Once Cara finished reading Alana's letter, she placed it down on the surgical table between the three of them like it was a curse.

The lanterns around the chamber guttered. Shadows quivered on the walls. The acidic downpour outside had turned into a full-blown storm—truly the worst it'd been in months—yet nobody dared to break the silence now.

Not Gael and Cara, sitting on two stools on one end of the table, and not Maeve, sitting on the other end with her hands pressed into her lap until her knuckles blanched.

But Maeve couldn't bear the silence.

She couldn't.

Clearing her throat, she forced her voice out.

"... It's alright," she said, brittle as glass. "The clinic can still go on without me. After all, we've spent six months doing good work: we've cleared out Myrmurs, healed tons of people, and now… with the fountain, there'll be more folk who will come of their own accord. Even if there's no pretty face at the front counter anymore—not that I'm that pretty anyways—the clinic will be fine."

The small laugh she tried to force out at the end never reached her throat.

"That's why… it's okay. I think—"

"If all your mom needs is some trinket, some… What'd you call it?" Gael leaned back in his stool, scratching the back of his head. "A Blood-Draining Knife? Can't be that hard to make. Get me the schematics and I'll have someone get someone to make it for her. We can afford to pop our coffers a little for your mom."

"But that isn't the point,' Maeve said quickly, softly. "Mom owes her employer her life. Even if you could replicate the Blood-Draining Knife—and I don't think you can, because the schematics are secret Symbiote Exorcist property—mom would still choose to stay with her employer. She feels she has to."

Gael's laugh cracked like dry timber. "No. What she meant was simpler. She'd rather not be near me."

Maeve's lips parted. "That's not fair. She only said that because of your mask, and because she's a former Exorcist. You know what that means. She's clashed with Ravens all her life up in Vharnveil, so… so of course she's wary."

"Oh yeah?"

"But if I can work with her for a little bit, and if I can show her what you're really like—what this clinic is really like—she'll see. She'll come around. I know she—"

"And you?" he said. "What, you still don't like the mask? Six months under the same roof, six months sharing my bed—making me sleep on the couch, actually, while you hog my bed—and you'd still rather have the 'real me' without the mask?"

Her heart skipped a beat.

"No!" The word leapt out, panicked and hot. "I didn't mean it like that. I only meant… the people here, and the neighboring folk, they're still afraid of you because they don't get to know you! And you don't get to know them! If you just take the mask off sometimes—"

He clicked his tongue, sharp as a lash, and raised his bottle of alcohol to his lips. The glass neck clinked against his beak as he drank deep, and when he lowered it, his words were bitter and black.

"It's always the mask," he muttered. "Couldn't give less of a shit what everyone else thinks, but even after six months, huh? Half a fucking year?"

Maeve swallowed hard. "Then what do you want me to do?" she whispered. "Mom gave me a choice: either I cut ties with you and the clinic by tonight, or I lose my chance to have a real relationship with her. What am I supposed to do?"

Gael tilted his head, ravenlike, as he waved his bottle around absentmindedly. "Well, a real mother wouldn't give you such a rotten, abrupt ultimatum. Six months you've been here—six months—and she demands you abandon it all in one night? Ludicrous. You call her your mother? She's a grave dressed in lace is what she is. There's something fishy about this letter anyways."

Maeve opened her mouth, half‑ready to defend her mother, but Gael cut her off like a knife snapping bone, jabbing a gloved finger across the table.

"Look, why are we even up here squabbling when the prayer hall's lit for celebration?" he said. "There's nothing to argue about. You swore an oath. I bleed with you, I hunt with you, and in return, you wear the face of this clinic. You drag its name through the mire until it shines brighter than every other clinic in the city. That was the deal."

"I know that was the deal. I was there, too, that night we—"

"So this means nothing to you? Six months breathing fresh air, six months healing, six months driving the vermin back and making wretches smile for the first time in years… did all of it mean nothing to you?"

Maeve's breath hitched. Her throat worked. She swallowed until it hurt.

"It does matter," she whispered, her voice splintering. "I like helping people. I like it when they smile at me. I like it when they say I'm… pretty." The word caught in her teeth like a thorn. Her gaze rose to him, unsteady, glassy. "But in the beginning, I… I only agreed to all this to find my mom. I told you as much. And now that I've found her—because of everything we've built here that'd last even without me—I want to live with her. That was all I ever wanted. That was why you agreed to... that was why I agreed to…"

She didn't finish her sentence.

She sensed she was about to let slip something she couldn't ever take back, so she didn't say it—and yet everyone knew what she would've said.

Gael knew what she would've said.

"So you 'agreed' to be with a Plagueplain Doctor, huh?"

The chamber shrank to silence.

Cara's lips stayed pressed, her hands tight in her lap.

Gael said nothing.

Maeve shifted under their stares, her nerves crawling, and she tried to cut the tension with a desperate, wavering smile.

