I saw the tail a half second before it hit me. Long enough to know I couldn't dodge. Not long enough to do anything about it.

  Impact.

  The rock wall caught my back, and my chest made a sound I'd never heard from the outside because it came from inside. Bones don't sound the way you think they sound when they break. They don't crack. They shift. A wet, grinding displacement, like two stones sliding against each other underground. I knew that sound. I'd heard it in the mine. The sound of a support beam giving way, of the ceiling settling an inch closer to the floor.

  My ribs were broken. One of them, maybe two, had pushed inward, into the soft parts. I could feel the wrongness of it as a pressure that had no business being where it was. Something filling up in my lungs. Blood. Had to be blood. When I tried to breathe, the air came up tasting like copper and couldn't get past whatever was pooling in my throat.

  I was on the ground. I hadn't decided to lie down. The ground had simply become the only place my body was willing to be.

  The sky above the mountain was blue. That was the first thing I noticed. How blue it was. I'd spent months in dungeons. Grey ceilings. Torchlit corridors. Before that, the mine. Before that, the same mine. The sky was blue and I was looking at it from the ground and the blue was the most vivid thing I had ever seen and I was dying under it.

  Galen was screaming something. Dorg was moving. Nina's voice, somewhere, muffled. All of it sounded like it was happening in another room. Behind a wall. Underwater.

  Someone was calling for Luca. Calling for [Heal]. The words reached me and my chest loosened a fraction because Luca was here. Luca was always here. Luca had always been here, every time, every wound, every miscalculation, every fight I'd walked into too confident and walked out of bleeding. Luca healed. That was what Luca did. That was what Luca was for.

  That thought. What Luca was for. It arrived in my head with the casualness of a fact, and the casualness was the worst part, because I didn't flinch at it. I used to flinch at it. When did I stop?

  ***

  A small shape approached. The blue glow of Luca's core, visible even through the blur that my vision was becoming. The body was grey. Half the size of my palm. When had it gotten so small?

  I knew when. I knew exactly when. I'd watched it happen. I'd watched the body shrink after every dungeon, after every series of heals, after the night the core cracked and Luca had shed a third of its mass to keep going. I'd watched and I'd done the math and the math had told me there was enough left for the next quest, and the math was the only thing I'd asked.

  The light was gathering. The core was brightening. [Heal]. The familiar glow, the one I'd seen hundreds of times, the one that had closed every wound and mended every bone and made every reckless decision survivable.

  The light stopped.

  The glow pulled inward. The surface of Luca's body went dark.

  Why?

  The question formed and dissolved in the same breath because I already knew the answer. I'd known the answer for months. I'd known it every time the body got darker and I didn't ask why. I'd known it every time I put Luca in the pack instead of the pouch. I'd known it the morning I set Luca on the ground like a toolbox at a worksite and walked away without looking back.

  I knew why the light had stopped. The only person in this party who didn't have the right to ask that question was me.

  ***

  The memories came. Not the ones I wanted. Not the rank-ups. Not the victories. Not the moment the guild receptionist stamped the C-rank insignia on my registration and I'd felt, for the first time in my life, like I was going to make it. Not the letter I'd sent home with three times the usual amount, the one my mother had replied to with a single line in shaking handwriting: I'm proud of you.

  Those didn't come.

  What came was this:

  The pack. The first night I put Luca in the pack instead of the pouch. Luca's body dimmed when I dropped it in. I saw it. I saw the blue go dark for a second, like a candle in a draft, and I thought it's fine, the pack is more practical, and I closed the flap and the dark went away because I couldn't see it anymore and not seeing it was the same as it not happening.

  The name. A guild hall. Someone asking about my healer. Me answering I've got a useful one instead of Luca. The name was right there. Two syllables. I could have used it. I used to use it all the time. But useful one played better with the D-rank party leaders I was trying to impress, and the impression mattered more than the name, and Luca was on the table, and I didn't look at the table, and I didn't see what happened to the blue.

  The bait. Luca shrinking away from me. The body contracting, pulling inward, the slime equivalent of a person backing into a corner. I saw it. I knew what it meant. I told myself it was the most efficient use of our resources. Efficient. I told Luca it was rational. I told myself it was rational. I said the word rational the way a man says the word fine when someone asks how he's doing and the answer is the opposite.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The core. That night. The sound Luca made when the fracture happened. Not a scream. Slimes can't scream. A vibration. High and thin and continuous, like a glass about to shatter, and I woke up and looked at Luca and for one second I was worried. One real second of real worry, the kind that doesn't calculate, the kind that exists before the math kicks in, the kind I used to feel all the time when Luca was new and small and glowing on my palm.

  One second. And then the math kicked in.

  Can it still heal? One more quest. Just one more. The reward for this one is enough to cover two months of mother's medicine. One more.

  I watched myself replace the worry with arithmetic. I watched it happen in real time. I felt the warmth leave and the numbers arrive and I let them arrive because the numbers were easier. The numbers had always been easier than the warmth.

  The ground. The morning I placed Luca on the stone. Not in my hand. On the ground. I didn't think about it. That was the worst part. I didn't make a decision. My hands just did it. The way you set down a water flask. The way you drop a whetstone. The motion of a person handling equipment.

  When did I stop putting Luca in my hand?

