The procedure demanded all of her focus, all of her magic. And in the haze of desperation and fear, her control over her magic slipped, grew looser. She couldn’t afford inefficiency or the way her energy bled out of her, but she couldn’t help it. Magic burned like cold flame, leaping higher and higher and casting the room in a pale light.

This man’s life was in her hands. She would not—could not—let Lowry kill again on her watch. Transplants were especially difficult. Partly because they were rarely required and thus rarely taught. Partly because organs were tangled in a net of blood vessels and fola, fine and gleaming and too easy to slice. A single mistake could be fatal. Few medics, especially combat medics, had the skill or practice to perform transplant surgery. But Heloise had ensured that she did.

If you cannot be loved, she’d said, you must be indispensable.

The months before Wren’s acceptance to the Guard were among the most grueling of her short life. She dared not to think of how many lab rats lay buried from her failed attempts at transplant surgery: leaking arteries, rejected tissue, complicated infections. Then, one day, as if by a miracle, both donors lived. Two mice, whiskers twitching, each with the other’s heart. Wren sometimes wondered how she’d ever thought herself kind.

It was a steady rhythm of cut and ablate, cut and ablate. She sliced and mended flesh like she was hemming fabric, and when it was done, she implanted the kidney and encouraged it to take root like a sapling. As she sealed the incision, a single thought tormented her. What is the point of all this? Wren could not imagine. Did not want to imagine.

These men were no soldiers, no mages. Had they been wrong about how Lowry chose his victims? Was this all just some sick game, entirely meaningless? The very thought made her want to retch.

The damaged kidney lay discarded in a bloody dish. The dead man looked like a slaughtered goat: slit open hastily, his abdomen gaping like a maw. Blood trickled slowly from the wound like sap from a splintered tree.

After peeling off her gloves, she dunked her hands in the bucket of water and scrubbed with a poultice of herbs until her skin was raw. She stopped only when she was bleeding, soothed when her own magic closed the abrasion. A buzz in her joints followed. Then, a familiar numbness in the tips of her fingers.

Overuse. The bitterest irony of healing magic.

She’d known she was pushing herself, but she’d always pushed herself. She always teetered on the brink of too much. This time, she feared she was dangerously close to toppling over the edge completely.