"But… you know, this isn't the end!" she said quickly, lifting her hands because she didn't know what to do with them. "Of course not! I'll visit secretly without mom and her employer knowing, and I'll help out whenever I can! I like Evelyn! I like Liorin! I like… I like the hounds, and the Vile Eater, and I like the prayer hall, and that statue of the crooked Saintess, and, you know, Fergal and his goons have mellowed out recently as well, so—"

"So she really was the one who killed my dad and put these scars over my face."

She paused at that.

Gael sighed, raising his bottle and tipping his head back again. "I mean, I figured you were related to her somehow—not a lot of Exorcists use that umbrella weapon model, I assume—but she was your mom this entire time, huh? Talk about... fate. Or is it misfortune?"

"... She's not a bad person."

"Oh yeah?"

"She took me in when I had nowhere to go. Nobody left."

"Sure didn't take me in."

"She saved me."

"How many others did she abandon after she 'saved' them, you think?"

"If you'd just give her a chance to—"

"Whatever." Gael rubbed the back of his neck and started chugging his bottle. "Don't bother. It's not that big a deal. If you wanna go, then go. I figured a silver-tongued Exorcist would spit on her vow eventually. Your mom sure did spit on hers, leaving me in that shitty orphanage without having the guts to look me in the eye once."

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Maeve flinched.

The way his dark green eyes narrowed behind his lenses hit her like a nail through the skull. Cara immediately looked like she wanted to snap at Gael, but for Maeve—for an instant—the chamber blurred, and she was no longer here.

She was back in that wreckage—on that cold, golden day where that Raven had come for her.

She remembered being small, her lungs seared raw from screaming, staring up at the Plagueplain Doctor who'd just slaughtered her family. He'd worn the exact same gaze then: green, cruel, unyielding, and utterly uninterested about her, the only accidental survivor of his cruel crystallization experiment.

Her stomach lurched. She gagged against her own breath, nearly retching as her body folded in on itself on the stool.

Still Gael drank. His bottle tilted, the liquor slid down his throat, and still he made it a point to look down on her.

Like…

Like I'm a…

Something inside her cracked.

... Like I'm nothing.

Her shudder twisted into a snarl, her nails biting her palms until blood pricked her skin.

Then she ground her teeth together until they ached and lifted her chin, meeting that dreadful green glare with her own.

"You know what?" she growled. "If you don't want me here, then fine. It's your clinic anyways."

Her stool screeched back. She stood so fast her knees cracked, her dress snagging on the legs of the table as she strode to the surgical cart by the windowsill.

While the storm outside roared like a beast battering the walls, her hand closed around a heavy butcher's blade, its steel glinting under lantern-light.

Neither Gael nor Cara moved at first. They didn't seem to understand her resolve, so she showed them. She lifted her left leg and slammed her boot onto the sill, rain-slick shadows falling over her as she aimed the edge of the blade to the iron cuff around her ankle.

"Maeve!" Cara's voice was sharp with alarm as she stood, but Maeve ignored her.

She hacked.

Once. Twice. The sound was awful—metal screeching, sparks flying against glass—and her arms trembled while the butcher's knife shuddered in her grip, but she brought it down again and again. Normally, the bloodshackle cuffs and chains couldn't be cut. The system was built to withstand everything short of the sharpest of attacks from the strongest of Myrmurs, but she'd been the one who bought these blades for Gael's surgeries. These were the sharpest blades money could buy from the Black Bloom Bazaar. She'd told herself she wanted Gael to have the best. Now, she was glad she had.

Hack. Hack.

Gael sat there on his stool, bottle in hand, staring at her through those dreadful glass lenses.

Hack. Hack.

Cara tried to move forward. Maeve shot her a glare that kept her back.

Hack.

Hack.

Her muscles burned. Her lungs heaved. The bioarcanic cuff rang louder and louder against the sharp steel until finally—on a desperate swing that jarred her whole body—she heard the split.

The cuff cracked apart, and it clattered onto the floor with a metallic scream.

Immediately her chest seized. Her free hand flew to her breastbone as fire coursed through her body. Bioarcanic essence surged wild and unbridled, crawling through her veins, prickling and stabbing her muscles as if ants were marching beneath her skin.

Her end of the system was gone. No more essence regulation. No more careful control. She still had her enhanced strength and mutations, but without the system to control all of it, every motion felt… off, like her body no longer belonged to her. And the thought of eating Nightspawn flesh again? Impossible. Without the interface to help her safely attribute 'points', she'd twist into a monster the moment she took a single bite of it.

Even still, she clenched her jaw until her teeth screamed, and then she looked up at Gael.

"... This is what you wanted, isn't it?" Her voice shook. Her eyes burned. "From the very beginning. You only took me in and accepted me because you wanted a system yourself. You wanted to get stronger. If you could have it with anyone else, you would. Anyone but me—a silver‑tongued 'Exorcist' you detest so much."

Her foot snapped out, kicking the broken half of the cuff toward him, and the clink rang across the floorboards

"Then take it," she hissed. "I don't need to be an Exorcist anymore. You've still got your end of the cuff. All you need is a new 'Hunter'. Sure, they'll start with all their physical attributes at level one, and they'll have to go through the mutations all over again, but with your impeccable guidance, they'll catch right up to me in no time. That's what you've always wanted, right? Someone you can control and jerk around on a leash?"