  I couldn't remember. I couldn't find the specific day, the specific moment, because there wasn't one. It was gradual. It was a series of mornings, each one a fraction colder than the last, and the fractions were so small that no single morning felt like a change, and by the time the change was complete it was invisible because it had always been happening and I had always been letting it happen.

  That's how it works. That's how a person who finds a light in the dark becomes a person who puts that light in a drawer. Not in one motion. In a thousand tiny motions. A thousand small buts. But the pouch is dirty. But the pack is more practical. But the name doesn't impress people. But the bait strategy is efficient. But the reward covers the medicine. But. But. But.

  Each but was small. Each but was reasonable. Each but moved me one step further from the boy who laughed in a cave because a small blue thing was happy on his hand. And by the time I looked down and saw where all the steps had taken me, the boy was gone and the man who remained was the kind of man who put a living thing on the ground like a tool and didn't notice he'd done it.

  I could have stopped at any of them. Any but could have been the one where I chose differently. I could have taken Luca out of the pack that first night. I could have used the name. I could have refused the bait. I could have retreated when the core cracked.

  I didn't.

  ***

  My mouth was moving. The words came out wet and broken and I hated them because I knew what they were before they finished forming. Why. Heal me. Why aren't you healing me.

  The voice of a man demanding service from a tool. The voice I'd used for months. The voice that had replaced hey Luca and nice work, partner and you okay? with heal and again and keep going.

  Even now. Even dying on the stone with my ribs in my lungs and my blood in my throat. Even now, the first words out of my mouth were a demand. Not I'm sorry. Not thank you. Not I know what I did.

  A demand.

  Something deeper than the pain twisted in my stomach. Not a physical sensation. Something else. The recognition of what I'd become, arriving at the same time as the recognition that I was too late to become anything else.

  Luca wasn't moving. The grey body on the stone. The dark core. The light that was inside and was not coming out.

  I tried again. My lungs were filling. The words were harder to form. But there was one word left. One word that I hadn't used in months, that I'd replaced with asset and resource and it, that I'd put away in the same drawer where I'd put the boy from Quors and the memory of a warm palm and the laugh in the dark.

  "...partner... right..."

  The word came out wrong. Too late. Too broken. Too obviously a card played by a losing hand. I could hear it even through the blood in my throat: the hollowness of a word pulled from storage after months of neglect. Partner. I used to say it every day. I used to say it and mean it and feel the meaning in my chest. Now I was saying it because I was dying and it was the last tool in the box and I was reaching for it the way I reached for everything: because I needed it to do something for me.

  Even the apology was selfish.

  Even the last word was a use.

  Luca's body flickered. Blue. For one instant, the old blue, the cave blue, the blue of the day I found a light in the dark. The blue of the day the light found me. I saw it, and the seeing broke something that the ribs hadn't reached.

  Then the blue was gone. Grey again.

  ***

  Dark at the edges. The sky shrinking. The blue retreating to a small circle directly above me, and the circle getting smaller.

  The last thing I could see with any clarity was the core. Luca's core. Inside the grey body, through the translucent tissue, the faint pulse of the fracture-line, the light that was still there. Still blue. Cracked and diminished and damaged by months of what I'd done to it, but still there. Still capable of [Heal]. Still carrying the capacity to mend.

  The light that could save me. The light that was choosing not to.

  And I understood. In the way you understand things when there's nothing left between you and the truth, when the math stops running because there's nothing left to calculate, when the buts run out because there's no future to attach them to.

  Luca's goodness was still in there. The core was still blue. After everything. After the pack and the name and the bait and the fracture and the ground. After all the thousand tiny steps I'd taken away from the boy who laughed in the dark. The blue was still there. I hadn't killed it. I'd cracked it and dimmed it and shrunk it and starved it, but I hadn't killed it, and the fact that it was still alive made what I'd done worse, not better, because it meant the blue had survived everything I'd done to it and I hadn't deserved any of the light it had given me along the way.

  That felt right. As a last thing to see. The blue in the dark.

  The same blue. The beginning and the end. The cave and the mountain. The light I'd found and failed and the light that was outlasting me.

  My mouth moved one more time.

  Sorry.

  No sound came out. The lungs were full. The throat was closed. The air that a word needs to become a vibration was not available, and the word stayed where it was, inside, unspoken, unheard.

  Luca couldn't hear it. Luca sensed the world through vibration, and a word that never became sound never became vibration, and a vibration that never existed couldn't reach a slime's perception. My last word was trapped in a body that could no longer transmit it, aimed at a creature that could only receive what the body could produce.

  If Luca had heard it. Would it have changed anything?

  No. Probably not. Sorry isn't [Heal]. An apology doesn't close a wound. The damage I'd done across the months couldn't be undone by a single word spoken at the end, and the word hadn't even been spoken, and the end was here, and the damage would outlast me the way the blue in Luca's core would outlast me, which was the only justice in the whole arrangement.

  I didn't write to my mother. She'd find out from the guild. A form letter. We regret to inform you. She'd cough and cry and the coughing would make the crying worse and there would be no money next month and no good doctor and the tincture that did nothing would run out and I'd failed her the same way I'd failed Luca, which was by trying to save her at someone else's expense and discovering too late that the expense was everything.

  Dark.

  The circle of sky closed.

  The blue faded.

  That day. The cave. The dark. The light that climbed onto my hand before I'd earned it.

  I was the one who was lost.

  I was the one who was fo