“Oh, my heavens, Praetor, right away!” Nestra chirped, adjusting her horn-rimmed spectacles so vigorously they slipped down the bridge of her nose. “Vivisected! That sounds terribly unhygienic for the upholstery, but I’ll file it under ‘Urgent Pest Control’!”
Vangrim merely grunted, turning back to his mahogany desk. She offered an exaggerated curtsey, scurried out into the chill of the corridor, and didn’t stop moving until she was down the three pneumatic lifts that led to Gloomward’s soggy, lower terrace.
The weeping-glass greenhouse sat balanced on an outcrop of rotting shale, overlooking the bottomless drop. Inside, moisture collected along the panes, dripping in rhythmic, sticky taps onto broken planters. It smelled of boiled lichen and stagnant vinegar.
“Ness?”
A rasping voice drifted from behind a barricade of dried tallow-vines. Tollo sat curled on an army cot, wrapped in three grease-stained wool blankets. He was ten, but his ribs showed through his threadbare tunic like barrel staves.
“Look what I brought, sweet pea,” Nestra said, her voice dropping the syrupy, shrill register into something low and cracked. She set down a tin of salted marrow and an armful of clean cotton bandages. “Real grease-tallow, too. Not the grey mold butter from the gutter-carts.”
Tollo smiled, but the expression seized. He folded over, his chest rattling like a basket of gravel. He spat into a tin bucket. What came out was not phlegm. It was a plume of fine, chalk-grey silt that crusted instantly upon contact with the metal rim.
She dropped beside him on the salt-stained boards.
His right arm had shot straight out. The skin from his knuckle to his elbow was turning the dull, grainy slate of petrified siltstone. The fingernails had already hardened into brittle calcified points. He clawed at the air, suffocating on the grit coating his bronchi.
“Can’t… can’t bend it, Ness,” he wheezed, teeth clicking together with a dry, mineral clack. “It feels like lead. Like poured mortar.”
“Shh, breathe through the wet rag, Tollo, do it now!” She pressed an oilcloth soaked in diluted vinegar against his mouth, forcing his head down between his knees. Her fingers dug into the rigid flesh of his forearm. The pulse underneath was faint, struggling against veins that were turning to conduit piping.
She massaged the limb with frantic, crushing force, working the herbal salve she’d stolen three days ago deep into the hardening dermis until the grey tint reluctantly receded beneath a mottled blush of pink. The arm dropped, limp again, exhausted.
He sucked in a ragged gasp, trembling against her chest. “I didn’t go outside. I swear I didn’t. The glass… it leaks, Ness.”
“I know, bug. I know.” Her teeth ground together so hard a molar gave an audible crunch. “I’m getting the real ampoules tonight. The ones with the red seal. Not the cheap dregs.”
“Wait. Before you go back.” Tollo reached beneath his stained straw mattress with his good hand, pulling out a sheaf of butcher paper covered in charcoal grids. “Look at the drift charts. You said the Spire told everyone the deep vents were erupting.”
Nestra smoothed the rumpled sheet. Tollo had mapped every spore-swell over the last six months, tracking humidity, wind shears from the abyss, and density gauges he’d built out of hollow tallow-reeds.
The plumes didn’t originate from the volcanic fissure at the floor of the trench. The concentric rings converged neatly, undeniably, on the high terraced gardens of Matriarch Irvina’s glass citadel.
“The Matriarch is venting them down-chute,” Tollo whispered, his pale face smeared with soot. “She isn’t filtering the air, Ness. She’s pumping it into the gutters on purpose. Why would she do that?”
Nestra stared at the charcoal lines. The skin across her collarbone prickled dry and cold. The fungal roots. They were the only things anchoring the sinking foundations of the lower wards to the canyon walls. Irvina wasn't just hoarding the cure; she was feeding the petrification to keep the bedrock from sliding into the void, sacrificing the lower thousands as literal mortar.
“Put this away,” Nestra said softly, folding the butcher paper and sliding it into her boot lining. “Don't show this to a single soul. I’ll be back before third-bell with the suppressants. Keep the vinegar rag on your face.”
