This cough had gone on long enough. Faustite had tried drowning it in more water, more tea, more whiskey and it hadn't made a difference. One of his boys had bought him cough drops, but he gave up on those when he choked on one during a coughing fit. He tried to keep moving to give the smoke somewhere else to go, he tried staying horizontal as long as possible, he tried cough suppressants that could be found over the counter, then he tried cough suppressants that were kept in the pharmacy itself, and nothing banished the cough. Looking it up netted him results from some sort of erosive heartburn disease to heart failure, both of them sounding fairly galling, and lung cancer came up between the two.

The last one stalled him. Coughing that doesn't go away, chest pain, feeling tired all the time, weight loss, bloody sputum. He had all of it. Was this cancer, then? Did half-youma get cancer from themselves? Faustite hadn't heard of any other youmafied officer having half as much trouble with their bodies as he had, so he always thought himself the odd one out. And now — lung cancer.

Was that what this was? He felt lightheaded, like he was dropped in the ocean before he could take a breath. He'd never smoked, but that didn't have as much of an impact on lung cancer rates as he had expected. His cough had gotten worse as time passed; it had gone from something mild and forgettable as the wind to this constant, debilitating, wracking thing that bent his back in the process.

Faustite remembered the day he made that discovery. It was the last Tuesday of January. He hadn't told any of his boys — even Albite. The thought never left his head.

A week had passed. He'd started to reach out to others, making appointments with only the description of his symptoms to hand over. He didn't want to say cancer. He didn't want to ask could it be GERD or could it be heart failure. He begrudged the possibility that the answer could be yes, even if it came with the relief of knowing, with certainty, what had plagued him since that day in the Rift.

He still dwelt on that day. Still thought back to it, wondering if he should've waited while the Mauvians invented some kind of battery, or if none of this would have happened if he hadn't used himself for a power source. It had felt like such a mindless conclusion at the time — a quick answer to a question that stood in their way. A barrier easily overcome. Being stalled for what could've been an important discovery of a weakness or some insidious weapon was such a repugnant thought that it was easier to move ahead with a more dangerous solution. What if the price was speeding up what was wrong with him? Looking back, lung cancer seemed like such a foregone conclusion. How could it be anything else when he was a walking smoke hazard?

Faustite had laid in bed with it. Tossed and turned. Went to work with it. Sat at his desk with it. Laid in bed with it that night.

Tossing and turning had become a ritual by then. He went to bed for the routine of it, for the comfort, then soon transitioned out of the bed when a boy had fallen asleep. He'd drag himself out of the pit, quietly as he could, and crawl on hands and knees to the piece of sheet metal that had returned to his bedroom. It was there that he slept anymore, pitched on his side or on his back, too hot in the throes of his self-imposed loneliness.

As he laid in bed, he scratched the side of his wrist absently. His mind was on lung cancer. How would they confirm it? What kinds of tests were there? Did he have a chance? He'd read about lung transplants. Was that something he would have to do? What would that look like? What if he couldn't? What if he'd die before they could find lungs for him? He kept scratching, kept thinking, kept circling back to the same unanswerable questions until a spark of pain had him wincing.

He looked at his wrist, expecting to see a careless gouge in it. But as he raised it up and examined it in the false sunlight that filtered through the unblocked cracks of the bay window, he saw a series of small, black blisters instead, arranged like a rash on his wrist. One of them had burst; fresh, wet ink had run down his arm.

He whiled away the hours looking that up, too. Injuries, infections, allergies all cropped up in the search, but he lacked any normal signs of infection and couldn't remember exposing himself to anything that would cause an allergy. It wasn't until he explored the injury category that he discovered heat blisters, and some of the photos for that had matched what was happening to his wrist. He supposed that was as good a self-diagnosis as any.

But then he wondered: were the two related? Was there any way to know? Could it be lung cancer if he was also having heat blisters? Part of him wanted to hope that a second symptom meant that he couldn't have lung cancer. But part of him insisted that half-youma physiology was sufficiently different that these might be his symptoms of lung cancer, even if they didn't always line up with the traditional ones.

But it could've been unrelated, too. That thought had brewed for a while, but only half as long as the others, for in another couple days, he faced a third symptom: his skin had started cracking open.

It happened after a long stint of handwriting comments on reports. He retired his pen, laced his fingers together, and stretched his arms out to work the stiffness out of his fingers and wrists, but felt a jolt of sore, persistent pain in the process. When he examined his hand, he found that a crack had formed on his wrist, parallel to its grooves. Heat poured out of it, easily felt from a distance, and the inside was a brilliant, molten orange. Even to him, it felt prohibitively hot to touch.

That wasn't something he would find on the internet. The implication seemed clear, however: he was boiling from the inside out.