They pitched forward. Lucian caught them on reflex, one arm hooking under their shoulders, staggering back half a step under the sudden dead weight. Raine looked back over at others with the expression of a man who had genuinely been looking forward to leaving the apartment tonight.
Behind Lucian, on the table, the coin flared once. A flash of cold white light, a single sharp pulse, there and gone in less than a second.
Then darkness. Then the rain.
"We need to move," Raine said. "Now. Get her up, get the girl, and..."
"We're not leaving." Lucian declared.
Raine stopped.
Lucian hadn't raised his voice. He hadn't moved from where he stood, one hand bracing the stranger against the wall, looking down at them crumpled there. He said it the way he said most things he'd already decided, it was flat and final, the tone that made further argument feel like shouting into a wall.
Raine looked at him. Then at the stranger bleeding onto his floor. Then back at Lucian, his mouth open with several responses queued up behind it.
Lucian looked at him. Raine closed his mouth.
"Fine," he said, and crouched down.
They got the stranger up between them, dead weight, soaked through, the hood still up and the coat still dripping, then maneuvered her through the narrow doorway into the inner clinic. It was a small room, the kind that had been built for function and had never pretended otherwise.
A single overhead magelight hummed in its casing. The walls held shelves of labeled vials and bundled instruments. The cot against the far wall had the worn, slightly stained surface of something that had seen considerably worse than this and had long since stopped being surprised.
They got her onto it. Sierra was already at the window.
She hadn't been asked. She hadn't waited for direction. She unlatched it without a sound, checked the drop on the other side with a single glance, and slipped out into the dark, one smooth motion, the curtain swaying once in her wake and then going still, as if she hadn't been there at all.
Lucian took the doorway between the clinic and the main apartment. He crossed his arms, set his back against the frame, and split his attention between the front door of the apartment and the sounds from the clinic behind him.
Raine was already working, cutting away the outer coat with the small hooked blade he used for exactly this, his movements practiced and efficient.
"How long?" Lucian asked.
"As long as it takes."
"Raine." Lucian's tone was strict.
"I don't know yet." Raine didn't look up. "He is breathing. That's what I know right now. Give me a minute."
Lucian turned back to the apartment. The front door was closed, latched. The magelight over the stove still buzzed. Selene was on the couch exactly where she'd been since they'd moved the stranger, Raine's coat hanging off her shoulders, far too large, the hem bunching around her feet. Her hands were folded in her lap. She wasn't looking at the door or the window or anywhere in particular.
She was just waiting.
Lucian watched her for a moment, then looked back at the front door. Behind him, Raine worked in silence for exactly as long as his silence ever lasted.
Then, "Oh." He shouted.
Lucian turned his head.
Raine was standing over the cot with the stranger's inner layer pulled back, staring at them with the expression of a man who had just been surprised by something and couldn't immediately decide what to do with the information.
"What," Lucian said.
"She's...she is not a he!" Raine gestured vaguely at the stranger. "It's a woman."
"I can see that." Lucian answered as if he already knew.
"I'm just noting it."
"You shouted."
"I didn't shout."
From the window, Sierra, who had just gone outside, entered and ran back inside to the inner clinic where Raine was. She looked at Raine in confusion. She looked at the stranger on the cot.
"What is it?" She asked.
"Nothing, he shouted because its a woman."
"I didn't shout" Raine retaliated.
She looked back at Raine with the slow, particular attention of someone adding something to a mental list. "You absolutely shouted," she said.
"I was surprised," Raine said, with dignity.
"By woman."
"By the, she was built like a courier runner. The coat, the boots, the way she was moving..."
"Raine," Lucian said.
"Right." Raine turned back to the cot, visibly collecting himself. "Right. Moving on. Yes."
Sierra rolling her eyes, dropped out of the window again. The curtain settled.
Lucian looked at the back of Raine's head for one more second. Raine's ears were slightly red.
Lucian turned back to the front door and said nothing, which was its own form of comment. Time moved the way it always moved when you were standing at a door waiting for something to arrive. Too slowly to track and too quickly to trust.
Lucian had spent enough of his life in doorways to know how to read a city's silence, the specific texture of it that meant the night was simply quiet versus the texture that meant something was moving through it, carefully, trying not to be heard. Siltwater outside gave him the former, for now at least.
The drip of water off the roof. A distant argument from several streets over, muffled into something shapeless by the rain. The flicker and buzz of a magitech lantern at the end of its life somewhere to the left. There was nothing wrong, not yet. But he knew, soon there would be.
