“You smell exactly like the alchemical smog in Sector 4…” Vorek whispered, his voice a low, dangerous rasp. “…where the hounds lost her.” The words hung in the air like frost on iron. Dacha kept her breath shallow against her ribs. His gaze, stripped clean of sleep, bored into her. The proximity of his ozone-laced skin left barely an inch between them, radiating dry, feverish heat. “Sector 4,” he repeated, flat and deliberate. His hand, calloused and nicked by shrapnel, lifted until his knuckles brushed the collar of her tunic, then stopped. A hunter gauging meat. Her mouth was dry, a desert. Logic screamed at her to feign ignorance, to stutter out a denial. But the terror, the gnawing certainty that he was moments from tearing her apart, ignited something fierce within her. The dispensary, the dying miners, the children coughing blood into gutter grates—they flared behind her eyes. This man was going to dismantle it all. Anger snapped her restraint. She struck his forearm away, a vicious slap of bone on bone. Vorek recoiled a fraction of an inch, pupils flaring with raw shock. Before his two lieutenants—a gaunt woman with a braided topknot and a burly officer with a pitted jaw—could step from the room's dim perimeter, Dacha tore into him. “Of course I carry that stench, you imbecile!” Her voice struck the polished bulkheads like cracked glass. “Where do you think rot victims come from? The scrubbed air of your apex wards? I treat the people your Spire leaves to liquefy in the trenches!” She thrust her hands forward, knuckles raw from lye. “Every dawn I dig through that effluent! What did you expect? Distilled lavender? Pull your head out of your armored breastplate!” Silence dropped over the deck plates. The woman by the door stood rigid, hand frozen on her sidearm. Borin yielded half a step. Vorek paused mid-rise, fingers poised inches above the examination couch. The violence in his posture went slack, replaced by cold calculation. He straightened his spine. “Rot cases,” he murmured, turning the words over like coin weights. “You treat them.” “With bare fingers when gloves tear!” Dacha leaned toward him, salt and bile rising in her throat. “Does necrosis ask permission before soaking into fabric? Into hair?” She thrust a finger toward the console beside him, where monitors mapped the necrotic spread. “Your trackers lose trails in the vapor, but necrosis doesn't lose mine. I reek of it because I cut it out of living tissue. Unlike your thief, I am trying to keep the lower tiers breathing.” Vorek studied her, a long, unnerving scrutiny that seemed to peel back layers of her skin. She met his gaze, refusing to flinch, channeling every ounce of fear into defiance. Finally, a slow, almost imperceptible nod. He turned to Borin. “Lieutenant. Issue Doctor Zoria unrestricted passage through secondary medical bays and compounding laboratories. Effective immediately.” Vorek did not look at his subordinates. “Provide reagents as requested. And Doctor,” a thin, cruel tilt touched his mouth, “keep the contagion off my floorboards.” The dismissal landed like an iron hatch dropping shut. Her knees threatened to give way, but she pivoted cleanly on her heel and marched through the pneumatic doors. By the third bell, Dacha walked the high-altitude citadel with a copper credential clipped to her breast. The facility gleamed under cold mercury lamps, a maze of centrifugal separators and pressurized distillation rigs. She mapped every riser, the whine of scrubber shafts, and the arc of optical sentries overhead. The contagion was metastasizing across the under-ducts; Vorek's terminal logs showed mortality curves steepening by the hour. Bypassing the recovery suites, she took the freight lift down into Sub-Level Gamma, marked on maintenance grids as deep salvage storage. The atmosphere cooled fast, thick with lime dust and damp copper. Security was lighter here, a single automated sentry drone patrolling the long, echoing corridors. Unpolished plasteel lined the corridor, blackened by ancient torch burns. Following an unshielded somatic draw along the conduit trunks, she located a reinforced vault door. No keypad interrupted the steel plate—only a brass palm depression sunk flush into the frame. Dacha set her skin against the cold metal. The groove flared emerald under her dermal lines. Pneumatic locks disengaged with a dull clank, swinging open to expose a lead-jacketed laboratory. Glass condenser coils hissed over blue burners, surrounded by calcified ledger sheets and rows of broth cultures. Bent over an ocular lens sat a stooped silhouette. “Elder Ostran?” Dacha whispered, halting in the threshold. The old apothecary she had left in the lower sumps stood thirty floors above the frost line, safe inside enemy lines. He looked up. His milky, blind socket pinched tight while his functional eye fixed on her. Green chemical residue stained his teeth as his jaw parted. “Took you long enough, girl.” He tapped a bubbling retort of black bile. “Welcome to Archive Gamma-Seven. The High Council funds the ledger, never guessing what boils inside the glass.” Dacha moved to the slate racks, scanning structural diagrams of spore clusters and lung necrosis. Nausea knotted behind her navel. “What have you brewed here, Elder? The contagion ravaging the ditches... you were supposed to isolate the neutralizing agent.” Ostran let out a dry, rattling laugh. “A cure? No, Dacha. I engineered it.” The words hit her like a physical blow. The air rushed from her lungs. She stumbled back, hitting a workbench, rattling a stack of empty beakers. “You… you *what*?” “The blight. The insomnia rotting Yastov’s brainpan. Both came from this desk.” Ostran slid an encrypted terminal slate across the bench. It charted trajectory vectors and thermal saturation grids aimed at the residential ditches below. “The Council prepares an orbital glassing. Project Cinderfall. Total purge of the lower tiers in seventy-two hours.” The targeting arcs matched the coordinates of her clinic. “I crippled their command grid to buy us hours,” Ostran rasped, tapping the glass. “The sickness choked their patrol battalions. Yastov’s sleepless delirium was designed to snap his spine so you could slip inside his ward, seize his clearances, and locate their targeting relays.” He lifted an ampoule of shimmering green suspension. “You have his ear now. One drop in his saline feed. No residue. No delay.” He forced the cold glass into her fingers, bone pressing hard against bone. “Kill Vorek before third bell, or our people burn to ash.”

The Mentor's Rot