Frankie turned translucent beneath the blue wash of Grant Passage. For an instant, I saw every route through her body: blood vessels, nerves, the violent black threads that had spread from the bite. Those threads led to a knot buried deep in her midsection. Not an organ, something wrapped around one. The knot pulsed faster as if it knew I had found it. I saw the path a few inches left of her navel. I lifted my blade.
“Bro—”
“Ken, hold her still.”
I pressed the tip of the blade toward the pulsing black knot.
The point met resistance for half a second, different from skin, something tougher. Then it gave, and the blade bit deeper. Frankie screamed.
It wasn’t a small sound. It tore out of her, amplified by her class. Every ounce of me wanted to pull the knife out, but I kept going. Ken flinched hard, and I thought he might drop her. A force erupted from inside her, pushing out the blade and sending my hand crashing into my thigh.
Black fluid spewed from the wound, thick and pressurized. It wasn’t blood. This was too dark, too thick. It sprayed against me as I tried to help Ken hold her steady, a hot, foul-smelling wave that made my stomach turn. She convulsed. Once. Twice. Then the black lines that marked her body rapidly receded, like water drawn backward down a drain.
Frankie’s health bar finally held firm at around 10%. She gasped loudly and slumped into Ken. He looked at me with wide eyes. Slowly, as if milking the tension for all it was worth, her health bar ticked back up. At 20% she opened her eyes.
“Is that? What in the hell?” Ken started, his voice flooded with relief.
“I don’t know. I just — I saw it inside her and knew I had to get to it.”
“Fucking OP” Ken said, grinning widely.
Frankie put a hand against his chest and shifted uncomfortably. He gently let her down to the ground. Her health was above 50% now. She hunched over, hands on her knees, and took several ragged breaths. A few thin traces of the black lines remained on her exposed midriff, but they had grown still, looking more like tattoos than pulsating veins.
“Ow,” Frankie managed. She touched the knife wound delicately. “Someone stabbed me.”
“That was a surgery,” Ken said, laughing. “The operation was a success.”
Frankie groaned, more at Ken than from the pain.
My hands were shaking. Not badly — not enough that anyone would’ve noticed unless they were looking for it, and I was very good at making sure no one looked for it. I kept my face blank. I’d spent a career teaching two-hundred-and-fifty pound men how to breathe through the worst ten seconds of their lives without letting anyone else see a second of weakness. That skill set seemed to transfer.
Somewhere underneath the part of my brain already cataloging Frankie’s vitals and running through what I’d say if her health had kept dropping, there was a smaller voice asking why the hell I knew how to do any of this. I had some background in kinesiology, but my main training revolved around mental performance. Definitely no trauma surgery. Yet some part of me had looked at a woman with a black, rotting affliction racing through her body and knew with total certainty where to cut.
I didn’t have time to sit with that. I never did. There was always someone else’s crisis that needed managing, while mine sat in the background. Dying hadn’t changed that thought process one bit.
I exhaled and looked up.
SUNMARK SHARDS ACQUIRED — 7 of 8