Crystal Healer (28 page)

His remarkable ability to heal had not yet compensated for his blood loss, however, and as I ran the hematology scan, I found the expected drop in his white and red blood cell count. He had lost a little over half of his blood supply; in a normal being that would call for an immediate transfusion. But while the blood loss kept him unconscious and his vital signs weak, his body didn't seem to be suffering any other ill effects from it. Time and plenty of fluids would probably allow his enhanced immune system to regenerate and replace all on its own what he had bled out.

I set up a portable monitor and put the Skartesh on a saline IV, and then tucked a coverlet around him.

"How did he lose so much blood?" Hawk asked. "There are no wounds on him anywhere."

"There were." I trusted Hawk, and he had too much medical knowledge to be fooled by any story I made up. "Jylyj's immune system is like mine. He heals almost spontaneously."

"So that is his secret." The crossbreed gave the unconscious Skartesh a thoughtful look. "Qonja said there was something he wished to hide." He frowned. "Joseph Grey Veil couldn't have made him, could he?"

I shook my head. "Cherijo's creator was not the only one responsible for making her the way she was. The Jxin female who pretended to be her mother also had something to do with it. She claimed there were others made to fight the black crystal. Jylyj has to be one of them."

"That must be the reason he jumped into that pit," Hawk said. "No sane being would do so unless they were suicidal."

The only oKiaf who was permitted to enter the kiafta was Trewa, who kept her head down as she brought in food. I had never had the chance to repay her for the gift of the bracelet, so I stopped her before she could leave.

Now that Reever had absorbed enough oKiaf to speak it, I could have asked him to interpret for me, but instead I removed the moonstone necklace Hawk had given me and offered it without words.

Trewa touched the beads, looked down into my eyes, and inclined her head so I could place the necklace around her neck.

I grasped her paws with my hands and thanked her in oKiaf.

A guard looked in, making both of us jump, and Trewa quickly hurried out. I went back to Jylyj, and Reever met me beside the platform.

"Uorwlan has a short-range backup transceiver in her pack," he said, keeping his voice low. "It's not powerful enough to signal the
Sunlace
, but she can send a relay to her shuttle pilot. He's ferrying supplies from the station and should be in orbit. He'll relay a message to Xonea."

I checked Jylyj's vitals, which had dropped enough to alarm me. "I thought he was stable, but he's getting weaker now. I don't think the oKiaf will volunteer a donor, and the only cross-matched blood I have for him is on the
Sunlace
. I need to get him back to the ship."

"Xonea should be able to convince the Elphian of the urgency of the situation." He traced a half circle under my right eye. "You look exhausted. Let Hawk watch him while you get a few hours of sleep."

"I'm fine." I kissed him. "Go, and don't let the guards catch you. We're in enough trouble already."

Darkness crept up around the kiafta as I watched over Jylyj. If the Jxin had created him with the same immune system I possessed, it had been overloaded or was no longer working. With every passing hour, he grew a little weaker.

Hawk brought me something that I ate without tasting, and kept watch with me until I sent him to rest.

"I will need you fresh in the morning to help me transport him," I said when the crossbreed tried to protest.

"You will wake me if you need help," he insisted, and only after I gave him my word, reluctantly went to join Qonja in their shelter.

When I was alone with the Skartesh, I sat on the ground beside the platform and rested my head back against the edge of the grass-stuffed cushion. I didn't tell Hawk that if Jylyj's condition didn't soon improve he would likely be helping me transport a corpse in the morning. I turned my head to look at the monitors, and saw my patient watching me, his eyelids opened only to slits.

"We're back at the encampment," I told him. "Your wounds have healed."

"Not all," he whispered, his voice a thin thread of pain. "Why save me?"

Had he jumped into that crystal pit in hopes of killing himself? "I never learned how to let someone die. Did they teach you that in medical school?"

"No. Learned it before." He lifted a paw and touched my hair, threading the blunt ends of his claws through the strands. "Never met another like me. Thought I was alone."

Suddenly, I understood many things. "Why didn't you tell me? Of all people, I would have understood."

"Angry. Afraid. The League . . . alterforming . . ." He drifted off for a moment, and then jerked back awake. "Jarn, after . . . destroy my body. Please."

He was afraid of the League, afraid of being discovered--and terrified of what they would do with his body. I had never considered what would happen if immortal DNA was used to alterform a normal being. Was that to be my fate?

"I will." I pressed my hand over his paw. "I promise."

Fourteen

Reever returned alone, and after refusing the food Trewa had brought, sat with me to watch over Jylyj. I told him about the Skartesh's brief period of consciousness, and what he had asked of me. Reever agreed that if Xonea couldn't get to us in time and we lost Jylyj, that we would at the first opportunity send his body into the oKiaf's sun.

"I don't understand why he's dying," my husband said. "Cherijo explained most of the bioengineering that had been done to her, and from what she said she couldn't bleed to death. Even if she sustained hundreds of wounds, her blood always clotted within a few seconds. If he is like her--like you--he should have done the same."

"Something interfered with Jylyj's immune response," I said. "Perhaps the crystal impaling his body. Now something is preventing his bone marrow from producing replacement cells. I've scanned him a dozen times, but I can't detect anything responsible for it. Here, see for yourself." I handed him the scanner I had been using on the Skartesh.

Reever skimmed through the readings I had taken. "This is calibrated to read the body's cells and other organic substances. Can you adjust it to scan for crystal?"

"I don't have to; it picks up trace minerals, as well," I said, frowning as I took back the device and isolated those readings. Normally, I wouldn't have paid any attention to the minute amounts of minerals that were present in any living being's body, not unless some heavy metal contamination or poisoning was suspected. I scrolled through the list and found a sizeable amount of one mineral had been detected in the bloodstream.

