The twitch in the Yurakk warrior’s left calf happened on a morning that had not been scheduled to be different from any other.

It was part of why Rakh’ash’tha almost missed it.

She had been running the same sequence for eleven days: pressure points along the spine, muscle response checks at the hips, knees, ankles, the same order each time. Any change would be a change against a known baseline rather than against memory.

The left foot’s sole had produced nothing for eleven days. On the twelfth, when she applied pressure, the calf moved.

Small. A contraction that would have been unremarkable in anyone whose nervous system was functioning normally, the kind of reflex a healer might not even register as information.

In a limb that had produced nothing for eleven days, it was the first new fact since the injury occurred.

She did not tell the warrior immediately. She ran the rest of the sequence first, in case the change was isolated to that one point.

Then she ran the left foot’s sole a second time, to confirm it was repeatable. It was.

"Something is different," the warrior said.

He had been watching her face, which was a habit she had noticed in him from the first day and had stopped trying to manage. A warrior who had spent eleven days unable to feel his own legs had earned the right to read whatever was visible on the person assessing them.

"Your left calf responded to pressure on your foot. It did not, yesterday or any day before."

"How much."

"A small contraction. Repeatable."

She did not embellish it, because she had learned in eleven days that he did not want embellishment. "It is one point, on one side. I do not yet know what it means for the rest."

"How long until I know what it means."

"I do not know that either."

He absorbed this the way he had absorbed everything else over eleven days, without visible reaction.

Then he asked a different question.

"Is there work I can do from here. Sitting work. While this continues."

She sent for Vor’gath, who arrived later than she would have liked, because he had been with Aliyah at the third Keystone for the morning reinforcement window and could not leave mid-sequence.

When he did come, he placed his hands at the contact point the way he had eleven days earlier, and was quiet for longer this time.

"The interference has thinned," he said, when he opened his eyes. "On the left side specifically. Not the right."

"Why the left and not the right?"

"The original contact was not symmetrical. I did not know that at the time, there was no way to know it at the time, but the angle of passage through his body was not straight. It moved through at a slight angle, left side shallower than right."

He looked at the warrior’s legs. "Shallower interference clears first. If this pattern holds, the left leg recovers function before the right does, and the right recovers slower than the left did."

Rakh’ash’tha wrote this down with a thoroughness she had not applied to the previous eleven days of unchanged readings.

Unchanged readings did not generate a pattern, and a pattern was what she had just been given.

"If contact angle determines recovery order," she said, "then every future casualty needs the contact angle documented at the time of injury. Not estimated afterward. Documented while it can still be observed."

"Yes," Vor’gath said.

She added a line to the field protocol she had been keeping since the second incursion: at point of injury, document the angle of the entity’s passage relative to the body’s vertical and lateral axes, as precisely as the observing party can manage. This information may predict the order and rate of subsequent recovery.

The highland warrior with the cold-side injury was her second stop that morning, and the contrast was immediate.

Eleven days ago, the cold sensation had covered his entire right side. Now it was localized to his right hand and forearm, the rest of the right side reporting normal sensation for the first time since the injury.

"That is faster than the Yurakk’s recovery," she said to Vor’gath, after the assessment.

"It is a different injury."

He had been turning this over since the previous incursion, she could tell, because his answer came without the pause his answers usually had. "The Yurakk’s injury is a signal interference, the body’s own nervous communication disrupted at a point."

"This warrior’s injury is a thermal displacement, part of him moved into a different register entirely and now moving back. Different mechanisms. Different recovery curves."

"Two injury types, then. Not one injury with variable severity."

"Two types, at minimum. There may be more we have not seen yet."

She drafted the field protocol that afternoon with both injury types described separately.

Signal interference: loss of motor response without pain, recovering asymmetrically based on contact angle, requiring positioning support and periodic shamanic assessment.

Thermal displacement: localized cold without pain, recovering from the periphery inward, responding to standard warming treatment without requiring shamanic intervention except in severe initial presentations.

She gave the draft to Aliyah, who read it once and said, "This goes to every garrison medic under the Compact’s sharing provision. Today."

"It is incomplete. Vor’gath thinks there may be more types we have not seen."

"It will be incomplete for a while. It is also more than any medic anywhere currently has." Aliyah was already finding a courier. "Send the addendum when there is one."

Rakh’ash’tha went back to the Yurakk warrior before the end of the day. He had asked a question that morning, and she had an answer for at least part of it now.

"Sitting work," she said. "The instrument room needs people who can hold focused attention for hours without moving much."

"Your legs do not need to work for that. Your attention does, and your attention has not been injured at all."

He looked at her for a moment, and then nodded, and asked when he could start.

"Tomorrow," she said. "Today you rest, because tomorrow you start, and I want you rested for it."