Third night in the Gulch, and the pipes are whisperin' again. Not the good sort of whisper. It's like a wench croonin' in your ear, but the... the wet kind. The kind that slides down the wall like phlegm and asks if you've still got skin to spare.

'Every drip's a clock tick, only the hands spin backward.'

I took the Spine-Valve road, or what really passes for a road down here. Rusted iron ribs stitched into the wall like a drunk surgeon's work. Thought I had my bearings. Thought wrong. Pipes twisted themselves behind me, grinnin' like old teeth, and when I looked back, the same shaft I crawled out of had sealed up with fungus blooms fat as plague bellies.

Passed a grate stuffed with shinbones, all gnawed hollow, marrow slurped clean as if some gutter-hound grew clever hands. Heard lullabies, too, floatin' from a culvert that wasn't there when I turned. Sang sweet like Saintess Severin herself. But I weren't fool enough to follow. Not unless I fancied wakin' up gutted and worn like a glove.

Still, the Gulch breathes water. Saw it gushin' in black streams, hissin' steam like a dragon's last cough. One right artery, one right vein, and we could bleed it into the streets above. Bharncair thirsts, and I'm the daft bastard sent to slake it.

Now, just how the hell do I break a new pipe?

– Excerpt from 'Journal of Harn Velth', last cartographer fool enough to map the Gulch

No matter how close it was to the clinic's growing brilliance, Miss Alba's little noodle shack was always squeezed between an abandoned pharmacy and a lung-rot fruit station, and perched on stilts above one of Blightmarch's minor tributaries: a slow, moss-colored stream that carried away corpses and deadlier things.

The shack swayed slightly with every breeze, creaking like an old lung, and the morning's broth had a suspicious green sheen that Gael chose not to question. Maeve, across the table, was eating much more politely as always. Back straight. Legs together. Chopsticks held like she'd been trained in a dining etiquette school. She'd even wiped her bowl before eating.

Freak.

"You look less miserable than usual, Maeve!" piped one of Miss Alba's kids, waddling over barefoot in tattered shorts. His little sister trailed behind, both staring up at Maeve like she'd grown flowers out of her head.

Maeve blinked, halfway through chewing. "Pardon?"

"You look happy," said the girl. "You're smiling."

Maeve glanced quickly down at her reflection in the soup. Sure enough, she was smiling. Her eyes widened slightly in horror, and she immediately looked away.

"... Ah," Gael said, pointing his chopsticks at her as he grinned at the kids. "That's because she spent the last three nights awake reading her new horror chronicles. She devoured volumes six through eleven like they were communion wafers while crouching in the back of the clinic eating Myrmur meat straight out of barrels, and all the while, the only thing that came out of her mouth was incomprehensible bitchings about ghostly nuns and possessed hospitals. What a horrifying sight."

"I… I did not," Maeve said, scandalized and slightly embarrassed. "I... I used a plate."

"Debatable," Gael said quickly. "Anyways, she's infected. Best not to talk to her or you'd catch a curse as well."

The children stared at them in unison for a second before racing off in terror, and of course, he got a good kick under the table from her for slandering her name.

They finished breakfast soon after and got up. Maeve paid at the little wooden counter while Gael inspected the rat skulls nailed to the walls, and Miss Alba, wiping down a bowl with a rag as worn as her lungs, gave Maeve a gentle smile.

"Be careful, whatever it is you're doing."

Maeve nodded politely, but Gael immediately glanced over his shoulder. "What makes you think we're about to do something?"

Miss Alba snorted and clacked a bowl down in the sink. "Maeve is one thing, but you never wake up this early for breakfast noodles unless you're about to die. You're usually high off your powder and sleep through the sun."

Gael grinned, teeth bared under his mask, and then the two of them quickly ducked out the door.

The street outside was barely waking. Pale smoke curled from vents overhead, and a thin veil of dew had turned the cobblestones damp and reflective. They walked twenty meters to the right, crossed an iron bridge covered in trash, and then stopped right in the middle.

Below the bridge, the shallow river gurgled with filth. Gael looked over the edge, then back at Maeve.

"No one looking?"

She shrugged. "No one worth worrying about."

Without another word, they vaulted the railing and swung themselves under the bridge, dropping into the slow-moving water with twin splashes. Their boots landed in sludge, and Gael swore a little as a bit of water seeped in through his supposed-to-be water-proof boots, but his irritation quickly grew as they immediately found what they were looking for.

There, right under the bridge, was an opening to a large, yawning, circular tunnel, big enough to fit an entire carriage. Its rusted rim was lined with fungal growths and old paintings. The inside, however, was pure black—no light, and no movement but for the hollow breath of old air.

He clicked his tongue.

"...Can't believe the closest entrance was right under Miss Alba's shop," he muttered. "Nine hundred Marks I paid. Juno was probably laughing her second ass off when she sold me this information, but.. fuck it. Whatever."

