SAGE (under edit)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Raidan was leaning against the drawers, head down so that she couldn't see his face. She took a step forward, dagger dropping to the ground, and saw blood coating Raidan's hand and as he lifted it away from his stomach, where more blood soaked his shirt.

'Crest,' Sage swore, stumbling forward to catch Raidan when he tried to move away from the drawers. She held him upright with a hand on his chest and the other around his back, and now she was close enough to see the beads of sweat across his forehead, the pallid complexion in his face.

'You need to lie down,' Sage said gently, and Raidan allowed himself to be eased down onto her bed. She peeled his shirt up off his abdomen to inspect his injury, grimacing when she saw the torn flesh. A weapon with a razor-edged blade had cut him, but fortunately it hadn't cut too deep.

Sage pushed aside her questions, her concerns, her confusion, and focused solely on healing Raidan. She went to her trunk at the foot of her bed and retrieved her medical kit to disinfect and clean Raidan's wound, but once she had done that she used her Kyra for the rest. Placing one hand to the centre of Raidan's chest and the other to his forehead – he had a fever, she noticed – Sage closed her eyes and focused on her Kyra.

Her healing ability was basic, good enough to keep a Soldier on their feet while out in the field but not as finely tuned as someone like Ashe who could bring a Soldier back from the brink of death if given enough time, but Sage could at least stop the bleeding and close the wound. Raidan's own Kyra would be trying to do the same, it was why Soldiers healed so much faster than civilians, but Sage could use her own Kyra to hasten the process even further.

When she opened her eyes, the sun had set and darkness had filled the bedroom. She withdrew her hands, looking down at Raidan and found him asleep, pain no longer written across his expression but his skin was still pale, perspiration still dampening the hair against his temples.

Standing up, her knees aching from having been kneeling for so long, Sage went to the bathroom and wetted a cloth. She came back to Raidan's side and dabbed the perspiration from his face before resting the cold cloth against his forehead.

He looks so tired, Sage thought. She still couldn't believe that he was here, after three months of wondering where he was, if he was all right, and if she would ever actually see him again. But why was he here? Why would he risk arrest by entering Lion Crest?

Sage frowned as she noticed Raidan's shallow breathing, her mind brought back to his condition because she couldn't help but wonder if something else was wrong with him. Someone of Raidan's calibre could tolerate a wound of this nature, function through the pain if they had to, so it seemed strange that Raidan was in such a terrible state.

Sage brushed back the damp strands of hair, pressing the back of her hand to his forehead. His temperature was running too hot. Was he sick?

It wasn't her forte to diagnose illness or poisons, but Sage could at least make the attempt. Her body was starting to succumb to the fatigue that came with Kyra-healing, but she pushed it aside for now and returned her hands to Raidan's head and chest.

Using Kyra to assess someone was like standing in a dark room, with only your sense of touch to guide you on what was around. A medic's knowledge of the human body, of the Kyra system, had to be refined enough to identify when something was amiss. So Sage's Kyra explored like her hands would in the darkness, gliding over bone and ligaments, feeling their shape and moving along when no breaks or fractures were felt, flowing between veins unhindered when no clots or blockages were found.

But it was Raidan's own Kyra that Sage sought; normally she would feel it like a river running through the dark room, but it was as if the river had run dry. Sage couldn't feel it within his bloodstream, or coursing through his muscles like it should, so Sage delved deeper until she reached the centre of the dark room to Raidan's main Kyra point.