Behind the granite water-trough, Joren stared down at the charred linen bandages across his open collarbones. Another underground thud shook up through the wet flat stone slabs. For six weeks in the darkened sick room, that rhythmic double-hitch inside his chest had been the mark of his deepest humiliation. The physical proof that his celebrated Bronze promotion was a fraud that was slowly cooking his organs. Every day since his collapse, he had tried to ignore the rhythm, drown it under cooling broths, or pretend it was just an ordinary training strain.
Now Seyun was asking him to listen to that exact shameful rhythm on purpose, and to shout it aloud across the courtyard so others could strike by its measure.
“If I open my chest awareness to track it,” Joren said, his voice tight and raspy over the roar of the steam, “the leftover scorch marks along my chest bone feel like someone is drawing hot copper wire through them.”
“It will hurt,” Mina said honestly. She knelt at his left side and pressing a folded wool pad soaked in cool salt-reed water against the base of his neck to keep his neck-artery pulse steady. “It won’t tear the vessel wall now that the main pocket is out, Joren. Because there’s no volume left inside your ribs to expand. It’s phantom traction on raw nerve endings. Painful, not lethal—if you keep your chest muscle pause on the exhale.”
