By late afternoon, Dayakan had assembled its wounds.
Not all of them.
Only the ones Taliah and the Shaman agreed were worth bringing into the same conversation as Vincent's hand.
That alone told him enough.
This was no longer fear testing a stranger.
This was triage.
The camp gathered in a narrower circle than before—not around the central fire, not at Halen's quarantine place, but beneath a long lean shelter near the south line where daylight still entered from one side and smoke from the nearby fire drifted past without choking the space.
Controlled audience.
Better.
Still dangerous.
Vincent sat on a low stool made from bound branches. The gauntlet rested uncovered on his knee. Julia stood at his left with a slate board and charcoal the Shaman had shoved at her earlier, not because she belonged in the tribe's process but because she wrote more quickly and clearly than most of them did in common script.
Serya stood at Vincent's right.
Of course.
Her arms were folded. Her face made it clear she still disliked the arrangement and disliked even more that she had already become part of it.
The Shaman stood in front of them with Taliah and Ragan to either side.
The old man tapped his staff once on the packed ground.
"Three."
That was all he said at first.
Three cases.
Enough to force choice.
Not enough to hide behind the excuse of infinite caution.
A murmur ran through the small group of hunters and women waiting near the shelter posts. Not a crowd. Just the people who had reason to care already.
Taliah did not waste time.
"We bring only those the camp might otherwise lose to slowness, spread, or bad cutting," she said. "No one leaves this shelter thinking the hand will touch every wound it sees."
Good.
Say that first.
Vincent appreciated competence wherever he found it.
The Shaman lifted one hand toward the first of the three.
A young hunter stepped forward and unwound the cloth around his forearm.
Vincent leaned slightly forward.
The wound had begun as a puncture near the outer forearm. The flesh around it had healed badly—puckered, red-brown, and threaded with faint black lines like thin ink trapped under the skin. Not spreading fast. Not clean either.
"Name," Vincent said.
The hunter blinked once, surprised at being asked directly.
Taliah answered for him. "Kes."
Vincent looked at the hunter, not Taliah. "How long?"
Kes swallowed. "Eight days."
The Shaman added, "Puncture from a forest boar tusk. Flesh cut open once. Drained. Wrapped. Heat came down, black remained."
Vincent looked at the wound again.
Localized.
Persistent.
Not immediately lethal.
The gauntlet pulsed once. Recognition. Mild.
Good. That mattered.
He held his hand a few inches away without touching.
The black veining in the forearm gave a faint twitch toward the gauntlet.
Julia noted something on the board without speaking.
Vincent said, "Not urgent enough."
Kes's jaw tightened, but he did not argue.
Good hunter.
Taliah did not defend him. Also good.
The Shaman moved to the second case.
A woman in her thirties came forward with one trouser leg rolled to the knee. The wound sat along the calf—longer than Kes's puncture, jagged from claw or branch or something that had torn rather than pierced. The skin had not blackened evenly. Instead, islands of dark branching sat at two points along the cut, as if the taint had tried to take hold twice and failed to decide which root to favor.
Vincent looked at the shape and disliked it immediately.
Variable spread.
Messier.
Potentially harder to draw in one direction.
"Name."
The woman answered herself. "Nari."
"How long?"
"Five days."
Ragan said, "Trap line. She fell while dragging a carcass. Something under the brush cut through leather and skin."
The Shaman crouched beside the leg and touched the edge of the wound with two fingers.
"Spreads by exertion. Slows under rest. Returns when she walks too long."
Nari looked angry rather than frightened.
That, Vincent understood.
A wound like this did not only threaten life. It threatened role. Usefulness. Place.
He lifted the gauntlet toward the calf.
The gem pulsed harder than it had for Kes.
The black islands beneath the skin tightened inward.
Julia wrote that down.
Serya saw it too and said, before she could stop herself, "Stronger pull."
Vincent glanced at her.
She looked almost irritated that she had spoken aloud.
Good.
He answered anyway.
"Yes."
The Shaman looked at her, then at Vincent, filing both reactions away.
Vincent kept the hand hovering.
No touch yet.
The pull pattern was wrong.
Divergent paths.
Bad for a first repeat extraction.
He lowered the hand and sat back.
"Nari is worse than Kes," he said.
Nari's mouth thinned. "Comforting."
Vincent ignored the tone.
"But not clean enough to test next."
That offended her more than the first sentence had.
Good. Better anger than false hope.
Julia's charcoal scratched steadily across the slate.
Localized. Split response. Movement inconsistent.
Useful notes.
The Shaman let Nari step back and turned to the third case.
This time the hush in the shelter sharpened.
The third was older.
A man past fifty, perhaps. Broad once, still solid through habit rather than ease, one side of his face marked by an old scar. He limped slightly before even sitting. When he rolled up the back of his tunic and loosened the wrap beneath, Vincent understood why the camp had grown quieter.
