She leaned him forward in the chair, and her fingers trembled as she looked around. She swept up the glass with a calm she did not feel, pouring it into an empty glass vial and tucking it into her satchel, warring between trying to convince herself that it had happened and telling herself that it hadn’t. Neither option felt fully plausible.
She went back and examined Ferron again as she would any patient. To her resonance, there seemed nothing distinctly different except that he was warmer now; the flashes of coldness didn’t tear at her resonance so intensely when she touched him. But there was nothing inside him except the talisman, still burning and glowing near his heart, and the lumithium alloy on his back.
She closed her eyes for a moment, reaching up out of habit to grip the amulet
