The room is too quiet. Outside, a carriage rattles over cobblestones and the sound feels like it belongs to a different night entirely. In here there's only the guttering candle, old straw and iron, and the artifact locked in my frozen grip.

  I'm on the edge of the mattress. Zeke is by the door, watching.

  "The artifact breaks the curse strings," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I expect. "Not a cure - what's already in me stays until I find the catalyst, and the notes didn't say where that is. I can chase it later. What this does is cut the connections, stop the spread, give me back what I'm losing." I work the cloth wrapping loose with my teeth. The fabric snags on the geometric edges. "Right now it's not doing any of that because I'm in the way."

  The wrapping falls. The white metal sits in my locked hand, not caring.

  "Then why are you still frozen?" Zeke says. "If it breaks the strings, why is it holding you?"

  "Because of this." I shove my sleeve up with my left hand.

  In the candlelight he can see all of it now. The seals I carved two nights ago - jagged patchwork from wrist to elbow, puckered, some still rimmed with dried blood where the skin didn't close right. Rough work. The work of someone with no better options.

  "They slowed the curse down," I say. "Bought me enough time to find this. But now they're in the way - blocking the artifact from finding the strings. My own seals are drowning out the signal."

  Zeke looks at the forearm. Then at me. "You're going to cut them out."

  "I need to break their shapes. That's all. It won't be clean." I reach for the knife at my belt. "Once the barriers go, the curse is going to move fast - faster than it ever has, nothing left to slow it. You have to be ready. The moment my hand opens, take the artifact. When I tell you to move it, move it. Don't wait."

  He doesn't answer. He watches me pick up the knife.

  I don't give myself time to think about it. The blade tip goes into the first seal near my wrist - the "Slow" mark, deepest of all of them - and the sting hits sharp and immediate, though still less than what came before it. The dark pigment bleeds out of the scar as the magic fails, the skin going a washed-out grey along the cut. The tissue underneath is hardened from the original work and I have to lean into it harder than I want to.

  I scream into my shoulder. The wool takes most of it.

  Blood runs down into the fold of my wrist and drips onto the quilt.

  I work through them one by one. Some hadn't fully healed and they give without resistance. Others fight back. I don't try for precision - just the shapes broken, the circuits interrupted, the noise cut off. Another seal. Another. I drag the blade through "Sleep" and feel it collapse the same way a stuck lock gives, not through force but through finding the exact wrong pressure that makes it stop holding.

  "Ashley-" Zeke starts, his hand coming up.

  The last seal fails.

  The dark lines don't crawl. They lunge - a cold oily rush up my shoulder and through my chest, filling everything the seals had been holding back. My locked hand snaps open with a sound like ice cracking.

  The artifact rolls onto the bed.

  Zeke moves immediately - grabs my wrist, careful of the bleeding forearm, and pins it flat to the mattress. His other hand goes into my satchel and comes back with a clean cloth. He wraps it tight around my forearm, not to stop the bleeding but to keep blood off the white surface when he picks the artifact up.

  I press my head back against the headboard. The pressure that's been building for days is gone, and what replaced it is worse - a raw openness, nothing left between the curse and everywhere it wants to be.

  "Now," I say. "Over the lines. Get it close to the skin."

  He picks the artifact up and holds it an inch above my open palm. A moment of nothing. Then the air between them thickens - a density that has no business sitting in empty space. My arm moves before I can register it. Not mine - a violent wrenching spasm that snaps my fingers toward my face in a jagged arc, the muscles answering something that isn't me.

  "Pin it!"

  He drops the artifact for half a second, lunges for my wrist, slams it back to the mattress. His grip doesn't leave room for argument, the force of it rattling the straw beneath me. He gets the artifact back with his free hand and holds it steady over my palm, and then the pain arrives.

  Not sharp. A deep vibrating pressure, like the bones in my hand are disagreeing about direction. I arch back, heels into the mattress, and make a sound I don't have a name for.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  He starts moving the artifact toward my wrist. I can see what it costs him - jaw set, knuckles white, the muscles in his forearm rigid against something that looks like empty air but pushes back like a wall. He moves an inch. Then another. His breathing is hard and even, paced like a man doing heavy work.

  As the surface crosses my forearm the dark lines beneath my skin don't fade. They shatter - the braided ropes breaking into scattered fragments, black static drifting apart under the skin.

  The sensation that goes with it is a cold grinding ache through everything, needles drawn through muscle, each broken string leaving a wake of numbness.

  "Legs," I say. The word costs. "Zeke. The legs."

  I fall back. From my hips down nothing is mine anymore - the weight of my own legs on the mattress reaches me like information from somewhere else. The pressure is already building down there, the curse threads sensing what's happening above and pulling tighter on my bones in answer.

  "You'll have to hold them down," I say. "It'll be worse than the arm."

  He moves to the foot of the bed without asking anything. He throws his weight across my shins and starts at my right foot.

