By fifteen, Gael could thread a suture one-handed while holding a tray of scalpel heads like a miser clutching coins.

The mansion-clinic had grown around him like a cage with gold bars, or maybe he'd just learned to live inside it without rattling the walls. Hard to tell. For the past five years, his morning rounds in Vharnveil were as routine as the fog. The days were clean and full of honest work. Today, he mended three lacquered citizens of the upper city: a corseted noble fainting from vanity starvation, a clerk with ink-lung who needed his chest steamed open and stitched shut, and some idiot who'd broken three fingers trying to mount a ballroom ladder in the rain.

While he ran the surgery and intensive care department in place of their dad, Cara handled the polite venom of the reception counter the same way she handled everything else: bright, precise, and armed with a scalpel smile. He couldn't ask for a better receptionist. Better her than him, anyways, with half a Raven's mask strapped over his eyes. Dad had told him not to put on the lower half. Only by wearing the full mask would he become a true Plagueplain Doctor, and the Bloodless Mandate would loosen its grip on his morality. He'd rather not get any itchy, murderous urges while he was doing his day job.

But the real work happened at night.

Tonight as always, Gael and Cara went below after the city's final bell, once the maids of the mansion-clinic started turning off the lights and the streets outside rolled themselves in perfume and law. Down, down, down they went, past the spiral stairs worn thin by their own footsteps, and down into the cold where the hums lived.

The underground lab had grown with them over five years. Tubes ran along the ceiling in clear, pulsing veins. Amber reservoirs breathed. Dial faces glowed with patient numbers. Vats lined the walls with their sealed, glass eyelids, and inside floated rejected futures: half-finished limbs, suspended chimeras, and opened hearts that would never wake. All side projects of their dad's, though not one of them was finished. Gael didn't care about them too much. His focus, as always, was purely on the one workbench in the center of the lab.

The symbiote elixir.

Currently, prototype #535 swirled in a wide flask over a blue flame. Six or seven colors chased each other in the half-organic fluid like jealous saints vying for the same shrine. The smell was sharp, chemical, and faintly sweet—Griefmaker's Ichor was black as a widow's braid, necridic solvent was cold as frost chewing bone, and rimeshock bile was shimmering pale and venomous. Together, they formed the three main ingredients of the base elixir, but for the longest time, dad and Cara had been unable to proceed further because the elixir was unable to intercept curses and maladies it'd never encountered before. I

That was where Gael had come in.

The first three ingredients were responsible for birthing the semi-intelligent organism that was the elixir itself, but its power to intercept curses came from the fourth and most important ingredient: his blood, and the library of antibodies he'd painstakingly assembled one injection, one fever, and one near-death at a time.

Five years. For five whole years, while Gael and Cara kept the mansion-clinic's doors open for patients during the day, dad had roamed further and further afield, going past Vharnveil, Bharncair, and even past the Plagueplain Front itself to send back… well, anything he could get his hands on. Jars of exotic venom. Wrapped curses in salt. Fever phials that steamed in their cases. Cara would pick up dozens upon dozens of curses in their local mail station every single morning, and all of them would go into Gael's veins every single day.

Gael took them all: spider milks, hedgewitch powders, cursed orchard pollen, and viper saps. On an average day, he'd inject himself with sixty new toxins, venoms, or curses. His record was a hundred and five. He'd never gone below twenty.

And tonight, they were going to feed the elixir his blood again.

"Ready?" Cara asked, holding up her needle as the two of them sat before the workbench.

He rolled up his sleeve. His arm was pale, cross-stitched with scars and faint bruises.

"Hell yeah."

The needle bit cleanly. Red slid through the tube, bright as an argument. When it reached the coupling, he loosened the clamp and let the first curl of blood meet the elixir.

The flask shivered. Colors broke apart, then wound themselves together again around something warmer. The beak of his mask caught the glow and threw it down into his eyes.

Cara didn't look away. "Increase feed by one-third millilitre every thirty heartbeats."

"I'm at twenty."

"You're always at twenty. Thirty."

"Bossy."

"Thick-headed."

"You love me."

"Just die."

For an hour, his blood dripped into the elixir. Cara adjusted the flame, checked the acidity, and jotted down a few numbers in the margins of the ledger. Meanwhile, Gael replaced bags, changed needles, and counted his pulse through the cold metal of the bench.

They weren't expecting prototype #535 to succeed, but when the swirl of the elixir became a single iridescent light, brighter than it'd ever been—like lightning's afterimage given breath—both of them held their breaths.

"... Dearest sister," Gael said.

"I see it."

They cut the feed. She reached for the ledger—fat with five years of their days—and opened it to the first page. "Arsenicals?"

"In."

"Mercurials."

"In."

"Spider milks—glassback, widow-char, muleleg—"

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"In, in, in."

She read. He tested. One by one, they dripped every single malady they had stored in the lab into the elixir. Curses, venoms, toxins—known and unknown—folded and died in the flasks's glow. Hours passed. The lab's hum lowered to a purr. Twice the elixir seemed to fail and lose its iridescent glow; twice it learned in moments, correcting itself with his blood.

When Cara finally closed her book, her hand was shaking.

"That's the knowns," she breathed. "Twenty-two thousand curse-malady entries that humankind currently knows of and then some more, even including the unknown classes, have been successfully neutralized by the symbiote elixir"

"And the molting curse from the Pier Quarter?" he asked.

"Already in metamorphic."

For a moment, neither of them spoke. The glow from the flask painted the lab in shifting color, sliding over the glass and steel like it belonged there.

