Mallory did not burn her uniform, but resolved not to put it back on until it was thoroughly sterilized. Tanya was able to tap her directions for containment, and after that Mallory decided it was no longer her problem. It would be her problem again whenever laundry day was, but she was not sure she was going to live to laundry day, and decided not to bother with it.

She did try to sleep, and lay in her bed in the dark for what must have been hours, but if she dreamed she only dreamed about lying in her bed trying to sleep, so she eventually gave up and decided the answer was to exhaust herself. There was too much going on, and she had too much unspent energy.

They were all going to be so eternally fucked up when all of this was over. If they survived to see the end of it. The last year had pushed her beyond limits that she didn’t even know that she had, and then kept going. She had been trained for extremes and this was still further than any training had ever bothered to attempt.

There was something selfish in the choice to avoid the medical bay, and she knew that. She didn’t want to see another torso turn itself inside out. It was not even a matter of just being too squeamish, she would be no help on this front line, and would do very little beyond getting in the way.

So, Mallory did the only other useful thing she could think of. She could do nothing for their last patient, but the last patient was not the last visitor. There was still the matter of the double, one extremely reluctant aid to the cause: Winterwing Flashblade. Duke had found a space to keep him in the kitchen, which annoyed her from a tactical standpoint, given how many things in there could have been weaponized, but at the same time, it was probably the best peace offering they could give him. They could not let him outside, and they currently had no additional quarters to keep him confined to. The kitchen was at least visible enough that they could all check in on him casually, and he could not complain about the conditions.

The room’s main focal point, the large round table that they shared, was covered in scraps of paper and writing utensils. None of it seemed organized in any logical manner. Some of it was written over, some stacked, and at least ten pages were discarded entirely, crumbled into balls that had slid away from the table and now occupied the floor.

It was all copies of the carefully preserved book Wildwing had brought back from the Raptor. Pages and pages of alien writing and illumination, yellowed with age. To the drakes’ credit, it did appear that they had actually been working at the task given to them.

However, they were not working now. Duke had decided it was time for a snack, and was rummaging around in the fridge. A fresh pot of coffee was sitting on the hot plate. Winterwing appeared to be doubtfully inspecting a carton of half and half, grimacing as it swirled around.

“Is there...anything to eat on this planet that doesn’t look like an adolescent prank?” he asked doubtfully.

“Hmm,” Duke pushed aside a pale yellow gallon of apple juice, and a jar of mayonnaise, and shook his head. “Not really.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Be careful with that, by the way, the first time is goin’ to hit your intestines like a pile of lead.”

Winterwing set the carton down, frustrated. “Then why do you have it?”

Duke looked thoughtful. “That is a good question.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Mallory interrupted.

“He was hungry, we’re in the kitchen,” Duke said defensively.

“So what?”

“I was hungry, we’re in the kitchen,” Duke said.

“I was told that you were supervising our traveling poet’s great masterwork that’s going to miraculously save us all,” Mallory made a show of surveying the room. “I don’t recall anyone saying anything about lunch.”

“Shit, Mal, I can make you a sandwich too, just ask.”

She sighed irritably, looking back to the mess on the table. “Okay, maybe I have this all wrong. You’ve made great progress and you’re taking a little break to regather your thoughts.”

She looked back to the two of them. Duke looked amused, with that shit-eating grin that he always had when she was annoyed. Duke was the sort of person that would fall down a flight of stairs and land gracefully at the bottom as if the entire decent had been intentional. Her anger was no more threatening to him than a little bit of wind. He would ride it out, and on the other side he would pretend she had never raised her voice.

The double, however, brought her thoughts to a halt. After their first real confrontation with Dragaunus, Wildwing had existed in a sort of emotional shell. The Mask had done a great deal of that, obscuring all but the most strong reactions, robbing him of most expression. But, even in those times where he did not wear it, either out of comfort or necessity, he had still managed a very practiced and neutral face. After spending a year in this place, she had very rarely managed to break through that armor, but it had mattered less over time. It took some practice, but there was a difference between the Wildwing that took shorter steps, the one that took long strides, and the one that held his breath for several seconds before saying anything.

All that nuance was useless here, because his double did not bother to hide anything. He returned her sharp tongue with a withering glare that almost, almost had an effect on her, but only because the visage was so like someone she should have known.

“I keep telling you people,” he said. “I took a class. It was five weeks of analysis on a tiny sampling of written epics, not even the full class.” He gestured to the table. “I can’t read any of it, I can just point out some likely context and patterns.”

