:I think I'd better not wait: Sigh. :You just try to rest, all right? I don't need any more things from you. Next bit's all on me: 

And, hand hovering just above the woman's arm, she refocuses all of her attention on the crystal growing under her skin. Carefully, delicately, wrapping her Gift around it, laying it just here, here - 

This time, rather than trying to crush it in one go, she just - tries to cut it off from the rest of the thing growing inside Julie's body. It's hard to describe exactly what mental motion she's doing, but she thinks she has the control to pull it off. 

What happens? 

She can physically cut it off, as surely as if she'd put something down in between the two pieces. 

Both parts react to this. The smaller one contracts, gets spikier, causes damage to the nearby tissue - Julie gasps. The larger one - shifts, readjusts, changes its position in the body. And there's - something, playing through both of them, simultaneous, like they're still somehow in sync.

She doesn't like that at all. It seems...intelligent? It seems to be reacting to her. Like an animal would. A smart animal. 

Shavri shivers, and then goes ahead and crushes-burns-rips with her Gift - she's going to cause some additional damage, she'll accept that, but she wants the section of crystal she has a grip on with her Gift to be dead. 

It dies. The rest of it retreats into Julie's tissues, and Julie screams -- very weakly -- and then vomits again.

Her arm is bleeding copiously, both externally and internally. The blood vessels that were feeding the dead crystal are very confused.

Shavri pulls her hand back, out of range of the blood-splash, and manages to get the basin to her without going too close to any other bodily fluids. 

:I'm sorry. It's okay, you're okay, I'm not going to do that again until I've observed for a bit. Just try to relax. I need to - stop bleeding...: 

She starts hunting around for confused blood vessels to patch up or reroute or pinch shut. 

The infection/weapon doesn't interfere with that. Julie doesn't either; she mostly lies still, shivering. 

Shavri gets her arm to the point where it's no longer bleeding. She doesn't try to clean up the blood, for now; instead, she sits back, and spreads out her Sight. How is Julie's body doing overall?

Under a lot of stress! She must have been in good health, before this all started. Her teeth are perfect, and she was muscular until quite recently. The hunger and dehydration would probably be tolerated all right, if they were the only thing wrong with her; the problems caused by having apparently been bedridden or something for a while are better now that she's lying down, but the infection is taxing her body everywhere on top of that.

:We really need to get more fluids into you: Shavri says quietly. :I'm going to get you some broth - you need salt too - and maybe we can do sweetened herb tea. And I want to try to kill the film growing in your stomach, so you can actually get nutrition from food. But I think first I'd better let you rest a while, and...I'm going to focus on getting a really, really good look at it: 

Shavri's Sight is better-trained than most Healers, even at just nineteen. She's been practicing it constantly for six years, after all. She looks at everything. (Including - especially - her baby daughter, and she remembers losing herself for candlemarks on end, before, turning her Othersenses inward on her own pregnant womb, Looking closer and closer and closer...)

She picks the remaining crystal growth in the woman's shoulder, and lets herself fall in, and in, and in. 

The crystal thing is complicated, internally, not in the way humans are complicated though in places it seems to be imitating human tissues, human blood vessels, other things that it picked up from Julie. It has a shocking variety of shapes and internal structures, and it seems to be pruning them, picking the ones that are having the most success in surviving and growing. It seems like there's more going on at a scale that's smaller still, too small for Healing-Sight to resolve; something like a nervous system, sending instructions out to all the other bits of its lifeform-- or not a life form, actually, nothing here could survive on its own, it grows only where it's tightly coupled to something that itself knows how to grow...

...Well, she could kill it by killing Julie. 

She isn't going to do that. For one, Julie has important information that no one else has. Two, Shavri is a Healer. She doesn't kill people. Not even when it could arguably be justified.

Shavri lets out her breath. 

:This thing is - smart. It's really scaring me: 

...after a moment it occurs to her that if the lifeform is intelligent, then maybe it can understand Mindspeech, but - gods - she can't worry about that right now. 

Yeah.

The Belters don't have good intel on this but - the first tests were in petri dishes, with nutrient solutions. Then with vat meat. Then with animals. Then with people. She suspects it's smarter when what it's eating is smarter. And she suspects at its full potential it's really, really smart. One theory was that aliens had sent it as a - terraforming arrangement. It lands, turns the planet into - something they can live on.

Just a theory, though.

:...Aliens?: Shavri frowns, tugging at the associations around that concept. :I - you mean - like beings from other planes?: 

Planes?

:You know, um, like the Elemental Plane of Fire, or Earth or Air or whatever? You can summon spirits from different planes. Apparently. I can't, I'm not a mage: 

Aliens are just a term for any life that evolved anywhere other than Earth. ....except this place. She has no idea what the explanation for this place is but, uh, it's not aliens.

:Oh. So...not other planes that you can do summonings to, but - other worlds? With different suns?: Shavri shakes her head, half-awed. :- Anyway. I hope the thing isn't at its full potential yet. I can definitely hurt it. And - I don't think it should want to hurt you? Because it needs you or it'll die: 

She spends another moment thinking. 

:I want to try to clear it out of your stomach, but - more carefully. So I think I'll try going in as small and close with my Sight as I can, and just - disrupt its shape and structure. See if I can be efficient about this: 

Julie's pretty sure the test subjects did, in fact, die. Most diseases don't want to kill their hosts but it still happens, right, and this one hasn't had much time to be selected for less virulence, if that's even going to be operative next to the selection it can apparently do on itself. 

Yeah, seems fine.

Shavri is thinking the same thing, a second after the words are out, but she doesn't acknowledge it in Mindspeech. 

:All right. Er, let me know if it hurts too much:

She focuses in close on Julie's stomach, until that thin film of alien life fills nearly all of her Sight. What's the structure of it like, here, up close?

It seems to be trying out several different ones! This area over here is a thinner film that seems to irritate the stomach less, but need more resources; this area over here is easily coughed up; this is sending out little swimmer particles, looking for something -

She could try to kill it, but there might be an easier way here...

Shavri tests it on a tiny section, first; can she use her Gift to rip a slit in just the film, and peel it away from the stomach wall? 

Yep! As always, the rest responds, entwining itself more thoroughly with Julie's tissues or dissolving itself in her blood or pulling away from the site of the injury.

Shavri thinks for a moment. 

Then she takes the jug of water and offers it to Julie. :When I tell you to go, please drink as much of this as you can, as fast as you can. I know it'll make you throw up again - I'm hoping I can just get most of the weapon growing in your stomach out that way, and kill it after, when it can't hurt you. Just throw it in a firepit, maybe, seems a lot more efficient than using my Gift: 

She makes her plan. This thinner, tighter film she'll try to tear off in strips like so, one two three four - the looser area she can probably just sort of yank at - the swimmer particles will hopefully just follow wherever the water goes. 

:- Ready?: 

Creative, Julie says unenthusiastically, and then tries to chug the water.

Shavri goes after the film. She doesn't need it dead; she just needs it loose, floating rather than attached. She slices and snips and peels and tugs, aiming for the best mix of speed and precision she can manage. 

It's probably not comfortable at ALL for Julie.

:Sorry, sorry sorry sorry -: