Only Survivors Give XP

Chapter 17 - The Triage

Chapter 17 · 1,506 words

Nolan worked through the neurological assessment systematically.

Pupil response: left sluggish, right normal. Reflex testing: patellar reflex hyperactive on the left, diminished on the right. Asymmetric. Consistent with localized neural interference rather than systemic damage.

Cognitive coherence: he asked Imani to count backward from twenty. Made it to fourteen before the numbers dissolved into a stare at something above Nolan's shoulder. Restarted. Got to eleven. Stopped.

"Can you tell me what day it is?"

"Tuesday? No. I don't..." The tremor in the left hand spiked. "The days stopped working. After it." A pause. The eyes darted. "After it stayed."

"Stayed?"

Imani's mouth worked. The words came in pieces. "It was in the library. I was studying. Late. And it came through the wall. Through. Like the wall wasn't there for it. It just." The right hand reached up, fingers spreading. "It looked at me. With... not eyes. It saw me inside."

The hand dropped. The tremor returned.

"Inside your head," Nolan said.

"Yes." Imani's voice was barely above a whisper. "It stayed. Even after it left. It's still." The eyes tracked. Snapped back. "Still here. In the walls. In the air. In."

Nolan put a hand on Imani's shoulder. Grounding. "Focus on me. Just me."

The eyes locked on. Held.

"Okay," Imani breathed. "Okay. You're... solid. You're real."

"I'm real. Can you stay with me?"

"Yes. For." A pause. "For a while."

Nolan ran through the rest of the assessment. Motor control: degraded but absent. Imani could move all four limbs, could grip his fingers when asked, but the fine motor was shot. The asymmetric tremor would make any precise physical task impossible. Sensory: Imani flinched at sounds Nolan couldn't hear, reacted to visual stimuli that weren't present. The psychic attack had left residual interference in every sensory pathway.

The System's stabilization window hovered in his interface. Four to six hours. The lower end assumed the patient could cooperate with the stabilization, follow verbal cues, maintain cognitive engagement, resist the interference patterns actively. The upper end assumed minimal cooperation.

Imani was somewhere in between. Aware. Trying. But the damage was real and the interference was ongoing.

"You understand what's happening to you," Nolan said.

Imani's focused eyes held his. "I'm a neuroscience student. I know what neural degradation looks like from the outside. I've been watching myself." The left hand jerked. "From the outside. For a while now."

"Then you know the trajectory."

"It gets worse. Then it stops. Then I." Another pause. The words required assembly. "Then I stop."

"Yeah."

Imani's right hand moved. Slowly, deliberately, against the tremor. Reached toward Nolan. The fingers were shaking but the intention was clear.

Nolan let them take his hand. The grip was weak. The tremor transmitted through the contact.

"I want." Imani's voice cracked. Swallowed. Started again. "I want you to try. I don't want to." The eyes tracked something invisible. A shudder ran through the entire body. Then focus. "I don't want to stop. But I know what it costs you. I can see the numbers in your face."

Nolan said nothing.

"You have somewhere to be." Imani's grip tightened slightly. "Something you're running out of time for. I can see it. The way you look at the air. Like there's a clock up there that only you can read."

"There is."

"How long?"

Nolan looked at the countdown. Twenty-seven hours and change. He'd been standing here for twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, doing the assessment.

"About twenty-seven hours."

Imani's eyes closed. Opened. The tremor in the left hand had spread to the forearm.

"Four to six hours for me," Imani said. Each word placed carefully. "Then you need to get where you're going. How long does that take?"

"Eight to twelve hours. Maybe more."

"So the math works." A pause. "Barely."

"Barely."

Imani's hand dropped. The effort of sustained conversation was costing them. Nolan could see it in the way the tremors intensified after each focused stretch. Every moment of clarity was bought with neurological energy they didn't have much of.

"I want to live," Imani said. Simple. Direct. No performance. "But if you try and it takes too long and you don't get there in time." The eyes tracked. Snapped back. "Then we both stop. And whatever you were going to do, wherever you were going to, it doesn't happen."

