Your own biology is unreasonable. Bone knit is faster than baseline. Soft tissue response is… efficient. No residual internal bleeding. No mana instability recorded."
"No instability," Rem echoed, and left the word where Smith's name had been.
"You are free to go when you can stand," the doctor said. "Rest is not a prison term, but it is strongly recommended."
"Understood."
"Try not to do that again," the doctor added with the bleak humor of people who always arrive after explosions.
"I am taking it under advisement," Rem said.
Walking was a list. Stand. Breathe. Put weight where the leg expects it. Repeat. The hospital smelled like disinfectant and kindness forced into hallways. Outside, the city had the right noise. Vendors. Tires on wet street. A cold wind that found the seams in his coat and wrote small notes on his skin.
His body felt wrong, which is to say it felt good in a way he was not used to. He caught his own balance too easily. Stairs offered less argument. The air seemed thinner and cleaner, as if some resistance in him had been folded away. He moved through space and space moved back like a door on oiled hinges.
He did not trust the feeling. He catalogued it and kept walking.
Home was on a street that smelled like tea and broth and oil. The sign over the door said Laddersmith once, and then someone had painted over it with a doctor's symbol. Rem let himself in without knocking.
"Boy," said a voice that had raised him without admitting to it. "You are on your feet."
Dr. Livesey came out from the back room wiping his hands. He was broad through the shoulders in the way of men who have moved other men out of danger for too many years. His hair had retreated in good order. His eyes were the color of tea when it has steeped too long.
"I heard," Livesey said. He stopped pretending he was calm. He crossed the room in three steps and wrapped Rem up the way a man rescues a person from water. It was not elegant. It did not need to be. "They would not let me in. Association rules, they said. I made several opinions known, and they said them again. I nearly went down there with a hammer."
Rem laughed, which pulled in the wrong places and felt right anyway. "They like hammers less than I do."
"Of course they do. They are made of paper." Livesey let him go but kept one hand on his shoulder for a beat longer than necessary. "You are like a son to me. Try to act like sons who do not make old men older."
"I will fail politely," Rem said.
"Sit," Livesey said, and put him in a chair as if chairs were a prescription. He poured something hot that smelled like fennel and told it to be medicine. "Your friend. The noble girl. The one with a spine made of well-cut glass. She carried you out, bleeding out of pride and hands. She scared half the rescue team and then apologized to them for standing up wrong. They said she is stable. I could not see her either. Rules."
Rem watched steam rise. He could still feel Evelyn's hands on his back, cold and precise, the moment before pain learned his name. He set the cup down without drinking.
"When I was out," he said quietly, "I remember things, maybe. Not pictures. Weight. I was sad and angry about everything. Enraged. I felt empty. Like I was the void himself."
Livesey's face dimmed. Not dramatically. The way a room darkens when a cloud takes the sun without asking. He put a hand on the table, palm flat.
"Shock," Livesey said. "Emotion. Brains make bad weather in the dark. You were near enough to death for the body to file complaints. It does that sometimes."
Rem held his gaze. "You are a bad liar when you choose to be."
"I am an excellent liar when I have to be," Livesey said, which was almost the same thing. He rubbed his thumb across a fault line in the wood. "Eat. Sleep. Then we can decide if you are possessed by an idea or just tired."
Rem drank. The broth admitted to heat and kindness. He let it be both. The house breathed its small, good breaths. A cart rattled outside. Someone cursed in a language that did not apologize.
He looked at the scar on his forearm where a weapon had decided not to be there anymore. He flexed his hand. It obeyed. It trembled later, small and honest.
Livesey fussed with nothing, which is how he kept the world from breaking.
"Rest," the doctor said again, and Rem heard the word he had not said out loud. Stay.
"I will," Rem said, though he did not promise a schedule.
When Livesey went to the back room to argue with invoices and tea, Rem leaned his head against the chair and stared at the ceiling. It had a stain shaped like a rabbit that had been told to leave and refused.
He thought about the crater. The sound the dungeon made when it quit. The way Evelyn had put her hands on his back without fear and then stood between him and what would have erased him.
"I hope the nerd's okay," he said to the quiet, and let the quiet answer by staying.