The light was ready. The core held it at the surface, gathered and trembling, the blue-white glow of [Heal] pressing against the inside of the slime's body like a breath held too long. The fracture in the core ached with the effort of containment. The light wanted to go. The light had always wanted to go. Since the first time in the cave, since the bat's wing, since the discovery that the small blue body could produce something that mended what was broken, the light had been the slime's first and most fundamental impulse. Damage existed. The light could address it. The space between those two facts was supposed to be zero.

  The body lay on the stone. Blood pooled beneath it in a shape that expanded slowly, fed by the internal damage that the slime could feel as a wrongness in the body's thermal signature: heat where heat should not be, the warmth of blood in places blood was not supposed to reach. The chest rose and fell in shallow, irregular intervals. The mouth was red. The eyes were open.

  The slime was at the body's side. Half a palm's width of grey tissue. A cracked core. The light, ready.

  [Emotion Sense] read the body's colors.

  Fear. Blue-white. The total, consuming fear of a mind that has understood, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that the heartbeats are numbered. The fear was not complex. It was not layered with meaning or softened by acceptance. It was the raw, animal terror of a nineteen-year-old who did not want to die, and it filled the body's emotional spectrum the way water fills a vessel, displacing everything else to the edges.

  Pain. Red. Uncontrolled. The red of a body in extremis, broadcasting damage on every frequency. Not the calculated red of anger or the warm red of exertion. The red of a system that was failing and knew it was failing and could not stop failing.

  Regret. A dark, murky color at the margins. Shapeless. The regret of a person who does not have enough time remaining to identify what they regret, only that they regret, the unprocessed emotion of someone whose internal filing system has been overwhelmed by the immediacy of dying.

  And toward the slime.

  [Emotion Sense] isolated the vector. Lv.2, approaching Lv.3, the precision honed by months of continuous reading, the ability to extract from the turbulence of a person's emotional state the specific component that was directed at a specific target. The slime searched the body's colors for the thread that pointed at itself.

  Yellow. Demand. The urgent, edgeless yellow of a person who needs a tool to function. Not gratitude. Not warmth. Not the acknowledgment of the small grey shape as a creature that had bled and broken and given up thirty percent of its body to keep this person alive. The yellow of requirement. The yellow of do what you exist to do.

  No gold.

  The slime searched again. Deeper. Through the fear and the pain and the regret and the demand, looking for the thing that [Emotion Sense] had found in the underground, in the two-second reflex that had surfaced when the core first cracked. The involuntary gold. The remnant of the boy who had reached into the crevice. The coal in the ash.

  It was not there.

  The fear had consumed it. Or the fear had buried it so deep that the slime's perception could not reach it. Or it had never been more than a reflex, and reflexes did not survive the extremity of dying, and the gold was gone, and the space it had occupied was filled with the blue-white of a mind that wanted only to continue existing and saw the slime as the mechanism by which that continuation might be achieved.

  The light wavered.

  ***

  The core stuttered, and in the stutter, the memories came.

  Not in order. Not as narrative. As temperature.

  The palm. Thirty-six degrees. The first warmth that was not the slime's own. The hand that had reached into the dark and waited, patient, open, carrying in its stillness the implicit promise that the world outside the crevice was worth entering. The slime had climbed aboard. The slime had felt the fingers close around it, gentle and uncertain, the grip of a person holding something fragile for the first time.

  The name. Two syllables. The vibration that had filled the empty space in the core where a designation should have been. Before the name, the slime had been a thing. After the name, the slime had been this thing. Specific. Identified. The vibration had been warm.

  The three syllables. Warmer still. The vibration the body produced only for the slime, the one that carried in its temperature the meaning of something the slime did not have a word for but understood in the way that bodies understand warmth: by orienting toward it.

  The gold. The first time [Emotion Sense] had opened and the body's colors had been visible. Warm gold. Trust. Gratitude. Affection. The confirmation, in a language the slime could finally read, that the warmth in the vibrations had been real. That the body felt what the body's voice had always suggested. That night, the vibration-warmth and the color-warmth had been the same.

  The last night they had been the same.

