The night before, the slime tried to heal itself.

  It had tried every night since the fracture. The process was always the same. The slime directed [Heal] inward, toward the core, toward the hairline crack that ran through the material from which the light itself originated. The light activated. The light passed through the core. The light emerged on the other side having changed nothing.

  [Heal] could not heal the core. The core was the source of [Heal]. The power could not reach its own origin, the way a hand cannot lift the arm it is attached to, the way a flame cannot illuminate the point from which it burns. The fracture existed in the one place the slime's only ability could not touch.

  The slime had not communicated this to anyone. It could have. The vocabulary of gesture was limited but sufficient: a contraction to indicate pain, a dimming to indicate weakness, the persistent stutter in the core's pulse that anyone paying attention would have noticed. The slime had chosen not to.

  The reasons were layered. The first reason was that telling the body would produce a question about scheduling, not a question about wellbeing. Can you still perform tomorrow? The concern would be operational. The concern had been operational for months. The slime no longer expected otherwise.

  The second reason was simpler and worse. A tool that could not function was a tool that was replaced. A healer with a cracked core was a healer whose output had decreased by a third, and a third was the difference between a party that could attempt a rank promotion and a party that could not, and a party that could not would find a healer that could. The slime would be set down. Not on a pillow. Not in a pack. Not on the ground where it could at least follow. Set down and left. Permanently.

  Discarded is worse than broken.

  The logic was clear. The logic was the logic of a creature that had learned, over the course of many weeks and many wounds, that its value was its function and its presence depended on its function and the removal of function meant the removal of presence and presence, however painful, was preferable to the cave.

  So the slime kept the secret. Lay in the pack with its cracked core pulsing unevenly, one side dimmer than the other, and did not tell anyone, and prepared to break further tomorrow rather than risk being whole and alone.

  ***

  Morning. The body's emotional color was a single, blazing hue: the golden yellow of absolute confidence. Not the warm gold of affection. Not the tarnished gold of possession. The bright, self-directed gold of a person who believes they cannot lose. The belief was specific: the slime's healing made the party invincible. The belief was a calculation, and the calculation was built on a premise, and the premise was that the slime's capacity was a constant, and the premise was wrong, and the body did not know it was wrong because the body had not checked.

  The body placed the slime in the pouch. The gesture was mechanical. The same motion used to stow a piece of equipment: locate, grasp, insert. No adjustment for comfort. No pause to register the weight or the temperature or the state of the thing being handled. The motion of a hand that has performed this action hundreds of times and has long since stopped thinking about what it is holding.

  The slime rode in the pouch as the party ascended. The temperature dropped with altitude. The air thinned. Through the leather, the slime felt the change in pressure and humidity that indicated height, and the cold that came with it, and the vibrations of four sets of footsteps on stone growing more cautious as the terrain steepened.

  The tall one's shoulder was stiff again. The slime could feel it in the asymmetry of his gait, one footfall heavier than the other. The large one's knee produced its familiar sound. The soft-handed one carried extra weight in her pack, additional supplies that the slime could detect by the change in her balance. Insurance. The kind that was carried by someone who had watched the primary plan fail enough times to prepare for it failing again.

  The body's confidence was undiminished. Its emotional color radiated outward like heat from a furnace, and the party moved within that radiance, drawn forward by the certainty of a person who had placed all of his faith in a premise he had never questioned.

  The shadow passed overhead. The sound of wings cutting air. Large wings. The vibration traveled through the rock and into the slime's body and the slime knew, from the mass implied by the vibration, that the creature above them was bigger than anything the party had fought.

  The body stopped. Drew its weapon. Turned toward the slime.

  The slime was extracted from the pouch. Not placed on a palm. Placed on the ground. Set down on the stone of the mountainside the way a toolbox is set at the foot of a worksite.

  The body produced vibrations. The two-syllable function-word. The temperature of assignment.

  The slime sat on the stone, half its original size, grey-blue, its cracked core stuttering in the cold mountain air, and waited for the fight to begin.

  ***

  The creature descended.

  The slime perceived the attack as a wall of displaced air followed by the impact of something enormous against the ground. The shockwave flattened the slime against the stone. The tall one was caught by the wind blast and hurled sideways, his body striking rock, his shoulder producing the specific vibration of tissue tearing along an old fault line. The bow's string snapped. A high, sharp sound, like a nerve breaking.

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  The body's voice. The syllable.

  The slime activated [Heal]. The light reached the tall one's shoulder. The core protested. The fracture widened by an increment too small to measure and too significant to ignore. The blue glow that [Heal] produced was thinner than it had been a month ago. Thinner than it had been a week ago. The tall one's shoulder mended. Eighty percent. The remaining twenty percent remained as pain the tall one would carry through the rest of the fight.

  The creature's claw struck the large one's shield. The shield broke. The arm behind it buckled. Bone fractured. The large one retreated, clutching the small shield to his chest, his emotional color a flat grey of endurance.

  The syllable again.

  [Heal]. The core screamed in its silent way, the stutter becoming a skip, the skip becoming a gap. The light reached the bone and sealed the fracture. Seventy percent. The large one rose. Returned to the fight with one functional shield and an arm that would not fully straighten.

  The body charged. Leapt. Blade aimed at the creature's flank. The blade struck scales and skidded. The body's balance broke. The creature's tail swept horizontally and caught the body across the torso and drove it into the rock face. The body slid to the ground. Blood at the mouth. Ribs cracked. The emotional color flared: pain-red, shock-white, then the immediate reassertion of confidence-gold, because the body believed, even now, even bleeding, that it could not lose.