The scanner, which had not recognized it, listed it as unknown.

"I thought his body had forced the crystal out of it as it healed." Cursing myself for making such a stupid assumption, I recalibrated the scanner. "I need to see the readings you took in the meadow today."

My husband retrieved the scanner he had used to detect the underground deposits of protocrystal, and handed it to me. I compared the compositional readings and swore again.

"His body didn't reject the crystal," I said. "It absorbed it."

I ran another complete scan of Jylyj's body and looked at the mineral display. In the hour since I had performed my previous scan, the amount of liquid protocrystal in his bloodstream had increased by two percent.

"It's still circulating through his body." I felt like throwing the scanner across the room. "And that's not all. It's growing."

Reever glanced down at the Skartesh. "Can it be removed?"

"I might be able to filter it out with dialysis, or a complete replacement transfusion." I tried to think, but all I could see was how the liquid crystal had consumed the clearing in a matter of seconds. "Did you hear anything from Uorwlan's pilot? Is Xonea coming for us?"

"The pilot was able to transmit a brief relay. He'll arrive in a few hours and land outside the encampment. If the oKiaf will release us to him, he'll transport us back to the station."

The tribe and the primitive conditions in which they lived no longer charmed me.

"Why do these people live like this?" I said, dragging a hand over my hot face. "They have no doctors, no proper medical facilities. Even on Akkabarr we had healers, and all the medicines and supplies we could salvage from the wrecks."

"He's as strong as you are," Reever said. "He'll keep fighting it."

If he didn't turn into a chunk of crystal before the shuttle arrived. I thought of the heartwood trees, and how the crystal had stopped growing at the tree line. "Do you still have the litter we used to carry Jylyj into the camp?"

My husband gestured toward the entry flap. "It's just outside."

"I need one of the heartwood branches from the frame." If I could discover what substance in the trees repelled the crystal, I might be able to synthesize an agent that would stop it from spreading, or even help flush it out of his bloodstream.

After a brief conversation with the guards, Reever brought back a short branch from the litter. I cut a sliver from the raw end and placed it in the analyzer. The results surprised me.

"It looks like wood on the inside, but it's mostly made of hardened resin." I felt bemused. "This branch is dead, and the resin is almost fossilized. No wonder it takes forever to burn."

The analyzer began listing the elements and compounds it detected in the resin, all of which appeared ordinary: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and so forth. Then the display showed a trace of an alloy, Cu
²
Au, which apparently accounted for the color of the wood.

"This tree absorbs two metals, copper and gold, from the ground," I said. "They combine into an alloy that is not present in the soil."

"Gold is harmless, but copper in large amounts can be poisonous to many living things." Reever studied the cut end of the branch. "It may bond the gold to the copper to change its properties and keep it from accumulating and killing the tree."

"If that alloy does not occur naturally in the soil, it could be the deterrent we're looking for." I went to the platform and used a probe to draw a few drops of blood from Jylyj, placing them in a vial and scanning them to confirm the presence of the protocrystal. As I did, Jylyj's blood began to crystallize.

Quickly, I extracted a sample of the Cu
²
Au alloy from the heartwood resin, and added it to the vial of blood. The crystallized blood instantly liquefied.

I scanned it. "The alloy dissolved the crystal. It's reverted to its liquid phase." I monitored the sample for a few minutes. "The crystal isn't growing. It's gone inert."

"That may explain why the tribe uses so much wood to adorn themselves," Reever said. "Their luck carvings may be protocrystal repellent." He tapped the bracelet I wore. "That may be what saved your life in the pit."

I paced back and forth as I thought it out. "I can't inject him with a copper alloy. He's not a tree; even a small amount would kill him." I studied my bracelet, and the gleaming slivers of wood between the green beads. "I have an idea."

Convincing the guard to send for Trewa took Reever some time, but eventually he brought the oKiaf woman to our shelter. With Reever as my interpreter, I told her about Jylyj's condition in simple terms, and asked for her help.

She stared at the Skartesh for a long time before she replied.

"She says he is being punished for waking the crystal," my husband translated. "But because we're strangers, and we didn't know what would happen, she doesn't believe he deserves to die. She will go to the other women in the encampment and collect what she can."

Trewa left us, and I began putting together the equipment I needed. I couldn't build a complete dialysis unit from scratch, but with some tubing, an empty IV unit, and parts of an infuser, I was able to put together a crude, portable version of one.

Trewa returned with a basket of the tiny heartwood carvings the women used for their ornaments, and Reever scanned them.

"They all contain traces of the Cu
²
Au alloy," he confirmed.

"Bring them here." I could only fit the smallest of the carvings into the empty IV unit, but there were enough to fill it halfway. Once I evacuated the air from the lines, I inserted the needle at one end into the radial artery in Jylyj's right arm, and the needle at the other into the artery in his left. Once I enabled the infuser port, which I had rewired to work in reverse, it began drawing the Skartesh's blood into the line attached to his right arm.

I watched his blood travel up to the IV unit, where it began to drip over the heartwood carvings inside the bag, and then fed down into the line that ran to his left arm.

It seemed to take longer than it did. I kept running a continuous scan on the amount of protocrystal in his blood supply. Gradually, the growth rate slowed, and then finally stabilized.

"It's working." I looked up at Trewa and nodded. "Tell her that she has saved his life."

As my husband translated, Trewa touched the moonstone necklace I had given her. She replied in a soft voice, gesturing to the Skartesh and then gently cuffing my left shoulder.