“So you’re useless,” she completed for him.

“Maybe,” he agreed, looking away from her and watching Duke work as if lunch were the only priority. “I will say, just for the record, it’s not as if you can read it either,” he gave an insincere smile. “You are welcome to try, of course.”

There was that red-hot feeling in her chest, building, that insisted the best way to alleviate it would be to break his arm. “You know your friend is dying right now, right?”

He leaned on the counter, and there, right there, that intake of breath and a few seconds before letting it out. She knew that. And, oh, she hated it.

Duke said nothing, but gave her a raised eyebrow. They were wasting time, they were all going to die while these two were wasting time on a sandwich and coffee. She shuffled through the papers, furious.

Duke set a mug of coffee on the table for her, soundlessly, and went back to his position at the counter. She was even more furious now, because it appeared that he was entirely serious about offering her lunch as well. He carried on with food prep, as if they were having a pleasant conversation.

“When’s the first time you realized you were going to lose someone?” Winterwing asked her, and when she looked up again, he was standing with a mug of coffee hand, though it appeared he had not given it a try yet.

She disliked having to tell him anything, hated it, wished they could have left him in the closet, that he could have been a thing for Tanya to dissect. It was not unlike that unsteady start to her friendship with Duke. Which Duke knew, and that’s why he was quietly moderating. Prick.

“I think I had a grandfather who died in a training mission when I was very small. Fuel line failure,” she said, with a hollow flippancy. She learned back in her chair, wistfully looking at the steaming cup, still too hot to drink. “But, what you’re asking is the first time I realized the Saurians were going to take someone.”

Winterwing said nothing, and waited.

“The name you’d be looking for is General McMallard,” she shrugged it off and did not feel the weight of it. “Daddy.”

“I see,” he said.

She noticed he did not offer any condolences.

He strode over and set his own mug aside, brushing away some of the papers, before selecting a few. “If you could take this back home, I think it would be the archaeological find of the century. With existing records you could maybe trace your way back, and work this out. Beginning with Terribus, but there are some other choice pieces in here too.” He selected one that he set down before her. It was illustrated with what might have been fields of crops. The writing worked in careful rows that following the lines of planting. “I’m fairly sure this is an older version of a chant meant for harvest.” And another. This one seemed something far closer to what she had grown up with, a mountain of snow and ice, and what may have been figures, painted in red, spread across it. “And this would be an old one describing the decent into hell.”

All of this, she knew in an academic sense, was fascinating, but none of it seemed useful for their purposes. It was perhaps true that the context here would be useful for translation, but he had told her nothing that they couldn’t have worked out without him, just from the illustration.

Winterwing must have seen the lack of praise on her face, because he held up a hand to forestall her voicing it aloud–-oh, she knew that gesture too, and found that she hated it just as much as the other mannerisms he borrowed.

“I don’t have an answer for you. No miracles or anything like that. I can show you something interesting, though,” he selected a few pages and placed them down on the table.

They looked unrelated to her eyes. The first was a brilliant flourish of red and gold, something resembling a battle with two clear opposing sides. The second was in rich gold and greens, figures collecting a harvest in a field. The third was deeper hues of blue and purple, showing a storm over a flat plane of land. The fourth was a tight tangle of brown and green, a forest thicket populated by oddly shaped beasts with teeth and claws.

There was poetry written in all of it, carefully illuminated and embellished within geometric forms. The paper that they had been drawn on was just as yellowed as the rest, and the inks were much paler colors than intended, dimmed with age. But these four were different from the other pages on the table. The rest had carefully curated borders, and the drawings never approached the edge of the parchment. In the four that he placed before her, each one was fully illustrated, from end to end.

He rearranged them as she watched, lining up an edge to an illustration, and sure enough, despite being different colors and subject matters, the geometric drawings aligned as neatly as a puzzle. He placed the third page on top of the first two, with the same result, and then the last one to complete the set in a skewed pile.

The poetry of the bottom page was now largely obscured, and what remained were short words or phrases in columns. The original illustrations met in the center of the pile to make a dark mass that resembled nothing so much as a singular overgrown tree with a bulbous trunk, or a malicious creeping mold.

The same vicious organic form that she had seen tear a person apart.

Winterwing nodded when she looked up again. “There’s your instructions, hidden in all of it. Someone has done this before. A long, long time ago.”