***
By evening, Nestra was back on the seventy-second floor of the Obsidian Spire, humming an off-key folk tune while carrying a precarious stack of punch-cards and an oversized mug of lukewarm chicory tea. Her candy-striped secretary blouse was pinned crookedly; her pastel skirt swished against the polished black floor.
In the sub-level bio-chem annex, Chief Assayist Kroll was barking at a subordinate. Kroll was an oily man who smelled of formaldehyde and carried an ivory key-cylinder pinned ostentatiously to his lapel—the authorization token for the Spire’s secure pharmaceutical vaults.
“I don’t care if the batch calcified early!” Kroll sneered, slapping a clipboard against a pressurized terminal. “Scrape the crust and bottle the liquid. The foundry workers won’t know the difference, and the Praetor demands the harvest quotas by midnight!”
“Oh, excuse me! Oh, gosh, so sorry!” Nestra stumbled forward on her two-inch heels, her ankle rolling in a spectacular display of uncoordinated flailing.
The mug of hot chicory tea sailed through the air.
It splashed across Kroll’s front, soaking his embroidered waistcoat and drenching the console in steaming, sugary sludge.
“You idiot!” Kroll roared, hopping backward and slapping at his scalded belly. “You blind, clumsy cow! Do you know what this terminal was compiling? Three weeks of distillation data!”
“Oh no! No, no, no!” Nestra wailed, fluttering her hands in frantic distress as she grabbed a stack of clean linen wipes from his bench. “Let me help, Mr. Kroll, oh I’m just so butter-fingered today, the Praetor had me typing until my knuckles went all wobbly—”
She leaned in, flapping the cloths across his chest. Her right hand vigorously dabbed his lapel; her left two fingers, coated in a fine trace of quick-drying resin, brushed smoothly against the ivory key-cylinder. She didn't steal it; stealing triggered the biometric dead-drop alarms instantly. Instead, she pressed a pliable strip of conductive wax hidden inside her sleeve firmly against the engraved frequency pins on its base.
“Get off me!” Kroll shoved her away. Nestra hit the floor with a pathetic squeak, the stack of punch-cards scattering like dry leaves across the flooded linoleum.
“Look what you’ve done!” Kroll snarled, glaring at the sparking terminal screen, which was now spewing corrupted gibberish as the sugary liquid shorted its logic boards. “It’s wiped! You wiped the auxiliary buffer!”
“I’ll… I’ll get a mop!” Nestra scrambled backward on hands and knees, tears welling convincingly in her wide, panicked eyes. “Please don't tell Praetor Vangrim! He looked so cross today, he said he was going to vivisect a lady earlier and I really don’t think my constitution could handle being vivisected!”
A snicker rippled through the low-level lab techs watching from the benches. Kroll turned red to the tips of his ears, humiliated by the public spectacle.
“Get out of my lab,” Kroll spat, venom tightening his mouth. “Before I have the guards throw you into the sediment chute.”
“Going! Yes, right away, so sorry!” Nestra scrambled to her feet, scooped up an armful of ruined papers, and practically threw herself out through the pneumatic safety door.
The door hissed shut. The bumbling, tearful expression vanished from her face as cleanly as chalk washed by rain.
She ducked into the auxiliary pipe-chase two corridors down, peeled the wax impression from her wrist, and slotted it into a blank brass bypass-key. She slotted the key into the heavy blast door marking the entrance to Vault B—where the Praetor kept the military-grade synthetic suppressants.
She turned the key. The tumblers fell into place with a satisfying, buttery *clack*.
The pneumatic seal hissed, releasing a puff of sterile, chilled air. The thick steel slab began to grind upward.
Then, the ceiling lights turned blinding, strobing crimson.
A siren shrieked through the metal walls, high and deafening. Behind her, a four-inch titanium pressure bulkhead dropped from the ceiling with the bone-jarring slam of a guillotine, sealing the corridor in total darkness.