They clicked their hip lanterns in tandem. Bioarcanic light shimmered to life, one from each hip, and the light immediately cut through the black in front of them, catching the glitter of fungus veins and the glistening sludge trails of something that'd recently entered—or exited—the tunnel.

"Stick close," Gael said, eyeing the gloom. "These tunnels don't like separation, and I'm pretty sure they're not fond of reunions either."

"But we're literally chained together," Maeve muttered, jerking her ankle forward. "You stick close to me."

"I'm the one with the map, the flares, and the better intuition."

"I'm the one who can kill something if it jumps us."

"We both ate our full Myrmur portions. That puts us on equal footing."

"In numbers, maybe." Maeve sighed, stepping into the tunnel with the certainty of someone who didn't care about his opinion. "But I'm stronger where it counts."

"Emotionally?"

"Physically."

"Eh, that's debatable."

"I lifted a closet to get Evelyn's head out of it last week."

"A light closet. That was a light closet."

Their voices echoed through the tunnel as they walked into the dark, bouncing off the curved stone in mismatched rhythms. The space swallowed every word, stretched it, twisted it—water dripped constantly from unseen heights. Rust patterned the walls like old blood, and occasionally, the crunch of something brittle underfoot made them pause and glance down.

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Sewer bones.

Fucking sick.

Of course, they squabbled the whole way through. Something about tunnel ambience made their bickering feel strangely appropriate, like background music in a dysfunctional opera. Maeve pointed out Gael's steps were too loud. He pointed out she walked like a pompous wraith. She accused him of hoarding the lantern light. He accused her of hogging the moral high ground.

Then, without warning, Maeve halted about ten minutes into the tunnel.

Gael nearly kept walking—until her arm shot out and caught him.

He looked down.

So did she.

They stood at the lip of a sudden drop. A shaft opened up beneath them, wide, circular, and perfectly vertical, like someone had punched a hole through the floor and forgotten to add stairs. Their lanterns revealed only the edge; the rest fell into solid black.

Maeve crouched, picked up a little rock, and dropped it in.

One second. Two. Three.

…

There was no clink as far as they could tell.

Gael whistled. "That's a leg-breaker."

"Or a spine-snapper," Maeve said.

He fished the rolled-up parchment from inside his coat and unrolled it against his knee. Unfortunately, Juno's so-called 'map' was less a map and more a suggestion—a drunk cartographer's napkin doodle, blessed by the gods of vagueness—but still, it showed enough.

"Right," he muttered. "So this is the drop we need to descend to get into the actual Gulch Pipelines. That's where the main veins run—see these lines?" He pointed to a cluster of scratched circles, and Maeve leaned over to take a look. "They feed under the entire city, which definitely includes the clinic. If we get down there and find the pipes that run directly under the clinic, and then we find the main valve, we can open the flow and send Gulch water through our pipes. Step two: we build some vertical pipes to run the water straight up to the clinic, but let's find the pipes first before we think about that nightmare of a task."

Maeve squinted between the map and the abyss below them.

"No ladder?"

"Nope."

"No lift, scaffolding, or safety net?"

"Nope. Thankfully, I came prepared." He reached into his cloak, already grinning at the smooth pull and the satisfying heft of his jury-rigged, rust-stained beauty.

But before he could pull out his harpoon gun, Maeve just stepped forward and walked straight off the ledge.

Her umbrella snapped open with a satisfying thwump, catching the stale air and lowering her gently into the black abyss.

"... Show-off," he muttered.

Sighing, he let go of his harpoon gun and reached around his back, jammed a hand beneath his back collar. His fingers immediately found the smooth curve of one of his new chitin-lined hexagonal alcoves. No flesh, no nerves. At level two, his 'Basic Repository' mutation had evolved two hexagonal alcoves about fifteen centimeters deep on his back—he'd probably have ten of them scattered like honeycombs down his spine if the mutation were at level ten—so he was using them to store only the most important of items in a Plagueplain Doctor's inventory:

Alcohol.

He pulled free a small bottle of 79% brown-gold, twisted the cap with his teeth, and took a long swig.

Instant fire.

Ahh.

Fuck, this is good.

Then he walked off the ledge as well, and mid-fall, snagged the Exorcist's ankle.

"Hey," she grunted, her umbrella jerking slightly.

"You're my parachute now."

"Get your own umbrella."

He just took another swig and enjoyed the slow, floating descent through rust and shadow.

The vertical shaft dropped deep—far deeper than he liked to think about. Their twin lanterns glowed dull gold in the dark, illuminating pockmarked walls crawling with pipe stubs, hatch mouths, dead wires, and fungus blooms that pulsed softly with bioluminescence. Hundreds of smaller tunnel openings dotted the walls like bullet wounds, vanishing into fog and rust.