The wound sat high along the right side, just under the ribs and toward the back.
Bad placement already.
Worse, the blackness here had not spread in delicate lines.
It pooled.
A dark knot under the skin with branching roots pressed between bruised flesh and old scar tissue. The surrounding skin looked normal from a distance, sickly only when viewed too long.
The Shaman did not speak immediately.
Taliah did.
"Name: Boru."
Ragan added, "Scrape two weeks ago. We thought it was shallow. It wasn't."
Boru gave Vincent a direct look. No fear in it. Only the exhaustion of a man who had already lived through enough pain to stop ornamenting the next one.
"It deepens when I breathe hard," he said. "And when I bend."
That drew Vincent's attention instantly.
The gauntlet pulsed harder than it had for the other two.
Bad sign.
Vincent kept his face still.
Julia, however, saw his posture change and stopped writing for one beat before resuming.
Good.
She was learning his tells too quickly.
The Shaman said, "The black has not spread outward much."
"Because it went inward," Vincent said quietly.
The old man's eyes sharpened.
Taliah looked from one to the other. "Meaning?"
Vincent looked at Boru's side again.
"The surface lies."
Boru gave a short, humorless laugh. "That sounds right."
Vincent rose from the stool and crouched closer, moving slowly enough not to threaten the man or the camp's nerves. He held the gauntlet several inches from the wound.
The black knot under the skin reacted at once.
The skin over it pulled tight, then trembled inward, as if the taint was pressing itself deeper away from the hand instead of toward it.
The shelter went completely silent.
That was new.
The gauntlet wanted it badly enough that Vincent felt the hand lean before his shoulder did.
He stopped immediately.
The cold in his arm sharpened.
Too interested.
Much too interested.
The Shaman saw it and said, "Back."
Vincent did.
The skin over Boru's wound eased a fraction.
Serya let out a breath she had clearly been holding.
Nari muttered something low under her breath.
Kes looked from Boru's side to Vincent's hand with a hunter's open distrust of traps buried under calm ground.
Taliah said, "Explain."
Vincent stood.
"Kes is localized and stable enough to wait," he said. "Nari is active but split. If extraction goes badly, the spread could be redirected unpredictably."
Julia wrote fast now.
Localized stable wait. Split active unstable.
Vincent looked at Boru.
"His is deep-set. Not wide. It's trying to avoid the hand by moving inward."
The Shaman nodded once. "I saw it."
"Which means," Vincent continued, "if I try to force it out without understanding the route, I could drive it somewhere worse."
Taliah's face hardened. "And if you leave it?"
Boru answered for himself.
"It keeps learning where I breathe."
That sat in the shelter like a blade laid on the table.
A taint knot near the ribs that deepened with exertion and responded to the hand by trying to bury itself farther in.
Boru should not have been the next test.
Which meant he was almost certainly the next test.
Vincent hated that the thought arrived so clearly.
The Shaman said it before Taliah could.
"Too dangerous."
Taliah's eyes did not leave Boru.
"Too dangerous to test," she asked, "or too dangerous to leave?"
Good leader again.
The wrong question and the correct question sharing one mouth.
Vincent looked at the three cases in order.
Kes. Wait.Nari. Unstable.Boru. Deep and reacting.
The camp was watching him now in a way it hadn't before.
Not as a tool.
As a judge.
That was worse.
Because tools could fail and still be blamed by the hand holding them.
Judges chose the hand to blame first.
Julia saw it too.
Her voice came quiet and exact from beside him.
"You don't need to answer fast."
Taliah heard that and did not object.
Interesting.
The tribe leader wanted speed. She also wanted an answer that held under scrutiny later.
Vincent took one slow breath.
Then another.
The gauntlet pulsed once.
Hungry.
Boring something into his skin with the memory of Boru's wound already under its scales.
No.
Not yet.
He looked at Kes.
"If we test on him, we learn little. The taint is shallow, old, and not costing enough."
Kes's jaw tightened but he nodded once. A hunter's acceptance of being judged less urgent.
Useful man.
Vincent looked at Nari.
"If we test on her, we learn whether split spread can be guided. But if it turns wrong, we create more branches before we understand how to stop them."
Nari cursed softly in her own tongue.
Fair.
Then Vincent looked at Boru.
No anger there.
No plea either.
Just a man waiting to hear whether his body had become the sort of problem others were willing to risk.
Vincent said, "If we test on Boru now, we don't test extraction. We test whether the hand can keep deep taint from retreating into a more lethal route."
The Shaman nodded once, slow and unwilling.
"Yes."
Taliah said, "Which is what we need to know."
There.
The pressure made plain.
Not who is easiest.
