[Some time passes…]

Sam

The newly appointed Lord Buck was nothing if not willing to repay those who had gotten him his job. Five of the best Physicians that could be scrounged up from the ashes of the ravaged city worked on Will around the clock inside the Academy.

There were probably wounded who died due to so many resources being allocated to one person, but Sam couldn't bring herself to feel guilty over it. Will needed to live. That was the only thing that mattered.

The doctors took him apart. Put him back together. Took him apart again. They hacked at him like butchers. And every time they sewed him up, there seemed to be a little bit less of him to work with.

It was horrific. She could hardly bring herself to see him for the first few days, there in that bloodsoaked makeshift operating room. She couldn't bring herself to sleep, either, so she just paced the halls of the Academy and left dents in the walls.

He lived. Sort of. His body was a mashed-together stitchwork, but they cleared the infection and stopped the bleeding and grafted on a new right arm in place of the one they had needed to amputate at the shoulder.

A miracle, the Physicians explained, that they had managed to stabilize him. One in a million, they said. But they were all very careful in their wording.

They were all confident he would survive. No one ever suggested he would recover.

Will woke up about a week after his last surgery, or his body did, but there was nobody in there. He had suffered some kind of traumatic brain bleed, and the Physicians could not gauge the extent of the damage.

Once he was stable enough they moved him to a spacious apartment in the residential wing of the Sheerhome keep. After a while they got him sitting, drinking, even taking a few tottering steps. But his eye was blank. Blind, they said. He could hear people talking to him, but he usually wouldn't respond. When he did speak, it made no sense.

Once it became clear that he would not die, the Physicians were called away elsewhere. There were thousands who needed urgent care, and not enough healers to help even half of them.

Most of the time, Will sat in a chair in front of a balcony so he could get fresh air and stared blankly into the horizon beyond the gray sea, and drooled on himself. The Physicians had told Sam that light exercise would be good for him, keep him from wasting away, so she had him up and walking a few times a day, a few minutes at a time. He didn't protest, following numbly as she led him by the arm.

Every night, she fell asleep crying.

Serene was there sometimes to offer support. Sam had been surprised to find out that Will had done more than just check in on her, and that they were already well acquainted. It seemed Will had gotten her off the drugs as well. She looked better. Sam was happy for her, but she also had to fight an irrational bitterness when she looked at her friend. To see someone else so miraculously improved while Will remained a hollowed-out husk.

Number One also stopped by often. He was good at offering sympathy. She didn't understand any of his sign language, so the old chimp just listened to what she had to say, which was usually somewhere in the range of aggressive self-pity and/or numb despair. He spent a lot of time in Will's room quietly reading, just to offer his presence. Sometimes he kept an eye on Will whenever Sam needed to leave for a while. She was very grateful to him.

"Good morning," Will said when she came into the room one day.

"Good morning," Sam replied, even though it was a good bit past noon. Any greeting at all meant he was having a good day.

She nudged the door shut with her hip and bundled over to the small table Will sat behind. She put a wooden wash basin down on the floor, cold water slopping over the rim, and took a towel off her shoulder to let soak. "Will, I need you to take your shirt off, okay? Can you do that for me?"

Will snorted. "Why? See something you like?"

Sam narrowed her eyes, and slowly let the wet cloth drop back into the bucket as she straightened. "You feeling good today, bud?" She wiped a hand on her trousers, then reached out to gently stroke his hair. He had an easier time knowing where you were if you touched him.

"Stop talking to me like a baby."

She noted the open newspaper on the table. "Do you want me to read it to you?"

"I'm reading fine on my own. I wouldn't mind something to eat, though."

Sam frowned, watching the side of his face intently, shadows filling the deep hollows of his gauntness. It was hard to tell how much of what he was saying was nonsense. "Are you saying you can see?" She waved her hand in front of his formerly good eye.

"No," Will replied impatiently. "I don't need eyes to read, Sam. I'm not stupid."

Now she knew he was talking nonsense. "Okay, bud. Of course, my bad."

He pointed a finger at her without looking up. "There!"

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

"There, what?"

"You're doing it again!"

"Doing what again?"

"Talking to me like I'm five years old."

Despite the somewhat deranged nature of the conversation, Sam's heart was racing. This was the most he had spoken at once since waking up. Maybe more than everything else he'd said combined. He actually seemed to be responding to her, too.

She pulled up a chair beside him and held his shoulder. "Will. That you in there?"

"Um. Yes?"

"Touch your nose for me."

"Absolutely not. That's demeaning." Instead, he reached up and flicked hers, making her jerk back in surprise. "Good enough?"

She found that she was gripping Will's shoulder too tightly and immediately let up. She couldn't bring herself to stop staring, though.

"Will…?"

"Yeeeees?"

"You're back. You're really back."

