Lilly looked at Luke and Dot, as if weighing this new information. "So, there are two of you now? Or are there more?"

  Luke glanced to Dot, then back, and shook his head. "It's just the two of us."

  "You dating or something?" Lilly asked, a small, calculating grin on her face.

  "Eep!" Dot squeaked, bringing up her hands to cover her mouth as her pale, freckled cheeks grew red.

  "No, we're not," Luke said. "She's my student. Sort of."

  "Professor Quinn," Lilly said, wriggling her eyebrows.

  "Stop that," Luke grunted, putting on his best Curtis expression, hoping it would get the woman and her weird insinuations off their backs. When it worked, he breathed a sigh of relief. Dot looked on the verge of tears.

  "Fine," Lilly said with a sigh. "Be that way if you want. Just as long as you make people better."

  "It's noble what you're doing. I mean, using your platform to help people," Dot told Lilly in a small, nervous voice as they approached the tent and the now even longer line of people.

  "I am pretty amazing, aren't I?"

  "She's just doing it to bolster her follower numbers, Dot. Don't let her fool you."

  Lilly didn't say a word to contradict him, but Dot didn't waver. "Still."

  "So, we just sit behind that partition and people come up to us and we heal them?" Luke asked, changing the subject.

  "That's right. You do your thing in there," she pointed to the back of the large tent. It was just a roof, with no sides to it, except for the partition in the middle. "I'll be out front at first, interviewing the patients, and then again when they leave all fixed up. We'll be filming the healing, too, of course, and use that in reels later."

  Dot leaned in toward Luke and whispered. "You didn't say anything about them filming us."

  "It's a small price to pay for such an altruistic chance at helping all these people, wouldn't you say?"

  "Well, yes, but-"

  "Great," Luke said with a grin. "What's your level?"

  "Two," she said.

  "Two? You didn't complete the Tutorial Dungeon?"

  She shook her head. "Someone burned me right up with a beam of fire almost as soon as I spawned into the dungeon."

  "An Integrated?" Luke asked.

  Dot nodded.

  "What a dick. Did you get his name?"

  She, being a head shorter than Luke, glanced up at him. "Why do you assume it was a man?"

  "Wasn't it?"

  "Well, yes. But still."

  "Name?"

  "What?"

  "What was his name, Dot?"

  "Leslie."

  The name rang a bell somewhere in the back of Luke's head, but he couldn't recall where he'd heard it before. He shrugged, dropping it. "What skills do you have?"

  "Well," she began, her eyes glazing over a little, a telltale sign that she was scanning her interface. "Threads of Mana, Needle of Life, and Weaver's Eye."

  "Good," he said, nodding. "Those are all we'll need today."

  The gathering crowd grew louder when Luke approached, and several cried out, waving for him, and a couple even called his name.

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  Lilly caught Luke's consternation and explained. "They've all seen my segments with you healing my 'brother', and I've been using your name to market this event. 'Luke the Healthweaver'!"

  "Lifeweaver," Dot corrected.

  Lilly gave her a cold look. "Whatever."

  After they were seated on a pair of folding chairs behind the partition, Luke turned to Dot. "You can still pull out of this if you want."

  "No," she said, shaking her head. "I have to do this."

  "Why?" he asked.

  "Why, what?"

  "Why are you here? Why follow Tim and become a Lifeweaver? Were you dating or something?"

  Her cheeks reddened again. It was sort of cute. "No! I would never. I touched the orb and chose this class because being a doctor was not enough. It would never be enough. Once I heard there was another way, I knew I had to go down that route."

  "What do you mean, not enough?"

  She sighed and gestured all around them, as if trying to encompass the whole world. "It's too limited. Rigid and stuck in its old ways. Change takes lifetimes, and doctors, and nurses, for that matter, are squeezed until we bleed trying to get as much done with as few people as possible. I've worked in my specialty for less than a year, and I was already regretting pretty much all my major life choices. Also, the grief can be a burden."

  "Right," Luke said. "I can see that."

  They were silent for a while, and could hear Lilly interviewing someone on the other side of the partition, her chipper voice sounding practiced and fake.

  "So you chose to become a Lifeweaver to do some real healing, then?"