  The moment the artifact gets close my body tries to throw him off. Every muscle below my hips fires blind - not a decision, just flight. He absorbs it. Holds. Locks his arms and begins the climb upward, slow and methodical, breathing hard. He's working blind through my clothes, navigating by the drag in his own muscles to find where the strings run thickest. He nearly stops at my knee, the resistance at its worst, and then something gives and the artifact moves forward a few inches before catching again at my thigh.

  Each string breaking is another cold grinding ache, needles through muscle, a trail of numb spreading upward. I can't see what's happening under my clothes. I hear his boots shifting on the floorboards as he repositions, and his breathing, and my own.

  I try to tell him to move faster.

  The word stops at the base of my neck.

  Not my throat - higher. The jaw. A sharp tightening I haven't felt before, different from what's happening in my legs. The curse threads have abandoned the lower half and raced upward while he was working, threading through the muscles of my jaw and locking the hinges, weaving into the tendons of my throat.

  My mouth won't open.

  Zeke is still at my thigh, shoulder pressed hard against the resistance near my hip. He can't see my face.

  I lift my freed arm - the one he already swept, the one that should be mine again - to grab his shoulder. To point at my throat. My fingers brush my chin.

  The lines come back instantly. Clean skin against cursed skin, the circuit completing the moment they touch. The dark threads climb from my jaw onto my fingers and my hand locks in the air, splayed and rigid, hovering two inches from my face. I'm completely stuck. Lower half under his weight. Free arm frozen above my own face. Jaw sealed. I breathe through my nose in short pulls - the only thing still working - and watch the candle flame through eyes I can't blink.

  Zeke finishes the sweep up my thigh. He straightens up, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, and looks down at me waiting for a nod.

  He goes still.

  The candlelight catches the dark lines standing out along my jaw and neck. He sees my arm frozen in that grotesque pose above my face, fingers splayed.

  "Ashley?"

  I can't answer. Can't move. Can't even blink.

  He figures it out fast - follows the line from my forearm to where the fragments reconnected with my face, sees how the clean skin touching the cursed completed it. He understands how a leak spreads.

  He swears under his breath and moves.

  He pins my frozen wrist to the mattress with his forearm and brings the artifact toward my face. The agony here is different - not in the muscles, but deeper, behind my eyes and in my ears, a pressure living inside my skull. As he moves it across my jaw the drag is the worst yet, a thin high wrongness at the very edge of sound. My head starts to thrash and he presses his palm flat against my forehead and holds it still.

  The pressure on my throat gives.

  "Don't-" My jaw opens and the word tears out ragged. "Don't let the clean skin touch the lines. If it-"

  White.

  Too much nerve signal arriving at once, and my brain steps aside. I hear zeke's voice somewhere far back, and then only my own heartbeat, slow and loud, and then nothing.

  I come back to weight on my chest.

  Both of Zeke's hands on my shoulders, his full weight pressing me into the mattress. The straw underneath has compacted and cracked. He's holding the artifact over my sternum and shaking with the resistance - I can see it in his arms, his jaw, everything locked and gasping.

  Then it doesn't snap. It just stops. The air gives way all at once and the artifact drops forward and he nearly goes with it.

  The shiver starts at my chest and runs all the way out. Every muscle that's been fighting for hours quits simultaneously, and the relief is so sudden it feels like the floor dropping away.

  "Done." His voice is wrecked.

  He pulls back and sits on his heels. I lie on the mattress and look at the water stain spreading across the plaster above me, and we breathe.

  The pain doesn't leave. It changes - the deep grinding pressure settling into a bone-deep soreness, muscle and nerve logging their complaints in a register I can actually hear. Then the numbness starts pulling back, and my sense of touch comes back wrong, everything turned up past where it should stop. The blanket against my arm is too rough. The draft from the gap under the door is too sharp on my neck. The weight of my own hair where it's fallen across my face is more input than I can sort out.

  He slides one arm behind my back and lifts me to sitting, his other hand at my neck while my head finds its balance. I don't have the muscle to help. I let him.

  "Ashley." Quiet. Something in it that isn't the Zeke from the last three days - the flat, transactional one. Something with less control over it. "Are you back?"

  I look at my hands. Both of them. I send the signal to my fingers.

  They curl - stiff, the skin tight over the knuckles, but they move.

  The artifact is on the floor where he dropped it, one edge catching the last of the candlelight. The blood from my palm has dried into the grooves, rust-red against white. I look at it and don't reach for it. What comes next - the catalyst, the rest of the trail - I can't hold that right now. I let it go.

  Zeke is still there, his shoulder solid against everything that's too loud. I can feel the warmth of him. That he's still here.

  I don't have words. I'm not certain I could make them work even if I did.

  My head drops forward onto his shoulder. My fingers find his sleeve and hold.

  My eyes close. This time the dark is only dark.