Still he said nothing. He only stared at the cuff lying by his boot as if it were a relic that'd crawled out of a grave.

Her breaths came faster. Her heartrate spiked in her chest. Before she could show him even more weakness from accumulating her toxic blood in her veins, her eyes fell on Mistrender, propped against the windowsill she was still leaning against.

She grabbed it.

The umbrella was a physical memory. She'd had it for almost as long as she'd been an Exorcist, but…

With a sharp swing, she hurled it across the chamber. Gael's hungry flower snapped out, biting it out of the air without even needing him to rise from his stool.

"You can give that to your next Hunter, too," she said, her voice quivering with a heat she couldn't control. "For the trouble."

With nothing left to say, she shoved the window open. The storm clawed its way in at once—rain lashing the chamber floor, wind tearing at papers and curtains, the world outside howling—but though the chill struck her bones, she didn't stop.

Her body screamed with pain as she swung herself onto the sill and vaulted out.

Cara's stool toppled behind her as she lunged forward, but she was too late.

Maeve dropped.

Two stories down, her boots slammed into the sodden ground with a shock that rattled her teeth. Her knees almost gave, but she caught herself, staggering upright as the storm swallowed her whole. She hadn't taken her mask from her closet, either, so she was immediately breathing the acidic mist that the clinic had worked so hard to get rid of indoors… but what was a bit more pain and suffering at this point?

She lurched forward. One step. Another. Her strength faltered, her balance broke, and she crashed shoulder-first into the nearest wall.

Gritting her teeth, she pushed herself off and glanced down. A rusted pipe lay abandoned in the gutter, half-submerged in muddy runoff. She stooped, hands trembling, and snatched it up, using it as a cane to steady her stumbling gait.

Her legs dragged her onwards. Her chest burned. Every breath was a blade in her lungs.

And still—still—she looked back once.

The clinic rose in the storm's haze, its windows bleeding pale lantern-light. There, in the frame above, Cara leaned out with rain plastering her hair to her cheeks.

Her mouth shaped words Maeve couldn't hear, so Maeve turned away and forced her eyes forward.

I can't stop.

I can't look back again.

Her hand tightened on the pipe until her knuckles split. She staggered into the storm, tears rising hot to her eyes.

This is what I wanted.

This is what I fought for.

Her vision blurred, but she blinked hard, ground her teeth, and refused the sob pressing at her throat. She couldn't cry. Why would she? This was exactly what she'd wanted all along, and now that she had the address of her mother's employer, she was going to go straight to her dream.

So she alone trudged on through the storm, her pipe scraping the stones as she refused to look back.

Gael's free hand was still slack around his bottle while his flower snacked on Mistrender, but his eyes were nailed to the broken cuff on the floor.

The thing could regenerate just like the chain could extend endlessly. He wasn't worried about it. He could slap the Hunter end onto any normal person and have them obtain the Wasp Class, thus creating a new Hunter-Host pair.

And the Exorcist was right. This time, he could choose anyone to be his Hunter.

Anyone.

Suddenly, the front door behind him and Cara groaned open. Two small faces peered in, their masks pale against the dark of the storm outside.

"...What's goin' on?" Evelyn whispered. "Aren't… aren't we supposed to have the party?"

For his part, Liorin didn't say anything. Behind the two of them, though, Gael saw taller, bulkier shadows: Fergal and his five goons stood like carved gargoyles, staring pointedly at the open window that Cara was still leaning out of.

For a long while, Gael said nothing.

The lantern sputtered.

His bottle sweated cold against his palm.

Then he tilted his head just enough to glance at the children, and when he spoke, it was with a crooked smile that was, admittedly, too sharp to be kind.

A problem he didn't exactly feel like fixing now.

"The Exorcist is gone," he said lightly. "We're not married anymore."

Liorin cracked his head sideways. "What that word mean?"

Before Gael could shape an answer, Evelyn shoved the door wide and stormed in, her boots ringing sharp on the boards.

Her small fists were balled, and her jaw clenched.

"What does that mean?" she asked. Her small fists were balled, and her jaw was clenched, but Gael didn't bother arguing back. Instead, he flicked Mistrender through the air, and Evelyn stumbled back as she caught the full weight of the bioarcanic weapon.

With that, he rose from his stool and tipped his head back, guzzling down the rest of his bottle until the very last drop of it was gone.

"She doesn't wanna work here anymore, so she left," he said. "What part of 'not married anymore' do you not get, dumbass? Now you keep the umbrella safe for me. It's yours for now."

He turned away from all of them after that. His feet dragged against the floorboards as he walked, slow and heavy, towards his bedroom at the back of the chamber.

Cara reached for him as he trudged by. "Gael—"

"Go celebrate," he muttered, shrugging her hand off. "Drink your fill, sing your hymns, and kiss the fountain. I just got a new idea for my next upgrade, so don't bother me."

And then he stepped into his bedroom, hooking the door shut with a slam that left the clinic ringing like a struck bell.

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