  "That's a decent way of summing it up, yes. You?"

  "Dropped out of med school. Couldn't keep up with costs. What was your specialty? From Tim's unhinged texts about your leg and your age, I'm guessing you're not a surgeon?"

  Dot gave him a weak smile. "Pediatric residency."

  "Oh," Luke said. "Dr. Tiny." He pursed his lips and squinted. "Kid Doc? Dr. Ouchie?"

  Her eyes widened in shocked surprise, and she burst out laughing, some of the tension she'd been carrying in her shoulders melting away. "Yep, that's me. The Lollipop Doctor!"

  "Paging Dr. Giggles!" Luke laughed with her, then turned to the side. A camera was pointed right at them, with a long-haired guy in thick purple-rimmed glasses standing behind it with an actual damn lollipop in his mouth. "Dude. You're not filming this, are you?"

  Rather than answering, the guy gave a thumbs up and nodded.

  "Goddammit," Luke sighed, shaking his head. "This is so dumb."

  "Anything for some altruistic healing, no?" Dot said, parroting his teasing from earlier.

  "Yeah, yeah. You got me. I was actually in pediatrics at your hospital a while back. With Tim."

  Her eyes glittered at that, and her mouth turned up into a crooked smile. "I know.”

  "Oh?"

  Dot nodded. "Mhm. Peter. The boy in the wheelchair."

  "DMD. Spiderman."

  "That's the one," she said, pointing right at Luke. "I examined him after. Never seen anything like it before. Peter said he'd been healed. Went to Tim after, since I heard he'd done something he shouldn't have, but they were light on the specifics."

  "What?" Luke said. "That's how?"

  Again, she nodded. "He told me all about you. About Lifeweavers. About his plan. How could I say no?"

  "Damn," Luke said.

  She gave him a long look. "Damn right."

  Before he had a chance to say something else, someone came past the partition. She was perhaps 40, and her dark-brown hair had streaks of white in it. From the way she just stood there wringing her hands, this one was nervous. Luke couldn't blame her.

  Weaver's Eye told him everything he needed to know even before she spoke.

  "Fertility?" he guessed, gesturing for her to sit in the one free chair opposite Dot and himself.

  She nodded and swallowed hard, her eyes tearing up. When she spoke, her voice was so soft the words were almost inaudible. "Yes."

  Dot turned to him. "Wait. How do you know?"

  "Rank 3 Weaver's Eye. Touch her and see."

  "May I?" Dot asked her, and the patient nodded. A couple of seconds later, Dot bobbed her head, coming to the same conclusion. "PCOS."

  "Yes," the woman said, a glimmer of hope in her voice.

  "Very advanced polycystic ovary syndrome," Luke added.

  "Can we really heal that?" Dot asked.

  Both pairs of eyes turned to him, both filled with hope now, but all Luke could focus on was that irritating camera pointed right in his face. He could just see the clip in front of him, with rising emotional music added to it. Sighing, he moved his hand in a 'maybe' gesture. "We can deal with the cysts and the scar tissue, but I'm not good enough yet to fix the hormone," he waved his hand in the air again, looking for the right word, "stuff."

  "I have medications for the hormone stuff," the woman breathed. "If you can remove the cysts, I'd have a real chance."

  Dot took the woman's hands in hers. "What's your name?"

  "Hillary."

  "Hillary, of course, we're going to heal you," Dot said, turning to Luke. "Right?"

  "We are," Luke promised.

  Leaning back in the chair, he extended two threads of mana and used them to enter Hillary's mana channels. Something was different in there, and it took a moment to puzzle out what. Dot's single thread of mana. Its presence made some channels feel crowded, and it was almost off-putting in a way to have another person in there with him, like they were trespassing in his domain.

  Pushing that sensation down, Luke continued to Hillary's ovaries, where he found the end of Dot's thread already probing around.

  "Be careful," Luke mumbled. "It's easy to mess this up."

  "Got the leg to remind me. I'm not touching a thing," Dot said, glancing up at him from where she sat next to Hillary. Their patient looked like she was about to pass out from anticipation.

  "Breathe, Hillary," Luke said. "I'm going to start with making sure there's no pain, OK?"

  She drew in a gasping breath, nodding. "Please."