The latch clicked with a dry, mechanical snap.
Kasia pressed her ear to the seam. Outside, boots crunched against salted grit, then faded down the corridor. She didn't drop her guard. Her palm bore the bite of Zoya’s double-pronged torsion wrench, a diamond-cut bypass tool stolen directly from the Ministry of Works.
"The adjoining wall," Miros murmured from the shadows at her shoulder, his palms skimming the damp masonry. "They built the Conservatory over the old hydrological substations. If the layout hasn't changed since the third census, the service conduit runs behind the intake panel."
"How sure are you?" She jammed the needle-thin pick into the vent grating along the baseboard, working the rusted pins with quick, rhythmic jerks. Metal scraped against metal.
"Eighty percent," he said. "Ninety, if the engineers were as cheap as the councilors who bribed them."
"Good enough to die on." Kasia twisted the pick. The lower screw sheared off with an iron cough. She pulled the grate free, tossing it onto the wool blanket so it wouldn't clang.
Miros didn't hesitate. He dropped to his knees, sliding his broad shoulders into the square intake shaft. There was no hesitation left in the scholar; weeks of shared starvation and thin broth had stripped away the softness of the archives, leaving a lean, hard-edged frame. When he reached back to haul her into the cramped ductwork, his hand caught hers with familiar grip. No transactions. Just skin, grease, and bone.
"Air is moving north-northwest," he muttered, inching forward on elbows and knees. "Exhaust fans from the lower boiling rooms. Keep low. The sheet iron will rattle if you place your knees wrong."
They crawled through a suffocating tunnel of zinc and dried lime. The stink hit them first—not the familiar soot of the lower wards, but caustic bleach mixed with the sickening, copper stench of an abattoir.
Kasia followed the sole of his scuffed leather boots. When he halted abruptly, she nearly collided with him. He had flattened himself against the lip of a massive brass-ribbed exhaust hood.
"Look down," he said, voice tight.
Kasia edged forward, peering through the diamond pattern of the floor grille.
The chamber below was vast, tiled in pristine white ceramic that glared under rows of chemical lamps. But the floor was not clean. Troughs of dark fluid crisscrossed the flagstones, draining toward central suction drains.
Suspended in the center of the hall hung six cylindrical vats made of thick, reinforced glass.
Inside the first vat floated a man. Thick rubber conduits pierced his jugular, his femoral arteries, and his wrists. Counterweights pumped in rhythmic, shuddering strokes, drawing dark arterial fluid up through spiraled glass tubes. Centrifuges spun with a high, keening whine, separating the crimson tide into clear, viscous oil and pale amber liquid.
To his left, two more vats held women. Their skin was translucent, leached of all color, bobbing like salted bait.
Kasia’s throat went dry. "The recipients of the Writ."
"The harvest," Miros corrected. His knuckles turned white against the edge of the duct. "They don't educate them. They don't give them estates in the high tier. They refine them. It takes forty bodies to distill a single ampoule of the distillate."
A hydraulic hiss cut through the machinery's droning hum.
Directly below their vent, an automated treatment recliner slid forward on greased tracks. The leather upholstery was stained with rust-colored rings.
Overseer Vargos sat strapped into the apparatus.
His uniform tunic was stripped away, cast carelessly across a brass side table. His flabby torso was mapped with blue surgical lines. A steel collar pinned his neck back against the headrest, immobilizing his chin while an automated injector needle hovered inches from his exposed carotid artery. His eyes were closed, his breathing heavy and drugged under the influence of preparatory anesthetics. No guards stood beside him. The chamber was running on an automated cycle while the orderly staff took their shift rotation in the outer ward.
He was completely helpless.
Kasia felt the iron pick dig into her skin. The memory of her torn ration cards, the threat of the munitions pits, the weeks of scraping by on frozen cabbage—it all condensed into a hot, focused spike behind her ribs.
"He’s alone," she whispered, reaching down to unseat the retention bolts holding the vent grating.
"Kasia, wait—" Miros caught her wrist. "Look at the patrol board on the wall. The timing relays—"
"I am not leaving him breathing," she cut in, her voice flat, cold, and absolute. "He dragged us here for cattle. I'm taking his throat."
Miros looked at the man below, then down at the blood running in the troughs. He released her wrist, reaching instead for a heavy, discarded iron conduit bolt wedged in the duct seam. "Then hit him hard. First strike through the windpipe so he can't signal."
She nodded. Together, they pried the grating up. The hinges were silent, lubricated by decades of oil vapor. Kasia swung her legs over the lip of the vent, aligning her boots with the top of a tall, enameled supply cabinet positioned against the wall.
She dropped.
Her boots struck the top shelf with a muted thud. She shifted her balance instantly, keeping her center low, knife-ready with the sharpened handle of the lockpick.
Then the shelf buckled.
A rusted anchor bolt pulled free from the tile wall with a screech of peeling enamel.
Kasia grabbed for the wall to steady herself, but her shoulder knocked against a tier of labeled glass cylinders—the pure, freshly separated amber serum awaiting storage.
A heavy quart flask slid outward.
She lunged to catch it, her fingers brushing the cold glass, but it slipped past her reach, tumbling through the empty air between the cabinet and the treatment chair.
The flask hit the tiled floor and shattered with the sound of an exploding shell.
Fluorescent, glowing fluid splattered across Vargos’s bare boots.
The overseer's eyelids snapped open.
Instantly, overhead horns screamed to life, tearing through the quiet with a series of deafening, strobing pulses. Red klaxons bathed the vats in bloody light as the security doors at both ends of the hall slammed open, and heavy iron-plated boots thundered down the entry corridors.