"I have a brother in the school."

Imani's focused eyes widened slightly. "The nest. You're going into the nest."

"Yeah."

"That's." The tremor spiked. Imani's jaw clenched, fighting for control. When the words came, they were strained. "That's why you need the shielding. The psychic stuff in there. It'll find you without it."

"I know."

Another pause. Imani's breathing was labored. The effort of maintaining cognitive coherence against ongoing neural interference.

"Then you have to decide," Imani said. "And I need you to know. I'm not asking you to leave me. I'm telling you the math is bad either way. If you leave me, I die and you keep going. If you stay, maybe we both make it. Maybe we don't."

The grip on Nolan's hand loosened. Imani's head tilted back against the wall.

"That's not me deciding for you," they added, quieter. "That's me telling you I know what's at stake. So when you decide, you know I know."

Nolan stood. His knees cracked. He'd been crouching for longer than he realized.

"Rest," he said. "Don't try to talk. Just."

"I know." Eyes closed. The tremor continued, visible in the hands, the shoulders, the slight rocking of the torso. But the face was still.

Nolan stepped outside.

---

Vera was waiting by the pharmacy entrance. She'd positioned herself where she could see both the street and the door. Gavin was a few feet away, receiver pressed to his ear, scanning frequencies.

Nolan looked at the countdown. Twenty-six hours and forty-one minutes.

"Talk to me," Vera said.

"Neurological degradation from a prolonged psychic-class attack. Nineteen-year-old, university student. Cognitively aware, motor control failing, hallucinating. Without intervention, six to ten hours to fatality."

"And the System?"

"Neural shielding. Protection against psychic attack." He paused. "It's what we need for the nest."

Vera's expression didn't change. She was already doing the math.

"Stabilization window?"

"Four to six hours."

The silence that followed had weight.

"You're cutting it close, Nolan," Vera said. "Real close."

"I know."

"If this goes long and the nest is harder than you think." She shifted her weight on the rebar crutch. "You don't just lose the time. You lose your brother."

"I know."

"Do you? Because I've been watching you since the overpass, and every time you look at that countdown, your jaw does this thing. You're clenching against it. You're not hearing me. You're hearing the clock."

He was. He knew he was.

"I'm telling you the risk is extreme," Vera continued. "Because you need to go in with your eyes open. If you fail, Imani dies and Lio dies. Both of them. Because you spent the hours on a rescue that didn't pan out."

"It'll pan out."

"You don't know that."

"I've made four rescues work."

"Four rescues with physical injuries. Crush, burns, chemicals, bleeding. Things your training covers. This is neurological damage from a psychic attack. You've never done anything like this."

She was right. And she was being honest. She wasn't trying to talk him out of it. She was making sure he heard the other side of the calculation.

"What would you do?" he asked.

Vera looked at the pharmacy door. Then back at him.

"I don't have your clock. I don't have your brother in that school. If I did." She stopped. Considered. "I'd probably try. Same as you. But I'd want you to know that 'probably' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Because the alternative is walking away from someone who's asking for help, and I've seen what that does to you."

The wound. She wasn't naming it. She'd named it once, back at the warehouse. She didn't need to repeat it. But she was pointing at it. Showing him where the decision was really coming from.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me. I'm not giving you permission or anything like it. I'm giving you the version of this that your own head won't generate." She shifted her weight on the rebar crutch. "Just make sure you're choosing with all the information. Not just the part that hurts."

Nolan nodded. He looked at the countdown.

Twenty-six hours and thirty-three minutes.

The math was possible. Barely. Every hour of margin would matter. Every minute of delay inside the nest would matter. If the stabilization took four hours and the nest took eight, he'd have ten hours of buffer. If it took six and twelve, he'd have nothing.

And inside the nest, "nothing" meant death.

He turned back to the pharmacy door.

Imani was waiting. Eyes closed, tremors visible from the doorway. Still alive. Still here.

A person. Not a calculation.

Nolan stepped back inside.

---