It'd been a while since Fergal visited the Heartcord Clinic, but he'd heard the rumors about the miniature forest that'd popped up around Asphodel Lane the past month.

He just hadn't expected them to be true.

Approaching the front of the clinic from the main street, he noticed the hedgerows outside the clinic had been trimmed into soft cathedral arches, and the flowerbeds lining the cobbled path burst with color, stubbornly refusing to wilt under the city's rot. Someone had swept the gravel by the sidewalks clean, raked the moss between the stones, and arranged the potted witch-cress in mirrored pairs. A woman's hand, no doubt, or just a really, really skilled gardener.

He strode forward, boots grinding grit, his coat heavy with the early morning fog. His five bodyguards followed him, and their presence alone was enough to make the people walking nearby turn heel and vanish. A wrinkled man in prayer beads dropped his gaze and made the Saintess's sign. A woman dragging a cart of empty vials tugged her shawl tighter and turned away, quickening her pace. All sorts of peaceful, upstanding citizens were already hanging around the audibly soothing clinic at this time of day, but none of them wanted anything to do with the six of them.

They were gangsters, he supposed.

The front door creaked open with a push of his palm, and he stepped into the prayer hall. The air inside was colder than outside—unnaturally clean, too. There was something offensive about how clear the chapel smelled. White soap. Burned basil. The stale sweetness of drying bandages.

His eyes swept the hall.

Forty of his men filled the pews and prayer benches. Not praying, of course. They were half-bandaged and still recovering from yesterday's battle. Some were binding wounds. Some were checking gear. One was stitching up a gash on his own leg, needle clutched between his teeth, but they all looked up at once when he stepped in like hounds spotting their master.

They rose in unison, no command given, and saluted his arrival. He only nodded at a few of them as he walked through the center aisle in silence. They were all bruised, but not broken. They could fight and explore the pipes today.

The Plagueplain Doctor really is a doctor after all.

But speaking of the man himself…

At the end of the aisle, past the pews and behind the altar, the crooked statue of the Saintess waited. Her head was broken at an unnatural angle as always, kept onto her neck only by a roll of bandages, and so he kept staring at her pitiful figure as he waited for his two new assistants to come out to meet him.

Right on cue, the thump of footsteps on the stairwell next to the altar drew his gaze upward.

Gael and Maeve descended from the surgical chamber on the second floor, both carrying heavy satchels. Their boots thumped against polished steps, and they looked like they hadn't slept.

He didn't speak until they reached the ground floor right in front of him.

"... Let's look for the central command chamber today again," he said curtly. "Are the two of you well enough to walk the pipes."

"Yep," Gael heaved, struggling to carry his heavy and bulging satchel while Maeve hefted hers with ease. The two of them barely acknowledged him and his Repossesors as they started walking past him. "Also… we've got one more person tagging along this time. Keep an eye on her for me, will you?"

Fergal's brow furrowed. "Who?"

A tap on his shoulder made him whirl.

Who…

…

Cara.

The older lady stood behind him in patched overalls and heavy boots, a small satchel slung across her back like a war drum. With a quill behind her ear, eyes sharper than they needed to be, and a smile that looked equal parts tight and excited, she was absolutely glowing with energy this early in the morning.

"Miss me?" she asked teasingly. "It's been what, a month? I didn't realize you boys were waging a full campaign down in the pipes. I would've liked your help trimming and shearing the trees outside, but oh well."

Fergal offered a measured smile—tight at the edges, polite by habit—because something about her tone prickled at the back of his neck.

Before he could ask what she was disappointed about, Gael and Maeve slipped past him without pause, their boots tapping down the polished carpet toward the front door.

"Let's move," Gael called. "We're burning daylight."

Fergal watched their backs recede into sunlight and incense. Then his gaze flicked back to Cara.

"You're coming too?"

She answered with a sigh that could scrape the mold off a pipe wall, and she strolled past him, one shoulder brushing against a stunned Repossessor who instinctively stepped aside.

"Yep," she said. "My dearest little brother has requested my charming company in the depths below, since, apparently, your maps are less reliable than a drunk's confessions. I'm going to correct that."

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Fergal scowled. Deep lines carved themselves into his face as he turned to follow her steps with a frown like a storm cloud.

"The Gulch Pipelines aren't a drawing room," he said sternly. "They're no place for a civilian. You can't just—"

Later that morning, the pipes swallowed them whole.

All forty or so of them stood at a four-pronged junction deep beneath the bones of the city. Water slithered along the cracks of the walkways. Mold bloomed thick and pulpy around the pipe joints. Bioarcanic lanterns hung from their hips and belts, casting puddles of sickly blue light across the wet iron, and all of them stood still with their arms folded.

Forty men held formation around Cara in hushed reverence, weapons slack, eyes wary as she paced left and right in the center of the junction.

Her footsteps made no noise on the damp stone. She had his old map in one hand, and in the other, a quill plucked from some half-forgotten university satchel. Her brows were furrowed. Her mouth moved constantly, murmuring to herself in syllables that barely seemed to belong to this district, and even Fergal had to admit he had no idea what she was saying under her breath.