  The soft-handed one's voice. The syllable. Directed at the slime.

  Third activation. The core's light was pale now, visibly diminished, a candle rather than a lamp. The body's ribs knit. Partially. Sixty percent. Enough to stand. Not enough to forget.

  The creature rose into the air. Circled. The brief reprieve of a predator adjusting its approach.

  The body stood. Wiped its mouth. Its vibrations carried the temperature of command, of again, of we can still win this. The body's confidence was a structure built on the premise that the slime's healing was unlimited, and the structure was cracking at the same rate as the core, but the body could not see the core and had not thought to ask.

  Fourth activation. Fifth. Sixth. The tall one's arm. The large one's ribs. The body's leg, gashed by a claw that had come too close. Each activation weaker than the last. Each drawing from reserves that were no longer reserves but structural material, the slime's own body converting mass to energy the way a fire consumes the wood that holds it above the ground. The slime shrank. The grey deepened. The stutter in the core became a stammer.

  The creature circled. The party breathed. The slime existed between them, on the stone, half the size of a palm, grey, cracked, its light flickering like something that is deciding whether to go out.

  ***

  The creature descended a second time.

  Low. Fast. Claws extended. The approach was different: a strafing run, level with the ground, designed to rake across the entire party in a single pass. The tall one fired. A new string, hastily tied. The arrow punched through the membrane of one wing. The creature lurched. The large one charged, screaming, driving his small shield into the creature's nearest leg as it passed. Contact. The leg buckled. A moment of instability.

  The body saw the opening.

  The slime felt the body's emotional color ignite. The golden yellow of absolute confidence compressed into a single, brilliant point, the color of a person who has identified the moment and is committing everything to it. The body leapt. Both hands on the blade. The arc aimed at the creature's throat. The exposed line between the jaw and the shoulder where the scales were thinnest. The killing stroke.

  The blade connected. Scales parted. Blood sprayed. But the cut was not deep enough. The creature's neck was thicker than the body had calculated, and the blade lodged in muscle instead of severing the artery, and the creature reacted.

  The tail.

  Full force. Horizontal. The speed of a limb driven by the pain of a wound and the fury of a predator that has been hurt. The tail struck the body on the left side of the torso, below the arm, and drove it backward into the rock wall with an impact that the slime felt through the stone beneath it as a single, deep percussion.

  The sound the body made when it hit the wall was not a human sound. It was the sound of structure failing. Of things inside a body that were designed to be rigid becoming not rigid. The body slid down the rock face and came to rest on the ground in a position that a living person could maintain but that a person whose internal architecture was intact would not choose.

  Blood at the mouth. Not the thin blood of a cut. Dark. Internal.

  [Emotion Sense] read the body's colors.

  The gold vanished.

  Not faded. Not replaced. Vanished. As if a light had been switched off. In its place: the blue-white of terror. The red of pain so intense it consumed everything else. And then, for one instant, a white that was not a color at all but the absence of all color, the blank that occurs when a mind encounters the concept of its own ending and every other signal drops to zero.

  The others converged. The tall one's vibration, sharp, carrying the body's name. The large one, moving fast, abandoning the creature. The soft-handed one, a sound that was not words but the frequency of distress.

  And then all of them turned toward the slime.

  The slime felt their attention land on it simultaneously. Four vectors of emotional color, all converging on the small grey shape on the stone. The tall one's color: desperate hope. The large one's: grim expectation. The soft-handed one's: anguished blue, so dark it was almost black. And the body's, from the ground, through the haze of pain and the encroaching white of shock: the color of need. Not warm need. Not the need of a person who wants another person near. The cold, functional need of a person who is dying and knows that only one thing can prevent it.

  The slime was already moving.

  Not because of their attention. Not because of their voices. The slime was moving because the body was hurt, and the body being hurt activated a response that was older than the damage, older than the betrayal, older than the grey and the yellow and the months of being needed without being wanted. The response was from the first day. The response was from the palm and the crevice and the moment a hand had reached in and the slime had climbed aboard and the climbing had written something into the core that could not be erased by anything that had happened since.

  The slime moved toward the body. Slowly. Its locomotion was barely functional, the contraction-expansion cycle operating at minimum amplitude, each pulse covering a distance that was laughable against the urgency of the situation. Half a palm's width of grey-blue tissue, dragging itself across cold stone toward a figure that was bleeding internally against a rock wall.

  The core began to glow.

  [Heal]. The activation sequence. The light building from the cracked source, pushing through the fracture, emerging diminished but present. The slime's body oriented toward the body on the ground. The distance closed. Inches.

  The slime reached the body's side. The glow intensified. The stammer in the core accelerated into something that might have been determination or might have been the final expenditure of a system that had nothing left to spend.

  The slime looked at the body. In the way slimes looked at things: with the whole self, every sensor, every capacity for perception directed at a single target.

  And [Emotion Sense] began to read what was in the body's colors as the body looked back.

  ***

  The light held.

  The core pulsed. The fracture ached. The glow of [Heal] hovered at the surface of the slime's body, gathered and ready, pointed at the wound that was killing the person who had named it.

  The others watched. The mountain was silent except for the wind and the creature's labored breathing somewhere behind them, injured but not dead, temporarily forgotten in the face of the more immediate crisis.

  The slime was at the body's side, and the light was ready, and the next moment would determine everything.

  To be continued.