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The lad followed him down the front stairs. “I left a perfectly good cadaver to save your sorry arse,” Sonder muttered over his shoulder, “so I think you can handle a smudge or two.” He made quick work of unlocking the front door and shoved it open onto empty Merrion Street. “Cross the park,” he instructed Gibbs, his tone as clipped as his patience. “It’ll get you out of sight faster. You were feeling ill and left early today. I haven’t seen you since midnight.”

Gibbs stepped out onto the footpath, and Sonder yanked him back, grabbing a white-stitched mask off the coat hook and slamming it into his chest. “Put this on, you eejit. It’s nearly dawn.”

Gibbs did as he was told and started for the park across the way but turned back, fiddling with his glasses underneath the mask to make it fit properly. “Why did you help me? I thought you hated everyone.”

Sonder debated telling him the truth of the pain he’d see if someone snitched, but he didn’t know Gibbs that well, and he really did make a mess of things. “I do.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “But I hate ledgers and don’t relish the idea of having to handle them if I sack you. Now fuck off.”

He hated that Gibbs had looked so grateful. Too grateful—like nobody’d ever been there for him before, and now he was going to think Sonder would be.

Gibbs managed to get his mask in the proper place and nodded once before bounding across the street and into Merrion Square Park with a gait that led Sonder to believe he’d never taken off at a run in his life. He could just make out Gibbs’s shadowed form as hefloppedover a bed of tulips, and Sonder winced, turning to go back into the House.

“Doctor Murdoch,” came Dr Lynch’s voice just as Sonder closed the massive oak door. The doctor eyed him keenly, from his soiled apron up to his face and Sonder tried not to clench his jaw. “How is your autopsy going upstairs?”

The bastard investor hardly ever stopped by, and certainly not in the pre-dawn hours of the morning. He’d always hated Finneas Lynch, from the first moment they were shoved into Briseis House together in grad school just like their parents and grandparents before them.

Sonder slid his hands into his pockets. “My current corpse is rather ripe. Too ripe to be of much use.”Here, anyway.

The doctor’s moustache twitched, but he nodded. “Anything of note?”

Plenty. “Not a thing,” he lied smoothly. “This Infected appears exactly like the last dozen corpses I’ve studied.”

“Take heart, Murdoch!” Lynch said it so forcefully that Sonder found himself grinding his molars together despite his efforts. “You will find answers soon.” The heels of his shoes scuffed across the floorboards as he walked away, calling over his shoulder, “The Plague cannot win forever!”

No, not if Sonder Murdoch had anything to say about it. He wanted that fresh cadaver, though. The one that had the girl spooked. The one she’d, intriguingly enough, cut into herself.

“Doctor,” he called back, and the man paused, already halfway to whichever rat he was collecting information from this time. “Don’t distract my anatomists, hm? They’re busy.”And they didn’t need Agamemnon Society’s fucking lackey weasling around.

“Yes, yes.” Lynch waved a hand dismissively. “In and out, mate.”

Sonder flipped his middle finger at the bastard’s back.

Taking the steps two at a time, he reached the landing and rubbed his hands together like a bonafide mad scientist, a blasphemous grin plastered to his face. Standing over the flayed corpse on his examination table, he couldn’t help the staccato of his heartbeat. How could he react any other way when there werevineswrapped around the man’s spine?Vines. Clawing their way up toward his heart—one even reaching for it. As if it was almost,almostthere before the man died.

“You’re coming home with me tonight, it would seem, my friend.”

Still, as he prepared his corpse for the trek to Murdoch Manor, he couldn’t help the niggling feeling at the back of his skull about the body the girl brought in. Cursing his curiosity and impatience to wait until after a solid night’s sleep, he left his corner of Achilles House behind and crept down to the chill chamber. It had been a good half hour since the girl dropped the cadaver off. Certainly, Walsh in Records would have catalogued the newest body by now, and probably already left for home, with any luck.

Sure enough, the body was in the closest chill drawer, front and centre. Sonder was surprised to see he’d not been cut into as haphazardly as he’d thought. The fresh autopsy incision certainly hadn’t been done with the precision of anyone in Achilles, but it wasn’t a complete hack job. The stitches, however, were bordering on archaic. A rushed endeavour.

Sonder moved around the body, taking mental notes of everything he could, pausing at the toe tag Walsh had written so recently that the ink was still damp.

John Doe #452, shows signs of Stage 3 Infection

A low whistle built within Sonder until he let it out.Stage 3. That meant another Infected with signs of flora.

A smile crawled across his face so wicked that his mam would turn over in her grave.

Atta

The dash clock blinked 7:06 and Atta swore, whipping her car into the farthest spot from her dorm. If she hurried, she’d have just enough time to shower, change, and make it to her 8:00 Biodiversity lecture. Provided Imogen or Colin wasn’t hogging the bathroom. Or one of the degenerates they dragged home. There were no sounds of running water coming from the bathroom when she passed by, so things were looking up.

Atta tossed her bag onto her bed and gently extracted the flora she’d plucked from the cadaver’s lung. Unwilling to repeat her earlier reaction to it, she left the blossom wrapped in wax paper and tucked it away in her desk drawer to inspect later. She grabbed her robe and rushed for the bathroom before one of her roommates could sneak in.

Rather than stripping down, Atta decided to hop in the shower fully clothed and let the hot water wash most of the mud and guck down the drain. It was a heavenly sort of hot burn after the drenching of cold rain. Summer hadn’t fully gone, but it was certainly well on its way out.

Atta wrapped the sopping clothes in a towel and shoved them under a cabinet to retrieve later when no one was home. She’d just returned to the shower and was washing her hair when the bathroom door opened wide, bringing with it the sounds of humming and snatching all the warmth from the steam.

“Christ sake,” Atta bit out. “I’m in the shower.”