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Nedra slowly turned the pages, her mouth silently forming the words within. It felt like a dismissal, so I moved to the back of the lab and opened one of the cages, selecting a rat and dropping it into my golden crucible. I had my own experiments to try.

My eyes drifted to the paper pasted on the back of the door, a map of Lunar Island that had been reprinted in a news sheet. Marks indicated where the plague had struck, along with numbers—the death toll. The northern villages were mostly a collection of question marks; it was harder to collect information from there. The factories and poor district of Northface Harbor were so heavily inked that itwas nearly impossible to discern any of the writing. I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would still agree to take a factory job.

I turned back to the work table, the rat inside my crucible peering up at me. It scratched at the gold as I activated the runes.

“What’re you doing?” Nedra asked.

“Did you read Professor Xhamee’s brief?”

She shrugged. Nedra had no intention of following any of the professors’ experiments; she was using the lab for her own theories. The only professor whose opinion she cared about was Master Ostrum.

“His theory is that he can draw out infection with the pain transference,” I said. “He’s come up with a different rune combination—”

Nedra’s head jerked up. “Really? Let me see.”

I shifted my crucible, showing her the sequence of runes lit up along the side. She squinted in thought as she read them, but then she shook her head.

“It won’t work.”

It was true that, although the theory was promising, Professor Xhamee had not yet been able to get the right rune sequence to create a working alchemical exchange. But a theory couldn’t be proven until the experiment worked, and I wasn’t going to dismiss it just because we’d run into some obstacles.

Nedra continued reading her book, but she watched me out of the corner of her eye. I set up the experiment, focusing on the alchemy. The rat inside the crucible clawed at the edges, its squeaks turning frantic as the crucible’s energy boiled around it. Rats couldn’t carry the plague, but if I could draw out a minor wound infection already festering on this rodent, it would be one step closer to proving Professor Xhamee’s theory.

“You’re hurting it,” Nedra pointed out, still pretending to read.

Hurting rats was part and parcel of being an alchemist, but the rat inside my crucible seemed to be in agony that far outweighed anythingI’d seen before. I was concentrating too hard, struggling to maintain the alchemical connection, but even though I didn’t answer Nedra, my focus was shot. The rat died.

Nedra pulled my crucible closer to her when I leaned up, peering inside it with a strange look on her face.

“It’s not fair, what we do to rats,” she said.

“We should leave our patients in pain when we could relieve them of that much at least?”

I pulled the crucible away from her and tilted it to its side. The rat flopped onto the table, its claws seized into sharp angles from the pain I had put it through before it died. A twinge of sympathy shot through me. Maybe Nedra had a point.

She reached over me and picked the rat up as if it were a dear pet.

“Nedra,” I said. “It’s not ideal. It’s not fair. But the basic principle of alchemy is equivalent exchange. You can’t just make the pain of our patients disappear. It has to go somewhere. And better it goes to a worthless rodent than a human.”

“You’re just saying that because rats are ugly,” she said, her eyes still on the rodent. “If we had to sacrifice fluffy bunnies or kittens or something, more people would protest. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she told the dead creature in her arms.

“Alchemy is about equivalent exchange,” I said again, gentler this time.

Nedra ignored me. She carefully placed the rat’s dead body on the table, as if it were in a casket being laid into the ground. She held her hand out for a scalpel, and, thinking she was going to perform a dissection, I handed it to her. Instead, she carved a rune through the fur and into the skin of the dead animal. Nedra consulted the book she’d been reading and muttered some runes I didn’t recognize.

“Nedra, is that...?” My stomach dropped.

“It’s not necromancy,” she said quickly, in a hushed voice.

“But—”

“Grey.” She said so much in that one syllable.

And the rat squeaked back to life. Just a moment, just a tiny little sound, but it was deafening.

“That’s—” I started, horror growing inside me. She might not have a necromancer’s crucible, she might not be a true necromancer, but using her golden crucible to go past healing into resurrection was absolutely forbidden and the first thing all alchemists were taught not to do. Such twisted use of her golden crucible wouldn’t last, much like animation with a silver crucible failed after moments, but it was stillwrong.

The rat’s snuffling squeaks pitched higher, into a squeal, a pained sound. Its eyes bulged; its body spasmed. In seconds, it was dead again, but this death seemed much more excruciating. The rat’s lips were curled into a snarl, its sharp yellow teeth gouging the table. In moments, its fur started to sizzle, melting away in a grayish-whitish-pinkish blur, filling the room with an acrid stench. Soon there was nothing but sizzling bones.