  Then: the sharp vibration. The function-word replacing the name. The yellows mixing into the gold. The gold retreating. The gold retreating further. The gold visible only in sleep, then only in alcohol, then only in reflex, then not at all.

  The pack. The shelf. The cold.

  The word that did not come. The three syllables replaced by a sound whose meaning the slime could not parse but whose temperature it could feel, and the temperature was the temperature of an object being appraised.

  The grey. The zero. The twenty presences in the room whose colors did not touch it.

  The fracture. The two seconds. The two seconds ending.

  The ground. The crawling. The following.

  The memories released. The slime's awareness returned to the present. To the stone. To the blood. To the body's eyes, open, looking at the slime, seeing the slime not as the creature that had ridden a warm hand through the gathering dark but as the function that was failing to activate.

  ***

  The body's mouth moved. Vibrations emerged, wet and broken, pushed through a throat filling with blood. The sounds were ragged. The two-syllable name was not among them. The function-word was not among them. What came was a raw, formless demand, stripped of all designation, aimed not at the slime as an entity but at the capacity the slime contained. The temperature of the sound was the temperature of a person who is drowning and does not care what the hand that reaches for them looks like, only that it reaches.

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

  [Emotion Sense] confirmed: demand-yellow. Fear-white. Toward the slime: the color of need without recognition. The color of a person reaching for a tool in the dark.

  The light went out.

  Not gradually. Not the slow diminishing of a flame running out of fuel. The light retracted. Pulled inward. The core's glow, which had been hovering at the surface, gathered and ready, reversed its direction and collapsed back into the cracked interior, and the slime's body went dark. The grey surface that had been illuminated from within by the readiness of [Heal] became simply grey. Unlit. Still.

  The slime did not move.

  Not a choice. Not yet. A cessation. The slime's internal state had collided with itself: the body-memory of the palm and the name and the three syllables and the gold driving toward [Heal], and the months of yellow and grey and demand and absence driving away from it, and the collision had produced not a decision but a zero. An output of nothing. The mechanism that connected the impulse to heal with the action of healing had jammed, and the slime sat beside the dying body with the light inside it and the light would not come out.

  The others were screaming. The slime registered their vibrations as distant phenomena, the way a person underwater registers sounds from above the surface: present, urgent, belonging to a world the slime was not currently inhabiting. The slime inhabited only the space between itself and the body. The space between the light that would not emerge and the wound that was not being healed.

  Seconds passed. The body's breathing changed. Shallower. The intervals between breaths lengthened.

  The body's mouth moved again.

  ***

  The sound that came was different from anything the body had produced in months.

  It was not a command. It was not a demand. It was not the sharp vibration of the function-word or the flat temperature of equipment management. The sound was broken. Fragmented. Pushed through failing lungs and a throat that could barely produce vibration at all. But the shape of the sound was recognizable.

  The slime recognized it the way a body recognizes a wound: instantly, completely, in every part of itself at once.

  Three syllables.

  "...partner... right..."

  The vibration pattern. The one that had been absent since the night the sleeping colors were still gold. The one the slime had waited for in the space where introductions were made and heard instead a word that meant a number on a ledger. The one that had been the warmest sound the slime had ever received, warmer than the name, warmer than anything, the sound that had meant you are more than what you do, you are mine and I am yours, and the word for that is this.

  The sound came back. On a dying breath. Through blood. In a voice that was no longer the voice that had first produced it, a voice that was cold where the original had been warm, a voice whose physical temperature had been stripped by hemorrhage and shock to something barely above the ambient air.

  The slime's body reacted.

  The core convulsed. A surge of color through the grey: blue. Vivid, involuntary blue, the blue of the early days, the blue that had appeared when the name was first spoken and the three syllables were first heard and the palm was warm and the world was something the slime wanted to be in. The body-memory fired. Every conditioned response that had been written into the core by the months of warmth activated simultaneously, and for one instant the slime was bright again, bright the way it had been before any of it happened, and the light of [Heal] surged toward the surface.

  And [Emotion Sense] read the body's colors at the moment the three syllables were spoken.