Maeve was silent for a long stretch before muttering, "What is this place, really?"

Gael grinned.

"The Gulch Pipelines," he said, raising the bottle. "Once upon a time, back when Bharncair was just a really unpleasant dream instead of a full-on plague fantasy, this place was a normal sewer. It acted as rain drainage, waste disposal, and those boring sort of things, but when the rich fucks gathered in Vharnveil and lifted the entire district in the middle of the city up into the sky fifty something years ago—the City of Splendors, as we call that piece of shit now—they decided to take the city's most important facilities up with them."

"I know that part."

"Right. So those of us left down here had nothing left. Vharnveil took the clinics, the churches, the banks, the academies, and most important of all, the shit buildings."

"The... what?"

"Sewage facilities," he grumbled, taking another swig. "They took their set of pipes and flew up with them, but since they also took the central sewage command facilities with them, we had nothing left down here. Now, with no engineers, architects, and people with more than half a brain down here, what do you think we all did in the aftermath of Vharnveil fucking off with the command facilities?"

"... Improvisation?"

He gestured lazily around them. "The Gulch Pipelines are fifty years of every neighborhood in Bharncair trying to fix its own sewage problems in isolation. Everybody needed pipes, so everybody sent someone down here to build something, break something, or reroute something—usually drunk, stupid, and drugged. Nobody coordinated. Nobody shared notes. A guy from the next block over could come down here to install new pipe systems under his house, but by next week, someone else would've rerouted his pipes for their own house the next next block over, so—"

"It was a war," she finished. "The Bharnish fought over these pipes. Since everybody could just come down here and mess with the pipes for their own benefit, you've turned the Gulch Pipelines into a labyrinth after fifty years."

He shrugged. "Well, most people stopped coming down here twenty or so years ago. It's getting too damn complicated for amateurs to navigate, and fighting here sucks."

"And the Nightspawn? Are they—"

"Oh, yeah," Gael said cheerfully. "Nightspawn and Myrmurs love these pipes. Wet, deep, and dark—what's not to love?"

Ten minutes of slow, swaying descent later, their boots finally hit the bottom with a wet slap. They were ankle-deep in something that smelled like boiling mushrooms and sounded like quiet breathing, and the bottom of the shaft opened into a wide, low cavern with rust-bloated pipes running across every wall like vines choking a corpse. Dozens of tunnels branched off in different directions, each yawning with the same slack-jawed emptiness. One was partially collapsed. Another buzzed with unseen bugs. A third oozed something yellow.

Maeve frowned as she surveyed the mess.

"And… are we not making all of this worse by adding more pipes?" she mumbled. "I mean, if we build a new one to reroute the Gulch water under our clinic, wouldn't we just be—"

"You're in Bharncair," Gael muttered back, corking his bottle and slipping it back into his body's storage alcove. "The city gets worse every time someone tries to fix something. It's tradition. What's one more pipe from us gonna do that we can't make up for by treating our patients better?"

He pulled out the map again and snapped it open with a flick of his wrist. The parchment really was limp, stained, and crinkled beyond saving, but it was still readable.

"First things first," he said, squinting at the smudged lines and drunken angles. "We need to get directly under the clinic. That's our main goal. Once we know which vein feeds beneath us, we can mark the route, and then we either pay some poor idiots to build a pipe upward or we do it ourselves."

Maeve was still staring at the branching tunnels with barely concealed unease. "And… you can navigate with this map."

He opened his mouth. Closed it. Squinted again.

"Well, in Bharncair, if there's a will—"

A sound cut him off.

Distant. Sharp. A rattle of metal.

Then a shrill scream.

Both of them snapped their heads toward the tunnel furthest to the left. More shouting followed, warped by the acoustics: panicked voices, someone crying out, and a muffled slam. It was the kind of noises that made rats run the other way, so he folded the map with practiced speed and immediately headed towards the tunnel further to the right.

"Nope. That way's cursed. We're going the opposite direction—"

Maeve grabbed his sleeve. "What if someone's hurt?"

"They probably are," he said flatly. "This is the Gulch Pipelines. Everyone who comes down here voluntarily has brain damage, including us, so—"

"What if a child who got caught up in some accident does need your help, and you left them to die?" she said, calm but clipped. "Can you live with that, Doctor?"

He stared at her.

Just stared.

The lantern light painted pale gold across her cheek. Her hand was firm on his coat. The tunnels gaped around them like mouths waiting to see what choice he'd make—but the Exoricst was starting to understand him too well, and he didn't like that one bit.

So he groaned, rubbing a hand across his mask.

"... You're getting more and more irritating by the day, you know that?"

Her cheeks tugged upwards, and he swore she was smiling beneath her mask.

"Fine," he grumbled, turning back towards the screaming tunnel. "We'll check it out, but if it's a Nightspawn mimicking a human voice, you're fighting it alone."

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