"Compression from the third valve's torque shouldn't be sloped this far west. That's a false vector," she whispered, drawing new lines, crossing out old ones. "Wind divergence between pipe two and pipe four… the atmospheric disparity's stronger there. That implies there's a collapsed upshaft, and that means…"

She turned on her heel, looked up from her map, and then pointed down the rightmost tunnel.

"We go right," she said confidently. "Pipe four follows the main pressure vein, and the ventilation pitch has increased by three degrees the past three turns we've made, which means we're running alongside a primary channel. If we stay the course, we should veer closer to the central control chamber. If we hit a dead end, that's fine as well. It'll just mean pipe two's the definitive right way to go, so we can circle back to this junction and take the second pipe."

Gael immediately chuckled. "Well, you heard her. Get to it."

The Plagueplain Doctor didn't need to say it, but he did anyways, giving a lazy shrug as he started down the rightmost pipe like it was already guaranteed to be the right answer.

Maeve followed immediately, her boots clicking briskly against the wet stone, and Cara trailed after them like she was on a morning stroll rather than a descent into the rotted veins of the undercity.

…

Fergal paused. Just for a moment. Then, with a small grunt, he gestured for his boys to move. They surged behind him without a word, boots and buckles and leather patchwork cloaks swaying with uniform weight as they fell into a practiced, quiet formation.

The deeper they went, the more the pipes pressed in around them, narrowing into coiled tunnels of condensation and rust. Every breath tasted like old metal and damp wood. Cara led the way confidently still, map in hand, her head tilted with thoughtful intensity as she glanced up and around every corner.

"That incline's too steep," she said, squinting at a crack in the wall. "The pressure must've shifted eastward since the last collapse… I bet we're under the old sewage siphon layer now, close to the Black Bloom Bazaar."

Maeve glanced at her. "You're really good at this."

Cara smiled faintly. "I should be. I learned most of it in the academy."

To that, Maeve tilted her head. "I thought you and the Doctor didn't go to school. You were both Sallow Hearth children, right?"

The tunnel suddenly felt a bit quieter, and for one long moment, neither of the leading siblings spoke.

Then Cara replied, a touch too breezily, "We didn't go to the same school. That's all. My training's a bit different than Gael's."

Fergal, walking three paces behind them, narrowed his eyes.

That's a lie.

He'd heard enough lies from desperate, dying men to know the rhythm. That pause. That smile. That softness in her voice. And above all else, her hair.

Down here in the dripping dark, the pipewater didn't lie. Droplets clung to Cara's short, braided black hair, and some of the water bled faintly down the tips of her hair. Beneath it, a sheen of tarnished gold showed through. Muted, but utterly unmistakable.

Gold hair. Almost no one in Bharncair had it. And that takedown move she'd executed on that halfling Myrmur two months ago—that move she'd tried to sweep under the rug by saying she just needed to rein in the Plagueplain Doctor sometimes—was a Mortifera Enforcer move. An instant-kill technique.

She's a pure-blooded Vharnish from the golden city alright.

Now the question is…

He glanced forward at Gael's back and narrowed his eyes. If nothing else, the Plagueplain Doctor was slum-born. A true Bharnish.

So why the charade?

Why pretend to be siblings?

"... What about you, Maeve?" Cara, still marking her map as they walked, tilted her head and spoke without looking back. "Any siblings?"

Maeve gave a small shake of her head.

"A pity," Cara replied with a lilting hum, pretending disappointment. "Only children are dangerous. You get used to silence too fast." Then she glanced over her shoulder, eyes sharp, catching Fergal just behind them. "And what about you, Finger? Got any siblings of your own?"

The tunnel dipped into quiet. Fergal didn't answer right away. The lanterns swung from their belts and cast mottled light along the dripping pipe walls, and somewhere behind them, water hissed through a crack in the ceiling.

Then he said, "A little sister."

Cara's voice turned soft, but not gentle. "Does she know you rob limbs as a career?"

The men behind Fergal stirred—barely audible shifts of posture, a subtle tightening of shoulder—and some of them glanced sideways at her, just briefly, as if waiting for the reprimand.

But Fergal only exhaled through his nose and kept his pace steady.

"She knows," he said. "She knows exactly what I do."

Cara nodded like she believed him. Like she respected it. Then she looked ahead again—and stopped.

The tunnel ended.

A flat slab of metal blocked their way, covered in rivets and bolted plates, crusted with mold and grime. No levers. No valves.

"Well," she said, squinting at the curve of the pipe ceiling, "that settles that. This is good. It means we can eliminate pipe four with certainty, so let's circle back to the junction and go down pipe two."

As all of them turned together, forty shapes filing back down the slick stone corridor, Fergal took up the rear for a brief moment.

Talk of siblings had left a splinter in his ribs.

He reached into his coat and pulled free his old pocket watch. The chain caught slightly before slipping loose, and he popped the lid open with his thumb.

Inside, behind the cracked glass, was the ink drawing—faded with time, worn at the edges—of two children standing together in a crooked alleyway, arms linked.

She'd drawn it for him herself, once.

…

He stared at it for a while, walking in silence, lanternlight flickering across his eyes.

He hadn't lost it.

He still had it.

With a small, final click, he closed the watch and returned it to his pocket—and then he kept walking, soft steps echoing behind the others, as Cara led them forward into the dark.

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