Ember refused to stay in the medical cabin.
"I've been running for three days," she told Bianca, who was trying to convince her to rest for at least another twelve hours. "I've slept in ditches and under fallen trees and once, memorably, inside a hollowed-out log that had some kind of beetle colony in it. A medical cabin with clean sheets and herbal tea is not going to be the thing that kills me. What's going to kill me is lying still long enough for my brain to catch up with what happened."
She said it flatly, without self-pity, the way someone states a fact about weather or gravity — something observable, indisputable, and not open to negotiation. Bianca, who had spent eighteen years reading the emotional undercurrents of people who were very good at hiding them, recognized the stateme
