Quinn’s hands fell away, and Besca took the opportunity to continue cleaning her up. The scratches staunched easy enough, and she wiped her fingers clean with the towels. She dabbed her lips; the girl was slurring like a drunk, but it didn’t look like she’d chewed through her tongue, and not deep enough into her cheek that she couldn’t speak. 

Dahlia kept a hold of her hand, brushing fingers through her hair, checking where she’d clutched at her forehead. No blood there, thankfully. 

“[COLOR=FFE63D]Th' Savior. Tell me 's got both eyes. Pleeeease.[/COLOR]”

Besca shivered. So she [i]had[/i] noticed it after all; it had happened during the phasing. God, but if she’d felt that she would have been shrieking through the comms, wouldn’t she? She’d had pilots go numb, ignore the pain, but for someone like her? It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make [i]any[/i] sense.

“[COLOR=FFE63D]Don' wanna be them. Tell me 's not true.[/COLOR]”

Now what did [i]that[/i] mean? Besca watched Quinn’s head roll back, watched her mumble nonsense into the air. Something was broken in this girl, and while she was no longer sure that break had happened during the invasions, it had certainly been irreparably worsened there. 

Quinn was not a pilot. She couldn’t be. Besca was absolutely certain of that now more than she’d ever been before—a bar so high Aerie Station couldn’t have cleared it. Her mind was gone, and if she was ever going to get it back, it wouldn’t be in the cold dark of a cockpit. There was no way she could go back there. No way Besca would [i]let[/i] her. 

God, but she couldn’t make that promise. 

She’d seen the readings. The times. She was fast—[i]very[/i] fast. Off the top of her head, she could think of two, maybe three pilots in the world who could match or pass the speed she’d phased in that test, and one of them was sitting right next to them. RISC wouldn’t let that go. They didn’t see how unfit she was, they saw her numbers, they saw statistics. They saw a buoy in the storm of the Hovvi disaster, and they were going to latch on. 

“[color=gray]Your Savior…[/color]” she said, thinking it over. “[color=gray]It, uh…it did lose one of its eyes during the test.[/color]”

[i]And it wasn’t regenerating.[/i]

But she didn’t say that. It wouldn’t help, and she was being paranoid. Head wounds always healed slower, and the process wasn’t always uniform. Sure, normally they’d have seen [i]some[/i] sort of mending in the socket, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to happen. 

It had lost an eye. That didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.