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The fluorescent lights in the ICU hummed with a frequency that made Dr. Sarah Mankiller's molars ache. She stood at the foot of her brother's bed, tablet screen casting blue light across her face as she swiped through CT scans that made no medical sense.
"These lesions." Her voice came out flat. "They're arranged in a pattern."
Beside the ventilator, their uncle Joseph lifted his head from his hands. Gray streaked his braids like frost on black wire. "You see it now."
"I see tissue damage." She pinched the screen, enlarging the image. Seven distinct points of necrosis ran along David's spine—equidistant, symmetrical, burning like stars on the scan. "Environmental exposure. Something in the cave system where you found him."
"The seventh spot from the head." Joseph stood, joints cracking. "That's where the heart and life are."
Through the window, dawn bled orange across the Smoky Mountains. Sarah's reflection hovered ghost-like in the glass, superimposed over peaks their grandmother had named in Cherokee when Sarah was small enough to ride on her shoulders. Before medical school. Before she'd stopped returning calls.
"He touched it," Joseph continued. Rain from last night darkened his denim jacket. "The ulun'suti. Said it burned cold, like holding a piece of winter sky."
"Hypothermia can cause—"
"Look at his eyes."
She didn't want to. Had been avoiding it since she'd arrived at three AM, paged by a night nurse who knew her maiden name. But Joseph's tone carried the same weight it had when she was seven and he'd pulled her back from a copperhead den.
Turning, she stepped closer to the bed. David's eyelids twitched beneath closed lids, rapid-eye movement that should have meant dreaming. She lifted one lid with her thumb.
The pupil gleamed. Not reflected light—actual luminescence, pale green like foxfire in rotting wood.
"Jesus Christ." Her hand jerked back.
"Not the name you should be using." Joseph moved to David's other side, touching his nephew's shoulder with the casual tenderness of someone who'd never left. "The scans show seven spots. Cherokee stories say the same. Your science and our knowledge are pointing at the same truth."
Outside, a freight train howled through the valley. Sarah gripped the bed rail, metal cool against her palms. David's chest rose and fell with mechanical precision, the ventilator doing the work his brain stem couldn't manage—decreased function in the exact pattern she'd seen in drowning victims, as if he'd inhaled water that wasn't there.
"If this is real." The words tasted like ash. "If he encountered something and it's inside him now—"
"Then you need to decide if you're going to treat him like a contaminated patient." Joseph's eyes held hers across David's body. "Or like your brother who went looking for medicine to heal you."
"To heal me?"
"He knew you were coming home. Knew you'd need a reason to reclaim who you are." Joseph reached into his jacket, pulled out a leather pouch darkened with age. "The ulun'suti chooses who sees it. David saw it for you."
The monitors beeped their steady rhythm. Sarah's pager vibrated against her hip—another emergency, another crisis she could fix with scalpels and sutures. But her brother's pupils glowed brighter as the sun rose, and the seven spots on his spine pulsed on the monitor like a constellation she'd been taught to read in a language she'd tried to forget.