"Raine." He called out again.
"Still working."
"How much longer..."
"When I have a number, I'll give you a number. Hovering isn't going to move this faster." Raine answered, annoyed.
"I'm standing at the door."
"You're hovering from the door. It's a special skill you have. Very impressive, very annoying."
Lucian turned back to the apartment. He was in a hurry, to get Selene out of here, to get them all out and to find about whats on the coin.
Selene hadn't moved. She was still on the couch in Raine's oversized coat, still folded into herself, still watching nothing with those calm silver eyes. She looked like a child who had been taught very young that drawing attention to yourself was a way of getting hurt, and had learned the lesson so thoroughly it had become the shape of her.
She wasn't afraid. He'd established that much. She wasn't tense the way people got when they were performing calm over something worse underneath. She was simply waiting, for whatever came next, for the stranger in the clinic to wake up, for the coin to do something else, for Lucian to tell her what to do.
He wasn't sure which part of that bothered him more.
"Raine." Quieter this time.
A pause in the sounds from the clinic.
"What."
"We may be compromised. Work faster."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"...How compromised?"
Lucian looked at Selene. She looked back at him. She didn't ask what he meant, didn't look at the door, didn't shift on the couch. She just held his gaze with those level silver eyes, and the steadiness of it was somehow worse than fear would have been.
"Faster, Raine," Lucian said.
Raine made a sound that was not an agreement but was also not an argument, which was about as close to cooperation as he got under pressure. He was using his magic very minimally, along with the instruments. The minimalist he could go as his main intention was to let the stranger, the woman, gain consciousness. He could not spend his magic, that comes with consequences to the healer and the patient both, on this stranger without agreement.
The clinic sounds settled into a rhythm, the soft clink of instruments, the tear of cloth, the occasional mutter from Raine that wasn't directed at anyone. Lucian had the sounds mapped. He knew when something had changed and when nothing had. It let him split his attention properly: half on the front door, a quarter on the clinic, a quarter on the girl on the couch.
At some point, without fully deciding to, he took the coin out he had pocketed earlier when the stranger collapsed.
He'd been keeping it in his left coat pocket, away from Mourne, away from anything else metal that might interfere. He turned it over in his fingers now, the markings sitting still and quiet against his skin. They hadn't moved since the stranger arrived, since the coin had flared and gone dark and taken whatever it was reacting to with it.
He looked at it for a long moment.
Then he opened his Remnant Sight very carefully. Just a touch, the lightest application, the kind he used on crime scenes and old weapons and locked rooms where something bad had happened and left its residue behind. Enough to catch the surface layer of what an object had witnessed. Enough to get a shape of what had passed through something's history.
Everything left echoes. Walls, floors, door handles, a cup someone had drunk from once and set down. The world was full of residue, and Remnant Sight was, at its most basic, simply the ability to read it. The coin had been carried across distance. Pressed into his hand by the Greymish Queen herself. Kept against his body through blood and rain and a night that should have killed him.
It should have been saturated.
He felt the resistance the moment his sight touched the coin's surface.
He pulled back. Looked at the coin again, physically, as if it might look different. It didn't. The markings were still. The metal was unremarkable. He pressed his sight against it again, the way you press your hand against a door to test its weight before opening it.
The resistance was total. Smooth and seamless, like pressing against sealed stone, like trying to read an echo from something that had never existed.
This had never happened before.
He had read echoes from bones. From collapsed ruins. From the bodies of people killed by Name-Eater weapons, which were specifically designed to erase existence, and even those left something, a hollow negative space that told its own story. Nothing he had ever encountered had simply refused.
He looked at Selene.
She was watching him. Not the coin but him. Her expression was the same as it always was, unreadable in its calm, but her eyes were very steady on his face.
He looked back at the coin.
Then he pushed.
Not hard like the way he pushed when he was desperate or reckless, that cost too much and lasted too long. But with the deliberate, measured pressure of someone who has spent years learning precisely where the line is and exactly how far past it he can go before the debt becomes unpayable. A controlled force, applied with intention, the way you work a blade into something that doesn't want to give.
For a moment, nothing.
Then the coin gave in.
It came through in pieces, not a clean echo, not a memory with edges and sequence, but fragments slamming against each other like broken glass, leaving Lucian in a state of shock and stillness as if the life has been draining off him and he couldn't do anything just to give in.