He hand Rule the book and he stepped behind, crouching to Mallory's height to help the woman to her feet, but she didn't budge.
Rule's hands shook for a bit.
She hadn't moved like that since... well, since... ever. It wasn't just that she was unconscious now or that she'd been knocked out during their fight with the Slimes, and he was afraid to look at her face because it would be so familiar in all this pain. He had seen what happened when she got hit, and it didn't end well. Her expression was blank, staring up at the ceiling as if nothing else in the world existed, but her lips twitched in some sort of silent scream.
The silence stretched out into something heavy between them, almost too thick to breathe through, but Rule couldn't think of anything to say.
"Is she dead?"
"I... I don't know," he whispered. The words came out sounding more shaky than he wanted to admit.
