Ranka reclined on a wooden chair, the needle Percy had inserted into her forearm itching something terrible. She watched with an increasingly unsettled stomach as tubing dark with her blood wound into the vial below. Blood from a wound was one thing, but watching it drain out of her, drip by drip, gathering slowly, slicking up the glass walls—

“Hey. Don’t look at it, look at me,” Percy said.

He’d stacked five empty vials on top of one another. He added a sixth, waggling an eyebrow, turning slowly to make the glass wink in the light. The tower wobbled precariously in his palm. Percy reached for a seventh.

“Aramis is going to kill you if you break those.”

“She’d have to catch me first.” He winked. “I’m quite fast.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Ranka’s mouth.

“Who am I killing?” Aramis walked into the room, eyes trained on the notebook splayed open on her hand. A smudge of ink marked her cheek. She looked up and nearly dropped the notebook. “Percy, again? No, don’t skip away from me—you’re going to drop them! Seriously, it’s not funny. Percy, get back here!”

Ranka sat back, her smile fading as Percy spun and sidestepped Aramis’s hands with fluid grace. Percy laughed, and Aramis swore at him with a ferocity that even a Skra would admire.

There would be no more of these mornings when Ranka killed Galen. She tried to push the thought away, but it lingered like a sour taste.

Percy finally stopped his whirling to swap the vial full of Ranka’s blood for an empty one. Aramis moved to the table and held it up to a white beam of mage-light, turning it this way and that, her lips pursed.

Ranka couldn’t help herself. “Any progress?”

Aramis’s eyes slid to her, bright with suspicion, ringed by more dark circles than usual. Ranka half expected the princess to tell her to piss off. Instead Aramis’s brows knitted together. “We don’t have a cure, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Better than before,” Percy said. “Before you, we were practicing on samples from corpses and pieces of hair I stole from your pillow.”

“That was creepy, by the way,” Ranka pointed out.

“It felt creepy. This is much better.”

“How does it work?” Ranka had never been trained as a healer, and she liked the funny words Percy had for his craft—doctors and science and vaccinations. She liked even more the soft light that bloomed in Aramis’s eyes whenever she spoke of the puzzles she saw in Ranka’s blood and the winalin they sought to cure with it.