Irina’s POV

I didn’t move.

The light pulsed between my fingers — soft, slow, like a second heartbeat. White. Warm. Not blinding, not sharp. Just there, quiet and steady, like it had always been waiting.

My first instinct was to pull my hand away.

I looked at Andrei. Pale face, still jaw, the thick white gauze across his abdomen not doing a good enough job of hiding what was underneath. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

The light in my hand didn’t flicker.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I want to be clear about that. I had no plan, no understanding, nothing except the fact that my palm was glowing and Andrei was dying and my feet were already moving before my brain caught up.

I reached out.

I pressed my hand, gently, to his side.

The warmth spread immediately. It traveled from my palm into him, slow and even, the way heat bleeds through blankets. The light wrapped around him, soft and complete, like it was closing a fist.

The room went quiet.

I didn’t look up. I kept my eyes on Andrei. On his face. On the way his breathing, just seconds ago uneven and labored, was already evening out.

The gauze over his abdomen was shifting. I watched it, barely breathing myself, as the shape underneath changed — the taut, wound-tight tension easing. The skin knitting. The color of his face shifting from grey back to something living.

And then he moved.

A twitch first. His fingers. Then his brow furrowed, slow and confused, the way people look when a dream starts feeling too real. He made a sound low in his throat — something between a groan and a sigh — and then his eyes opened.

He blinked at the ceiling.

He blinked again.

Then he looked at me.

I was still glowing. I couldn’t turn it off — I didn’t even know how I’d turned it on. The light curled around my fingers and up my forearm, soft white, completely visible to anyone in the room with functioning eyes.

Andrei stared at me.

I stared back.

He opened his mouth.

"So," he said, voice rough and slow, still clearly not all the way back from wherever he’d been. "Either I’m dead, and heaven sent a very dramatic welcoming committee." He paused. Swallowed. "Or you’ve been hiding something from all of us."

I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

"You’re not dead," I said.

"That’s usually what people say in the afterlife, Irina."

I pulled my hand away.

The glow didn’t stop.

I turned.

The room was frozen. Every medic. Every conscious soldier. Roman, somewhere near the door, hadn’t moved. A few of the men who’d been awake were sitting up in their cots, staring. Nobody made a sound. The only sound was breathing — the ragged, improving breathing of people who had been badly hurt and were now, suddenly, not.

I looked at my hand.

The light looked back at me.

*What are you?* I thought at it. *What are we?*

No answer. Of course.

I took a breath. Then I moved to the next cot.

---

The man there was younger than Andrei. Maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. His left arm was wrapped from wrist to shoulder. His eyes were closed, and his face was the kind of still that looked like work — like staying unconscious was the only thing keeping him from the pain.

I didn’t hesitate this time.

I placed my hand on his arm, above the bandage, and let the warmth go.

It happened faster than with Andrei. The light spread, found what was broken, and fixed it with the calm efficiency of something that had been doing this for a long time. The man’s breathing changed. The tension in his face released, muscle by muscle, until he looked like he was actually sleeping.

He didn’t wake up. Not this one.

But his color returned.

And when I lifted my hand, his arm moved easily — no stiffness, no guarded angle. Like nothing had ever happened to it.

I moved to the next cot.

And the next.

And the next.

I stopped counting after a while. It didn’t feel like effort — that was the thing I couldn’t explain, couldn’t make sense of. It felt like breathing. Like the light knew where to go and didn’t need directions from me. I just had to put my hand down and let it.

Some of them woke up. Most of them didn’t. The ones who opened their eyes looked at me the way people look at something they’re not sure is real — like they were weighing whether to believe their own vision. Nobody spoke. Nobody stopped me.

I worked my way down both rows.

By the time I reached the last cot, the glow had dimmed — not gone, but quieter, like whatever had been burning hard had settled to an ember. I pressed my hand to the last man’s shoulder, felt the warmth move through, and then stepped back.

I stood in the middle of the room.

Every bandage in the room was now wrapping a body that didn’t need it anymore.

My legs were trembling slightly — not from pain, not exactly, but from something like the aftermath of running hard. My heart rate was elevated. My hands, when I turned them palms-up and looked at them, were almost dark again. Just the faintest trace left, fading slow.

*What was that,* I thought. *What was any of that.*

The silence in the room had a texture to it. Heavy and complete. Like everyone was holding something too fragile to breathe around.

I lowered my hands.

And still nobody spoke.

Roman was at the door. He was staring at me with an expression I’d never seen on his face before — something between careful and stunned, the usual control stripped off the top layer, leaving something rawer underneath. He didn’t say anything.

Andrei was sitting up on his cot, watching me with dark eyes and no jokes left.

The medics had their instruments forgotten in their hands.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what any of us were supposed to do next. I stood in the middle of all those repaired bodies and felt entirely lost.

Then, from the far corner — a sound.

A chair shifting. The slow, deliberate movement of someone old choosing their words before they committed to standing up.

I turned.

I hadn’t noticed him before. He must have been there the whole time, tucked back against the wall near a supply cabinet — an old man in a physician’s coat, white-haired, with the kind of deeply lined face that comes from decades of watching things other people miss. His eyes were sharp even from across the room.

He was looking at me the way a scientist looks at something they’ve spent their whole career believing was theoretical.

He cleared his throat.

"Perhaps," he said, slowly, like each word was being measured before it left, "you are..."

He paused. Like he wasn’t sure he was ready to say it out loud.

"...the healing bloodline."