The woman died anyway, two hours later.
Gray watched from across the room, his back against a wall that had once been someone's kitchen. The plaster behind him was spotted with mold and something darker, something that might have been blood or might have been rust. He didn't turn to check. His attention was fixed on the young woman kneeling beside the cot, her hands wrapped around the dying woman's fingers, her lips moving in whispers too quiet to catch.
The silver threads he'd seen before - the impossible lines that had held the broken body together - were fading now. He could see them dimming through the strange sight that had haunted him since the world ended, the cold-water sensation in his skull that showed him things that shouldn't be visible. The threads flickered like dying embers, their light guttering out no matter how steadily the healer held on.
She didn't flinch. That was what he noticed first. Death came for the woman in increments - a shallower breath, a longer pause, a final exhalation that carried something away - and the healer stayed present for all of it. Her hazel eyes never closed. Her hands never tightened. She simply witnessed, as if witnessing were itself a form of mercy.
Gray cataloged her from his position against the wall. The steady rhythm of her breathing, even now. The way exhaustion had carved shadows beneath her eyes, purple-blue bruises that spoke of days without proper sleep. The faint tremor in her fingers that suggested she was running on fumes, her body's reserves depleted by whatever impossible thing she'd done. She'd held a dying woman together through sheer force of will for hours, and now she was paying the price.
He should have felt something. Grief, perhaps. Pity for the woman who hadn't made it, or admiration for the healer who had tried so hard. But the cold place inside him - the place where emotions should have lived - felt hollow and distant, like a room he'd locked and couldn't remember how to enter. He noted the facts instead: the healer was exhausted, the patient was dead, and the silver threads had failed.
When she finally stood, her knees buckled.
Gray moved without thinking. One moment he was against the wall, the next his arm was around her waist, her weight settling against him like a question he hadn't meant to ask. She weighed almost nothing. He could feel the ridge of her ribs through her shirt, the sharp architecture of someone who had been running on too little food for too long. Her hair smelled faintly of herbs and something metallic, copper-bright, like blood that had dried and been washed away.
"Thank you," she said, and her voice was hoarse but clear. Not the voice of someone who had given up. The voice of someone who had more to give.
He didn't let go immediately. The cold-water sensation in his skull had quieted when he touched her, the constant static of his strange sight dimming to something almost peaceful. He didn't understand it. He didn't have words for what was happening in his own mind, the way her presence seemed to smooth something ragged in him. He only knew that for the first time in days, the migraine that lived behind his eyes had eased.
"You should sit," he said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended.
She shook her head, a small motion that made her sway again. "I'm fine."
"You're not." He guided her toward the wall, his hand still steady at her waist. "You nearly collapsed."
"That happens sometimes." She let him lower her to sit against the plaster, her legs stretched out before her, her hands resting in her lap. They were still trembling. "It's the cost of... of trying."
He didn't ask what she'd been trying to do. He'd seen the silver threads. He'd watched her hold a dying woman together through something that wasn't medicine, wasn't science, wasn't anything he had words for. The world had broken eleven days ago, and it had broken in ways that defied explanation. He'd accepted that much, at least.
Instead, he asked, "When did you last eat?"
A pause. "Yesterday, I think. Maybe the day before."
He reached into his pack and found the last of his supplies - a can of peaches he'd been saving, a half-empty bag of jerky, a bottle of water that was more precious than gold had ever been. He set them beside her without ceremony.
"Eat," he said. "You can't help anyone if you're dead."
She looked at the food, then at him. Her eyes were steady, measuring, as if she were cataloging him the same way he'd cataloged her. "You're hurt too," she said, and her gaze dropped to his arm, to the burn that still throbbed beneath his sleeve. "I can see it. The way you're holding yourself."
"It's nothing."
"Nothing doesn't make people flinch when they move." She reached for the jerky, tore off a piece with her teeth, chewed slowly. "I could try to help. If you let me."
He remembered the pharmacy, the mirrors, the figures that had reached for him from impossible reflections. He remembered the way the silver threads in his own burn had felt, cold instead of hot, working beneath his skin like something alive. He didn't know what he was becoming. He didn't know what she was either.
But he knew that her hands had held a dying woman for two hours, and she hadn't looked away once.
"Maybe later," he said, and it wasn't a yes, but it wasn't a no either.
She nodded, accepting the half-answer without argument. They sat in silence while she ate, the dead woman a quiet presence between them. Gray could feel the weight of the moment, the way it pressed against his chest like something physical. He should say something. Ask her name. Offer comfort. Do any of the things that a better person would do.
But the words stayed locked in his throat, and the silence stretched on, and eventually she finished eating and closed her eyes, her head tipping back against the wall. Her breathing slowed into something that might have been sleep, or might have been exhaustion so complete it mimicked death.
Gray stayed awake. He watched the door, the windows, the shadows that gathered in the corners of the room. He watched the dead woman, waiting for something he couldn't name. And he watched the healer - the girl without a name, the stranger who had tried to save someone and failed - and wondered what it meant that her presence made the noise in his head go quiet.
He didn't ask her name. Not yet. Some things needed time to become real, and speaking them aloud too soon might make them disappear.
Outside, the sky had gone the color of old bruises, and the wind carried the sound of something that might have been screaming, or might have been the world remembering how to breathe.