Getting through the front door might have been difficult. Our plan had been to have Kurtis unlock it, but he was stumbling, nearly incoherent in his gasps and moans of pain.

I couldn’t actually tell how severe his injury was. Blood dripped down from the ragged wounds on his forehead to coat his entire face, but head wounds always bled heavily. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked? A set of smaller punctures on his shoulder were seeping crimson onto the shoulder of his mangled buttondown, but they were hardly worth mentioning next to the horror show above.

Byron had left the cart to Twinkles - who easily managed it by himself on the flat pavement - and hooked an arm under Kurtis’s shoulders to help him walk the twenty feet to the doors. “Give me your hand,” he said gently. “I’ll put it on the door and you can just use your ability to unlock it, and…”

The door swung open and I heard a man’s voice. “Oh my god! Sharon, you’re right! The screaming is people. How did you get here? Come in, quick!”

One more monster attacked before we made it inside, but Byron lifted his free hand and fired Fire Bolts at its mouth one after another. By the fifth, the monster wasn’t moving forward anymore, and by the seventh, it evaporated into smoke.

That gave us enough breathing room to stumble inside, squeezing our cart into the lobby.

As the pair of doors slammed shut behind us, we were cast into darkness. The same man who’d let us in before raised his voice. “We got company! They need healing!”

I heard a chorus of surprised voices in the distance, then a clatter of footsteps. As they approached, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a thin light streaming in from the edges of the door, and I could see another patch of hallway in the distance, illuminated dimly.

A group approached us, their leader carrying a torch. She took one look at Kurtis and stretched out a hand toward him. She stepped away a moment later, still awake, but Kurtis wasn’t healed. The blood all over his face obscured some of his injuries, but the light of the torch made the rough tears in the skin at the top of his forehead evident.

“Darren, swap in!” she said, and a man moved forward to take her place. He, too, called for a swap, and then a third person did the same. I expected this to continue, but as soon as the cuts on his forehead scabbed over, the chain stopped. A man stepped forward to take his hand and simply stood by his side. The cuts didn’t heal, but he didn’t move away.

“Any other injuries?” the first woman asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got a few small ones, but the two women on the cart are too hurt to walk.”

“They stable?”

“Uhhh… Maybe? I’m not sure what that means, medically.”

“Will they be fine for another couple minutes?”

“Yeah. I think so, anyway.”

The woman grunted. “Good. Follow me, then.”

Torchlight reflected off a tiled floor and dull beige walls as the woman led us through darkened hallways. We passed a stairwell - light from upstairs windows made it faintly visible - but kept going until we reached a large room with propped-open double doors. A hole had been knocked in the ceiling, allowing in natural light from the building’s second floor. The trip had taken long enough to let our eyes adjust to the darkness, making the room seem bright. It was empty of furniture, although worn indents in the carpeting suggested that this hadn’t always been the case. A few people lay sleeping on the floor, amid bloodstains that would have seemed sinister if the people here hadn’t already clearly demonstrated their competence at healing and willingness to help.

The woman with the torch gestured to us. “Lay them down.”

I exchanged looks with Byron and Twinkles, but we hurried to obey. These people were acting a little weirdly, but they were also offering exactly the help we needed without asking for anything in return. We lifted Zephyr off first. As I put my arms under her legs, I caught a faint unpleasant odor I couldn’t put a name to.

Davi, however, refused to lay down, instead bending to peer at her leg in the thin light. “I think my ankle is getting better, Vince. Just… slowly.”

“We can speed that up,” said the woman with the torch. She had knelt down next to Zephyr’s body and lifted her shirt, peering at a mess on the side of her torso. “Ankles are no problem. Ten minutes, max, and we’ll have you on your feet. Bonus: you won’t need those glasses anymore. Healing will fix that too. I’m worried about this other girl, though.”

“You can’t heal her?” Avalanche said.

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The woman sighed. “We can, but it smells like the cut nicked her intestines. Gut wounds haven’t been healing right for some reason. Boardman and Chang died yesterday, and Fitzwilliam and Smith woke up feverish this morning.”

“Sounds like an infection,” Byron said. “Healing Touch won’t help with that? Or whatever ability y’all have. Seems like it works differently than Healing Touch.”

The woman shook her head. “No, it’s Healing Touch. But we had to do a lot of healing yesterday. We had about thirty people arrive here from the hangar, and they were all injured one way or another. Marcy took a healing ability, and then the rest of us did too. Trying to fix the injuries knocked us all flat. After we woke up, we started trying to help a little bit at a time and that seemed to work a lot better. Doesn’t tire us out as much. As for the infection idea…” she sighed. “I think you’re right, but I don’t know what to do.”

