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“Well, fuck me into next week.” Good ol’ Carl. He wheeled the first body out to his transport van while Atta wheeled the second out behind him.

As soon as Carl’s taillights faded into the fog around the dark street corner, Atta locked up Gallaghers’ tight like a fort and crept back downstairs to her John Doe.

Scalpel in hand, she completed her incision from earlier, but as she reached for her rib cutter, she realised two discomfiting things. She didn’t have a body for Achilles. And she needed to return the very cutter in her hands.

It was likely she wouldn’t receive much payment for the cadaver as it was since she’d sliced the man open and he was rather ripe already.

At least she had a gurney available this time.

Sadder than was warranted or sane, Atta checked the perimeter of the morgue and wheeled the body and her medical bag of precious tools out to the boot of her car.

Sonder

The ice clinked in his glass as Sonder took another sip of whiskey, draining it. He sat on the edge of his desk and unbuttoned the collar of his black shirt—it was bloody anyway. The manila folder on his desk stamped withARIATNE MORROWglared up at him. He’d yet to open it and debated doing so, but the whole thing rather annoyed him.

Reluctantly, he lifted one edge, about to flip it open, when he changed his mind and threw the whole damned thing into the rubbish. If Mariana hadn’t made copies for her records before giving him the file, it was her own fucking fault.

Eyeing the flayed corpse across his lab, he poured himself another glass from the most expensive bottle he had stored at Achilles House. One of three his father had been saving for special occasions he’d never get to see.

Sonder, however, did have occasion to celebrate tonight.

That Stage 3 corpse had left him one step closer to proving his hypothesis correct.

After he’d cut apart the sloppily stitched sutures, he’d been greeted by exactly what the pretty girl mentioned last night. There were signs of flowering in the lungs. And the heart.

Sonder swirled the amber liquid in his glass and strode over to the body, looking down into the open chest cavity.

In fact, he could tell precisely where the girl had hastily torn out a bit of the flora for herself. She’d failed to take the root, instead ripping off the stalk, like one might carelessly rip a hellebore bloom from a garden. She hadn’t mentioned the heart, and the bud there was so fresh, so new, he suspected it wasn’t there before and half-expected it to grow before his very eyes. If he kept it under the correct conditions, it just might.

Tyres crunched on gravel outside and Sonder moved to look out the window, staying hidden so he didn’t have to don his infernal mask. Watching from behind the curtain, he recognised the car. An old 70’s something or other in the exact shade of brown as his favourite shoes. Her face sprang to his mind, unbidden, before she even stepped from the driver’s side in a plaid skirt.

Christ sake. He hated the way he noticed the fit of it over her hips as she walked to the back door of the House and banged with the knocker. He couldn’t see her expression clearly from the second floor, but she sure beat the hell out of that door, the sound meeting him from both outside the window and up through the House. She had a medical bag clutched in one hand. An old style from the 50’s, and he felt a stab of envy for it. A thing of beauty. Presumably, it was filled with the instruments he’d demanded she bring back.

She glanced up suddenly, looking right into his window, and Sonder slunk back into the shadows to grab his mask.

Atta

Her mood had soured considerably by the time she made it to Achilles House.

Hauling her doctor’s bag out of the passenger seat, she stalked up to the back door and banged the gargoyle knocker against it with the full force of her ire.

A curtain twitched from somewhere up on the second floor and her attention shot to it just in time to see someone scurry back into the shadows.

The door groaned open and Atta scowled up at the Black Stitch Mask who greeted her.

“Here.” She shoved the bag of tools into his chest with enough force that he grunted. “I want that bag back. And there’s a body in the boot of my car.”

The Black Stitch said nothing, only turned and went inside. Atta waited on the front step with her arms crossed, looking up at that window where someone had been spying on her. It was late and she was cold and wished they’d just hurry up.

A few moments later, the silent Black Stitch came back out and unceremoniously handed her the bag. She popped the boot open and tossed her grandfather’s old medical bag into the passenger seat while the Society bloke hauled the body out and dropped it onto a gurney he’d dragged out the side door behind him. It made a racket on the gravel and Atta wondered what the passerby might think—bodies coming in and out at all hours—if the back of the House hadn’t been tucked up in a copse of trees unseen from Merrion Square.

Atta leaned against the bonnet of her car, ankles crossed and her coat pulled tight around her while she waited anxiously for her payment, hoping the Gold Stitch prick wouldn’t tell her never to come back after bringing two opened bodies. It wasn’t like she’d removed any vital organs or anything. She’d done them a favour, really, getting the process going.

The White Stitch gangly lad came out then, handing her an envelope.

She opened it quickly and thumbed through it. “This is half what I should be paid,” she called to his retreating form.

He turned around and shrugged. “It was cut open and tampered with. That’s not the deal.”