  Turbulence. A maelstrom. Every color the body possessed, stirred by the proximity of death into a chaos that defied separation. Fear-white and pain-red and regret-dark and demand-yellow all rotating around a center that the slime could not resolve. In the chaos there might have been gold. There might have been, in the deepest layer of the turbulence, beneath the terror and the need, a flicker of the warmth that had once been the body's primary color when it looked at the slime. A remnant of the boy. A coal.

  Or there might not have been. The resolution of [Emotion Sense] at this level, with this degree of emotional turbulence, with a core that was cracked and a perception that was exhausted, was not sufficient to determine whether the gold was real or whether the slime was seeing what it wanted to see in the noise. The gold might have been there. The gold might have been an artifact. The gold might have been the slime's own desperate projection onto a canvas that was, in truth, only fear and need.

  The slime could not tell.

  The slime would never be able to tell.

  The blue surge collapsed. The light that had rushed toward the surface retreated. The vivid color drained from the slime's body as quickly as it had arrived, pulled back by the undertow of everything the months had taught. The body-memory had fired, and the body-memory had been answered by an ambiguity so total that it could not sustain the response.

  The slime did not move.

  This stillness was different from the first. The first had been a collision. A zero produced by opposing forces canceling each other. This was quieter. This was the stillness of a creature that has received the last piece of information it will ever receive about someone it loved and the information is I don't know, and I don't know is not enough to act on and not enough to refuse to act on and the creature sits in the space between action and refusal and the space is very small and very still and the person on the ground is dying in it.

  The slime did not know if it had chosen not to heal. The slime did not know if it could not heal. The slime knew only that the light was inside it and the wound was in front of it and the distance between the two was not being closed, and the distance was where the body was dying, and the body was dying.

  ***

  The breathing stopped.

  The slime felt it as the cessation of a rhythm that had been present since the first day. The body had always breathed. In sleep and in waking, in the pouch and on the pillow, in the pack and on the shelf. The chest had risen and fallen, and the rising and falling had been a constant, and the constant was gone.

  The hand fell. The fingers that had once closed around the slime with the careful grip of a person holding something precious relaxed, and the hand lay on the stone, and the hand was still, and the thirty-six degrees began their slow descent toward the temperature of the mountain.

  [Emotion Sense] registered the change.

  It was not a color. It was not the absence of a color. It was the absence of the capacity for color. A living mind, even a sleeping one, even a mind suppressed by alcohol or exhausted by combat, produced some emission. Some faint signature of ongoing process. The body had always produced something. Yellow or gold or grey or the muted palette of unconsciousness, there had always been something, a signal that the system was running, that the person inside the body was still a person.

  The signal stopped.

  The slime perceived the stop as a quality of silence it had never encountered. Not the silence of sleep. Not the silence of the pack or the cave or the empty space where a vibration pattern should have been. The silence of a mind that was no longer generating. The absolute, irreversible zero that separated a person from a body.

  The others made sounds. The slime registered them peripherally. The tall one's knees hitting stone. The large one's breathing, held and released. The soft-handed one's hands rising to cover her mouth, the small, strangled sound that escaped between her fingers.

  The wind on the mountainside. The distant, labored breathing of the creature that was not dead. The sound of blood cooling.

  The slime's body stopped flickering.

  The alternation between blue and grey, the rapid, desperate oscillation that had characterized the last minutes, resolved. The blue withdrew. The grey remained. Not the grey of concealment, the false-blue technique the slime had practiced to hide its deterioration. Not the grey of exhaustion, the depleted hue of a body running on empty. A new grey. The grey of a thing that has arrived at the end of a process and found, at the end, neither resolution nor collapse but a flat, featureless plain where nothing moves and nothing changes and the light inside the core continues to pulse but the pulse illuminates nothing because there is nothing left to illuminate.

  The slime sat beside the body. The body that had been a person. The person who had reached into a crevice and named the thing that climbed out and called it by a word that was warmer than its name and then, over the course of months, replaced the word with a function and the function with a number and the number with a silence and the silence with a demand and the demand with three syllables spoken too late in a voice too cold to carry the warmth they had once contained.

  The grey slime. The cooling body. The stone. The wind.

  The light inside the core, still present, still capable, still ready to heal. And no one to direct it toward who would receive it as anything other than a tool performing its function.

  The slime did not move.

  The slime did not move for a very long time.