“There might be an ability to fix infections,” I said. “I didn’t look.”

“Neither did we,” the woman said. “By the time we realized it was a problem, we’d all taken ours.”

“What about washing out the wounds?” Avalanche said.

The torchbearer’s face grew tight. “Water stopped flowing sometime last night. We’ve got a few water coolers, and that’s it. We talked about cutting our people’s wounds back open and trying that, but there have been… arguments.”

“So… you don’t have any water to spare?”

The woman looked pained as she looked into Avalanche’s eyes, but she didn’t waver. “We don’t. No food, either. We’re happy to offer healing, but… if you don’t have any water of your own you’re out of luck.”

My stomach ached. The tiny snack we'd had before leaving the warehouse had barely taken the edge off my hunger. I'd been hoping - however unreasonably - that there'd be more to eat here.

“We came from the airport,” Avalanche said. Her words caused something of a stir, but she kept talking, turning to the rest of us. “Water was scarce there too. We’ve got a single bottle. I’d like to use it to rinse Zephyr’s wound… but I guess that means we’ll have to keep moving.”

We had two bottles, but perhaps Avalanche wasn’t counting those, mentioning only the leftovers that TAF had brought to our little alliance.

No one corrected her. I gave her a nod. There wasn't a huge difference between two bottles and one; either quantity still left us needing to find more, and quickly. If she could use some water to save her friend's life, that was the right call.

Avalanche pulled a bottle out from under the tarp, and moved over toward Zephyr. Byron squatted beside her. “Get the neck of the bottle deep into the cut and make sure you really squeeze it. Get a lot of water pressure going. If infection’s an issue, we gotta hose it out real well.”

Some of the crowd nearby took a step forward as Avalanche took out the bottle, and there were some gasps and angry murmurs. I held my staff at the ready, stepping between the crowd and my allies.

Kurt was the one who saved us. He lifted a sleeve to his face, wiping away blood to reveal a series of three parallel scabs, two of which tore through his right eye on the way off his cheek. He opened his left eye, squinting at the crowd. His voice wavered with pain as he addressed them. “Do any of you have friends or family at the airport? We need to get going soon, but we can do our best to answer any questions you have first.”

As a distraction, it was perfect. As it turned out, almost everyone here worked closely with airport employees in some capacity, and as locals, a lot of them had family working nearby as well. It took less than a minute for Byron and Avalanche to finish their work and toss the empty plastic water bottle to the ground as Zephyr bit her sleeve to keep from screaming. I saw some angry glances toward the water bottle, but anyone who had wanted to interfere was too late.

Kurt was swaying a little where he stood, grimacing in pain.

“Kurt, let me take over. I can answer questions too," I said.

He shook his head. “I need the distraction.”

Davi pulled herself up off the cart, wincing as she put weight on her still-injured leg. Her face was worried as she peered at our co-worker, but her tone was light. “He’s got to get his meeting fix somehow, Vince.”

“Hah. Alright, I’ll be right back then. I’m gonna at least find him a chair.”

By the time I returned, Davi was bouncing up and down on her toes, clearly delighted in her regained motion. The healer who’d been working with her came over to me, and my wounds recovered incrementally as the healer tapped my arm once every few minutes. By the time she finished, my leg was whole and hale. My vision was blurry, but when I pulled off the thick glasses I’d needed for as long as I could remember, it was crystal clear. Even in the darkness, seeing so perfectly without glasses or contacts took my breath away.

Zephyr took longer to recover, but eventually, she too was standing, looking relieved.

Kurt’s scabs shrunk slowly as he talked, finally leaving his skin pristine and smooth. Eventually, the healer working with him gave him a pat on his shoulder. “Alright, sonny. I’m all done.”

Kurtis’s patter had grown more jovial and natural as his pain receded, but at the woman’s words, he looked up in shock. “No you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. There’s nothing more to heal.”

“But… It’s still not working.”

Kurt’s eyes were open wide now. It was hard to make out in the dim room, but when the woman with the torch came closer, I could see: his right eye was a clear pure blue, with no pupil.

She shook her head. “I’m sorry, honey. We can only heal what’s there; something must be gone. Bunch of the people we healed yesterday lost fingers. Show him, Gary.”

A man in the crowd lifted an arm to wave, and I could clearly see he had only three fingers left on his hand, his thumb and index finger missing.

“But… it’s magic.” The normally verbose Kurtis seemed lost for words.

“Yeah,” the woman said. She wasn’t looking at Kurt, but at a bloodstained patch near the far wall. “Sometimes, even magic’s not enough.”