Then their hands met in a sharp smack. The sound rang off the walls. Cara laughed first—all bright, girly, and clean—and then Gael followed with a low, crooked cackle.

"Sixty a day!" he shouted over the hum of the bioarcanic machines. "Toxins, venoms, curses—breakfast, lunch, and dinner for five years straight—and we fucking did it! It's finished!"

"And you're still short!"

"And handsome!"

"Eh, that's debatable."

They laughed until the sound worked itself into the hum of the lab. When they stopped, the elixir still glowed.

"Now, now, we have to move onto the administration phase," Cara said, already murmuring to herself as she hopped off her stool and paced around the lab. "Intravenous is the obvious plan, but it's slow. Aerosol risks contamination. Dermal? Intrathecal?"

"Don't you dare say suppository."

"I wasn't."

"You were thinking it."

"I was thinking micrograft."

"You were thinking it."

She tossed a flask at his head. He dodged it. She tossed another at him, and this one shattered against his mask. "Be serious. We need to know thresholds, dosage, and half-life. Will the symbiote elixir stay keyed to your antibody library permanently? It should, but it may want regular encounters with its index of antibodies, so…"

Gael eased the flame until the elixir's simmer turned low and content. The air still smelled faintly of wet leaves, and the elixir was still iridescent.

It wasn't a dream.

They could think about the administration phase later.

"... We did it," he whispered, eyes still glued to the elixir. "Now, imagine Bharncair without its garden of sickness."

"A panacea against all curses," Cara murmured back. "Let's tell dad."

"Yep."

The two of them didn't walk so much as climb the stairs two at a time, the iridescent flask clutched in Gael's hand like a torch he meant to shove in the face of God. Soon, they reached the cooler, quieter floors of the mansion-clinic and burst through the double doors of dad's office without knocking—and the room immediately smelled of bitter ink and rain-wet wood.

Dad sat slumped against his desk, long fingers resting on an open ledger. His top hat lay tipped back on the blotter like a crown without a head, and he looked up slowly when they entered.

"What is it?" he murmured. He reached for his hat, set it on his head with care, and smiled at them.

Gael's words tumbled out before sense could catch them. "Prototype #535. Full antibody saturation. All twenty-two thousand known curse-maladies neutralized—plus the unknown class, plus repeat intercept capability, zero degradation. She's holding steady after four hours at idle flame, and…"

While he kept on rambling, he couldn't help but notice dad's skin seemed more sallow than usual.

It made sense, Gael told himself. Five years of running the city's veins and the world beyond, chasing down every poison, every sickness, and every curse he could find to ship home to be pumped into Gael's veins meant he'd spent five years coming in contact with the things most people burned, bottled, or buried. Of course he was tired. Of course he looked frail. Of course he hadn't come downstairs to the underground lab in an entire year already.

He was dying slowly—not from any curse or malady the elixir could intercept, but from simple age and weariness.

The thought soured Gael's mouth.

They'd made something that could kill any curse in the world, but it wouldn't buy dad back a single day.

Of course, it didn't help dad's stress that in the past few months, the clinic had been drawing more attention than a bleeding man in a shark pond. Big names. Heavy boots. Organizations that normally slithered in shadows now knocked boldly on the front door, curious—or suspicious—about why a quiet upper-city clinic was importing dozens of crates of exotic venoms and bottled curses every single day. Dad had always sent them away with words sharp enough to shave bark, but the memory of those visits itched at the back of Gael's mind.

"... The clinic," Gael eventually asked, setting the iridescent elixir down on dad's desk. "We're still doing fine, right?"

Dad didn't answer the question. Not directly. He just rubbed Gael's head, his hand warm but lighter than it used to be, eyes fixed on the iridescent flask on his desk. He didn't even try to take it for himself.

"You've gotten really damned smart, you know that?" he murmured. Then his gaze flicked to Cara as well. "Both of you. Good job."

He beckoned the two of them closer. They stepped in, wary at first, and were thoroughly surprised when he suddenly pulled them into a tight hug.

Cara's smile was easy. Gael's came slower.

When they pulled away, Father coughed into his sleeve, then straightened. "Now. If the elixir's finished, we have to move onto the administration trials. Phase one. Go back downstairs and get the first setup ready."

Gael was about to suggest they start tomorrow—on account for dad's weariness—when a heavy knock came from the front door downstairs, rattling the wood in its frame.

Both Gael and Cara immediately turned towards the sound. Gael's jaw tightened. Cara crossed to the window and twitched the curtain aside.

Rain streaked the glass, blurring the streetlamps, but the figures outside were clear enough: they were a whole knot of black-coated churchmen, hoods gleaming wet, led by a Plagueplain Doctor whose beaked mask reflected moonlight like a blade.

Gael's mouth curled. "It's them."

"They've come to harass us again," Cara said, glancing back at dad. "You think they've somehow caught wind of what we're doing here? That they want the symbiote elixir for themselves? We should—"

"No," dad said, grabbing their shoulders and turning them away from the window. "You two go downstairs. Prepare the test. I'll deal with them."

Gael frowned. "If they want the elixir, they're going to have to go through—"

"Downstairs, Gael," dad cut in, his voice calm but final. "Get yourselves ready in the lab."

They hesitated, but his tone left no space to wedge an argument.

Reluctantly, they stepped back from the desk. As they left the office, dad returned to the window, the rainlit street reflected in his dull, watery eyes.

On the stairs down, Gael didn't speak. Neither did Cara.

But the bad feeling sat heavy in his chest, like the air had tilted and they'd all started sliding towards something they couldn't see yet.

And for some reason, he felt he just knew tonight wouldn't end clean.

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