I dove to her side, falling on my knees in the loose sand. The thick bunker wall was protecting her from the worst of the flames, but her feet were close to the opening. I grabbed her arm, thinking to pull her further away.

  What I'd taken as being her black uniform was her skin, charred, cracking away from my fingers. Blood seeped between them.

  Talain was burned, badly.

  An ice-cold rage filled me at the Syndic who'd grenaded us. Stop. Think. Rage was crudmunging pointless. He'd died in the bunker.

  Smoke billowed out of it, interspersed by the flash and crack of rounds cooking off and exploding from the heat.

  Talain's breath sounded like weak snoring, wet and labored. Her ears were gone, burned away beneath her helmet, but her face was strangely untouched, red and blistered on the sides but pale and whole in the center. Her lips were very smooth, and open.

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  She was dying.

  I grabbed for my medpack, realized my bag was gone.

  "Hao," I said, "give me your medkit."

  "Lost it," was all the reply I got. Hao bent, lifted her hands as if to touch Talain, drew back. Geir coughed, breathing heavily.

  "Give me your medpack," I told him.

  He fumbled with a side pocket on his black pants, and came away with a small, charred package. The polywrap around it had melted, the bandages and vials inside distorted and cracked, blackened from the heat.

  He must have some serious burns beneath his pants. Didn't complain though.

  Talain wheezed, a long, bubbling, final-sounding wheeze. I ripped a thread of force from the void, shoving it at her. Her heart kept beating, but she felt weak, distant, her life cooling. I didn't know her well enough to build an affinity, even if I'd known how to use it. Slapping someone with force was one thing, healing them with magic something completely different. Medkits exist for a reason.

  Medkit. Talain needed a medkit. There was one not a kilometer away.

  I tossed the medpack back to Geir.

  "Help her," I said. "However you can. Hao, assist him."

  "How?" she said.

  "I don't know how," I called back, running. "Figure it out."

  With that, I pushed them from my mind, running as if my life depended on it.

  Or somebody else's.