Who teaches the most.
Julia stepped in then, not loudly, not disrespectfully, but with the kind of precision that forced everyone to hear the practical edge.
"And if he dies teaching it?"
The shelter tightened.
Serya looked at Julia, then at Boru, then away.
Ragan's grip shifted on his spear.
Boru answered before Taliah could.
"If I'm not tested, I die slower."
No one in the shelter argued with him.
That was the worst part.
It might well be true.
The Shaman rubbed one hand over his mouth.
His age showed in that moment more than in any stiffness of limb.
"Then we still don't rush the hand into him," he said. "Not as extraction."
Taliah turned to him sharply. "What else?"
The old man looked at Vincent.
Vincent understood and disliked it.
Then did it anyway.
"Contact mapping first," he said.
Julia's charcoal halted.
Taliah's eyes narrowed. "Meaning?"
"No pull attempt," Vincent said. "I track where the taint moves when the hand approaches from different angles. We learn its escape routes before we try to drag it anywhere."
That quieted the shelter in a different way.
The Shaman's face settled into grim approval.
"Yes."
Taliah asked, "Pain?"
Vincent looked at Boru honestly. "Probably."
Boru snorted once. "Then we're already on familiar ground."
Serya, from Vincent's right, said quietly, "And if the hand likes what it finds too much?"
That was the correct question.
Again.
Vincent answered without dressing it up.
"Then I stop before it touches skin."
The Shaman cut in at once. "And if stopping becomes difficult?"
Vincent looked at him.
"You stop me."
The old man held his gaze.
Then nodded once.
Good.
That made the rule communal, not private.
Much safer.
Taliah looked at Boru. "Would you take mapping before extraction?"
Boru laughed once through his nose, the sound dry with pain and patience.
"If you're asking whether I prefer measured danger to blind danger, yes."
There it was.
Consent Dayakan-style.
Kes stepped back first. Nari followed after a heartbeat. Both knew the circle had narrowed now to one.
Julia resumed writing, this time under a new heading:
Selection
Kes: stable, low-priority
Nari: split, unstable route
Boru: deep-set, inward retreat, mapping required before pull
Good.
Make it legible. Make it harder for hope to turn the process into superstition.
Taliah read over Julia's shoulder without asking and said, "Good."
Julia did not thank her.
Better.
Serya watched the slate too and said, almost reluctantly, "Add: reaction strongest on depth."
Julia looked at her.
Serya looked back.
No edge added. No insult riding behind it.
Just correction.
Hostile respect, then.
Still hostile.
Still respect.
Julia added the note.
Vincent saw the shift and filed it away as carefully as any movement under the skin of a wound.
Important.
A camp held together as much by the relationships around a tool as by the tool itself.
Taliah stepped back from the circle.
"Boru stays," she said. "Others return to line."
No one argued.
Kes rewrapped his arm and left with the efficient bitterness of a man unhappy to be spared only because someone else was worse. Nari took her place near the shelter post and sat without looking at anyone, likely already imagining when her turn would come.
Boru remained on the stool.
Still.
Waiting.
The Shaman said, "Not today."
Taliah's head turned sharply.
The old man did not flinch.
"Selection is not touching," he said. "The hand has already reacted to all three. It rests before it maps anything deeper."
Good.
Important line.
Taliah did not like it.
But after a long enough silence to remind everyone that leadership here was not gentle, she nodded once.
"Dusk," she said. "Not later."
Compromise.
Dangerous.
Manageable, perhaps.
Vincent exhaled slowly.
So the choice had been made.
Not extraction.
Not yet.
Boru first.
Contact mapping at dusk.
And because the camp had already begun leaning toward the kind of decisions that made Vincent more than a hand with rules.
He was now helping decide whose body bore the next risk.
Julia looked down at the slate, then up at him.
She did not need to say anything.
Her expression did it for her:
This is the line.
Yes, Vincent thought.
And it had moved under his feet while everyone was pretending they were only sorting wounds.
The gauntlet pulsed once.
Slow.
Interested.
Boru watched the hand, then Vincent's face, and said the thing everyone else in the shelter had carefully avoided saying aloud.
"If you choose wrong," he said, "at least choose it while looking at me."
Vincent met his gaze.
The shelter held very still around them.
At last Vincent said, "I will."
Boru nodded once.
Satisfied with the only promise worth anything here.
Dusk, then.
No miracle.
No cure.
Just a man, a wound under the ribs, and a hungry hand being asked to prove it could learn a body before trying to save one.
And all through Dayakan, the camp began arranging itself around the next test—not as witnesses to wonder, but as people who now knew exactly how dangerous it was to let the stranger choose correctly.
Because each correct choice dragged him farther from being a tool.
And closer to becoming the one everyone would look at when the next bad decision needed a face.