He sighed and folded up his newspaper when she went in for a hug, wrapping him up. Then suddenly she was bawling her eyes out, and he was softly patting her head.

"Thanks for the miracles," he murmured. Then, after a while, he added: "I don't suppose you could work another? Fetch me a cigarette?"

"Fuck offfff…" she burbled into his chest. Through racking sobs, she said: "I'm not… letting you… go… for the next five hours."

"One."

"Three."

"Two and a half. And after that, you have to get me a smoke."

"Deal," Sam lied.

She was never letting that bastard smoke again in his life. He was going to eat his spinach and drink his milk and do his daily exercise and live until he was two hundred.

"What's this?" Will asked after a while, fidgeting with something. Sam reluctantly peeled herself off of him, leaving a trail of snot down his shirt, and saw that he was hefting her star amulet between two fingers.

Sam cursed herself equally for her lack of foresight and his morbid curiosity. She should have known he'd latch onto something like that and taken it off before sitting down with him. But then, she hadn't really been thinking much of anything at the time.

"Oh, just a necklace," she said casually, cupping his hand in hers to try and get him to let go. It didn't work.

"You've never been one for jewelry," Will mused. Slowly, he traced the eight points of the silver star with his thumb while he stared off into space. "You realize this is a religious symbol, don't you? The star of Era?"

"Oh, um… Really? Huh."

"Did someone give it to you?"

"No. Why do you care? It's just a stupid necklace."

"In that case, can I have it?"

"No! I mean, uh…"

"Sam, you're a terrible liar. Just tell me where you got it."

She hadn't had the time to give much thought to the amulet and everything that had led up to her getting it. What she did know was that Will definitely had no business hearing about it. Not while he was in this vulnerable of a state, barely a step off the mortuary slab.

"You're right, it's not nothing," Sam admitted. "But we should talk about it later, when you're better. For now, just—"

"Talk."

Even after everything, his voice cut as sharp as it ever had. She knew she'd said the wrong thing by offering to talk about it later—that just made it seem like a bigger mystery, and Will loved a good mystery. Or hated them, maybe, given his obsession with picking them apart.

At this point, she figured withholding information would probably just work him up even more, so… she told him. About Crow, and about the necklace, and the cold strangeness she felt emanating from it. She didn't mention any of that nonsense Crow had been spouting about her dad, though. That conversation was still a ways off.

Will listened silently while she talked. Every so often, he scratched at his sad eye, or fiddled with the stitches of his grafted-on right arm so that she had to smack the back of his hand to get him to stop.

When she was finished he sat in silence for a minute, his good eye scanning over the empty stone wall. "Well, you always did have an extraordinary talent for getting yourself into trouble. As far as trouble goes, this is up there with tripping headfirst into an active volcano."

"What do you think it means?"

"I need to think. You were right, let's table this discussion for later."

He wanted her to hand the amulet over to him for safekeeping. She refused. He argued with her until a bout of vertigo sapped the fight out of him, and he relented. Satisfied, Sam stuffed the silver chain back inside her shirt.

"Who else knows about the amulet?" Will asked. "About Crow?"

"Just me and Oatmeal."

"Who's Oatmeal?"

"Oh, he's a slave whose freedom we bought in Timbryhall; he traveled with us after that. His real name is Wesley."

"How much do you trust him?"

Sam squirmed uncomfortably. "Um, like, medium, I guess? He promised not to tell anyone."

Will nodded; slowly, calmly. "I see. Where is Wesley now?"

Sam was reluctant to admit how clueless she was on the subject. "I don't really… know. I told him to stick around when he came to Sheerhome. I tried to keep an eye on him…" A lie. She'd barely thought about him at all in the last two weeks. There had been bigger things to worry about. "But then, a few days ago, he took some stuff and disappeared."

"Any idea where he might have headed? Anywhere specific he talked about going?"

Sam thought about it for a moment and chewed on her lip. "No. I don't think so. I have no clue where he might have gone." She felt like she'd been called in front of the principal and taken to task. Will could be so stern sometimes. Maybe she should have hated it, but…

The intensity of his questioning was making her cheeks heat up. He was back, all right. She didn't know how, but at that moment she didn't really care.

"Well, all right then," Will finally said with a sigh. "It's not good that we've got a potential info leak, but there's not much we can do about it at the moment. Now…" He picked up the folded broadsheet and shook it. "You can give me the latest while we walk. This paper's from Timbryhall—and a few days out of date, I suspect."

"Okay, I guess, but you really should be getting some rest. Wait, walk? What's that supposed to mean, mister? Walk where?"

"It means if I have to stay in this fucking room another minute, I'm going to jump out that balcony." He nodded in the direction of the open doors leading into the open air. "I'm sick of sick beds. Sick to death, you might say."

Sam crossed her arms tightly. "You're not funny."

"Then if you're not busy laughing, you might as well make yourself useful."

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