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There was no saving this man. Not when his chest was ripped open by the feral growth of flora, sprouting right from his lungs, his heart.

Atta moved forward quickly, not allowing herself to think. To feel.

Sonder rushed to the man’s other side, scalpel in one hand, black salt in the other.

It wouldn’t be long. His lungs were a tangle of viscera and vines already crawling up the wall.

“If you see vapour,” Sonder said, “get your mask back on or get the hell out.”

Atta tuned out the screams and refused to feel the writhing of the Inhabited man. When this was over, she could feel. Mourn. Retch. Console a widow who was outdoors praying they could save a man already sentenced to die. But right now, she needed to focus.

Calming herself and closing her eyes, she reached out and let her fingers rest along the inside of his arm.

Behind her eyes, the pain and buzzing began, spreading to the back of her skull. She couldn’t see anything. But she could hear. A voice like a child of lily-white innocence, but it felt wrong. Off-kilter.

Cut your eyes, one at a time, scoop them out and make them mine.

Atta gasped.

“Close your eyes!” she shouted at Sonder over the patient’s screams.

“But the vapour!”

“Now!” she commanded.

“Atta, what’s happening?” he shouted back.

“I can’t see, but I can hear it—smell it, even.”

“Smell it? Can you track it, then?”

“I’m not a fucking hound!”

“We have to dosomething.”

He was right. They had to do something. If the Inhabited man perished, the faerie would leave. If Sonder’s parents were the blueprint, the faerie would need both its host—the soil—and a living person—the nourishment.

Oh god,they hunt for pairs.Mrs McDonough and her son. Lauren Kennedy and her lone roommate. Sonder’s parents.

Eyes still squeezed shut, she listened, followed the voice of the girl, followed the scent of loam and petrichor. There. Beneath the screams of a man being ripped apart by flora, was a pixie faerie, tucked behind the heart, already dissipating into vapour. “Tourmaline,” she shouted. “Behind the heart, hurry!”

She felt Sonder move next to her, his practised anatomist’s hands sliding into the open chest cavity. The girlish voice turned to screams that joined Mr Byrne’s.

How were they to trap it with their eyes closed? Atta panicked in the split second before the solution came to her. It needed to be immobilised. “Get me your embalming fluid in a syringe. Keep your back turned!”

A moment later, she felt Sonder place a syringe in her left hand, and she jabbed it into the place the faerie was hiding. At first, she thought she must have missed, but then the scent turned cold. Not gone, not lost, but like the first frost over dead leaves.

Mr Byrne’s cries turned to whimpers.

The pixie’s to sobs.

The sort used to lure in a kind heart, only to devour it.

“It’s immobile,” Atta said. “We can open our eyes. Just don’t look in its face.”

Fighting back a bout of terror that she might be mistaken, Atta opened her eyes slowly. Sonder, who apparently had more confidence in her, already had his eyes wide open, his hands desperately trying to staunch the black blood oozing from Mr Byrne.

“End this,” she told him. “He can’t be saved.”