It’s poison in the liver and skin, but the meat’s a delicacy if you cut it right.

Takes years of training and a lot of snakes you can eat as long as you take the head off clean.

You want to eat the creature that tried to kill you, said Sepha slowly.

Seems only fair, said Hamish.

It had a go at me first.

While Hamish slept through most of the second day, Sepha sent a full report to the Conquered Medical Council on the Central Worlds.

She was careful with it.

She attached every scan, every blood analysis, every reading.

She described the bite, the venom concentrations, the progression of symptoms, and the recovery in the plain and precise language of her profession.

She did not speculate.

She knew how extraordinary the claims were, and she knew how they would be received.

The reply arrived that evening.

It was polite and it was dismissive.

The council thanked Dr. Illenvith for her diligence.

It noted that her equipment was clearly malfunctioning, or that the creature had been misidentified, or that it had perhaps delivered a dry bite with very little venom.

It reminded her that no being had ever survived skithra envenomation.

It recommended that she recalibrate her analyzer.

Sepha read it twice.

Then she went to the station’s archives and requested every document the Conquered had on file about human biology and sat up through her second night in a row reading.

The Conquered’s files on human biology were thin.

Humanity had joined the Conquered only four years earlier, and most of the medical data had been gathered by a single survey team in a hurry.

But the humans themselves had shared a great deal of their own medical literature as a gesture of goodwill, and nobody had ever bothered to read most of it.

It sat in the archives in vast, untranslated heaps.

Sepha ran it through the translators and began to read.

She started with the human liver because the analyzer had shown that organ working at extraordinary levels during the fever.

She learned that the human liver could process an enormous range of toxins, including many that humans deliberately consumed for pleasure, and that it could regrow itself from a fraction of its original size.

She put down the tablet for a moment after reading that and stared at the wall.

Then she moved on to the immune system, and that was where she spent the rest of the night.