“Hm,” Stephen says, and he knows that he can’t push back against this one as strongly as he’d like.

Perhaps it’d be easier for him to argue against it if he weren’t a rifter himself, with the exact same worries dogging him. If that shard in his hand hadn’t crippled him from making meaningful connection for his entire first year here: one foot out the door, always waiting to see if he would simply vanish one day. It was no way to live a life.

And he already knows the rebuttals to point number two, because he can run that argument in his own head, and has done. It’s not his own most compelling point either. It might not even work — but they’ve no way of knowing until they try. They need information, and the doctor’s generally in favour of gathering information. Experimentation, even to one’s own personal detriment. Lyrium warping his skin.

So he skips right to the one after: “So. Point three. What if it does work, and others start following you en masse in lopping off their hands? Besides the operational impact of an organisation full of amputees, we literally need shard-bearers to close rifts. This world might well be ripped apart at the seams without it.”

He wonders, sometimes, if it would look very much like an incursion.