Page 12

Contractors May or May Not be Loaded

R elieved to finally be able to return to the safehouse, Krahe set a slow roast before she went out. The oven fortunately had a timer built in, so even if something unforeseen kept her away, it wouldn’t burn. At worst, if she were for some reason unable to go back for days, Casus would end up eating it. She surely hoped that would not be the case after the work she had put into that food, however.

Krahe spent the better part of the next day just laying low in the safehouse, attempting to translate Yao’s scroll as she familiarized herself with the new brush. It was written in the language of Tiengenzhen, the script close enough to Chinese which was, at once, a blessing and a curse. It was a laborious process, but at least by undertaking it she achieved both her goals and even gleaned a fair few insights from it already. Besides this, she also got in touch with the owner of the building she had been using until now, querying how much he would want for the property.

“Well, eh… Contractors’re loaded, right?” the owner prodded.

“High-rankers, maybe,” she scoffed. Despite Casus’ words, her conception of real-estate prices remained twisted, and so she had decided to manipulate the price downward as much as possible. “I figured I might be able to afford the place given its state and location.”

“What state?

“Have you ever lived there? You have to sleep with earplugs in because the basement ventilation is connected to the tramline vents. Not to mention, as I said, the location…”

“Yeah, the location ain’t great. Whatever. Fifty thousand, just take the shitheap off my hands.”

Krahe almost had a coughing fit, but she just barely managed to suppress it. Thankfully, the owner interpreted it as her balking at such a “high” price, and sighing, said, “Alright, forty-five. I can’t go any lower.”

“I… Yeah, I guess I can make that work,” she said with a heavy, reluctant sigh. She deceived as easily as she breathed.

To the owner, this came across as a completely normal negotiation. The price was a bit on the low side, but considering that basic maintenance on the place had been draining his wallet for years now, he was fine with taking a net loss on the sale.

“Y’want to do it now? Don’t matter shit to me. I can draft the contract right now. I’ll even sign in thaumine ink and splash some hemolymph on that bitch so you can get it notarized your own self once I’ve pissed off from this hellhole.”

Once inside, the owner drafted the contract atop a rickety foldout table on the ground floor, without much care for his handwriting, resulting in calligraphy that was merely nice rather than utterly meticulous. The atmosphere was a bit tense as Krahe cautiously went over every bit of the three-page document, but that tension evaporated when she admitted, “Looks legit. Just to be clear, I will—”

“Probably kill me if you even think that I’m screwin’ you. I know your type. Once this shit’s sold I’m gone. I’m moving to… some fuckin’ city in Afshan, I dunno. Once your name is on the ownership documents I don’t exist anymore as far as you’re concerned, and the same goes the other way.”

Once they finished signing, the owner was another step closer to being free of this property, and richer by… a moderate sum. It really wasn’t much, but then, he was selling an empty shell of a house in an unremarkable part of the city. Really, he figured he should thank her for bringing it up first. He couldn’t wait to be out of here. As a silver lining, the anathemist pulled a pair of dregstones, pressing them together for a moment before she showed him one worth the exact amount he was owed.

As he left the house, he murmured under his breath, “Fuckin’ Vedesian bullshit. I ain’t spendin’ another second in a war morph let alone a whole fuckin’ molt cycle. Piece o’ shit. Can’t believe that wise guy expects me to…”

He knew it wasn’t smart to mention those kinds of things in front of skinbags, but he didn’t really give a shit and he had no personal reason to believe that woman could even make sense of what he had said. She could, of course, but he would be in Afshan before it could become his problem.

Krahe branded the owner’s words into her brain the moment she heard them, and immediately chased after him. But he was already gone. Somehow, someway, he had vanished from under her nose, and even a meticulous search wasn’t enough to find so much as a trail. Frustrated, she took some solace in the fact that the small splash of his hemolymph wasn’t yet dry on the paper and the thaumine ink would carry his thaumic signature for some time, as was its purpose. Having no other ideas, she took it to Firminus. She had a good excuse to visit him, since she was three days overdue for a checkup, as he made abundantly and scathingly clear when he realized it was her knocking on his door.

Only once she was in the chair, her suit split down the back and her spine spilling out like some gruesome parasite, did she bring up the owner, what he had said, and her desire to find him again.

“Not so amusing when someone else is able to vanish, is it? I presume you have a lead that you believe I would help you with…” Firminus grumbled, chewing his cigarette as he spoke, poking and prodding at Krahe’s back. He pulled and poked at muscle bundles, murmuring about the bonding of her own skin with the graft-muscle and the seemingly total absence of rejection symptoms, theorizing on how the biosuit’s presence might be helping the process along.

“He signed the sale contract with imbued thaumine ink and splashed his hemolymph on it. That’s all I’ve got.”

“And what do you expect me to do with that?” the grafter balked. “Individual flymen cannot be identified by their hemolymph, and without a sample to compare it against, his thaumic remnants are no more useful. The most I can do is… perhaps cut out the signature and entomb it in a preservation cell. Is that truly worthwhile for the infinitesimal chance of this leading you back to that man? What did he even say to alarm you in such a way? Assuming you are willing to tell me, of course.”

Krahe cleared her throat, and recited, “ ‘Fucking Vedesian bullshit, I’m not spending another second in a war morph, let alone a whole fuckin’ molt cycle. Piece of shit, I can’t believe that wise guy expects me to…’ And that was it. He also said that he was fleeing to somewhere in Afshan.”

“A war morph… There are not many circumstances which can force a mature Evoy to molt into a war morph. However, it could just be a hyperbolic figure of speech; for them, at least for those of them who are not practicing Vedesians, the war morph is a sign of great and terrible upheaval. However, one man’s words don’t mean much. I would wager he just interpreted recent happenings as signs that upheaval is coming to Audunpoint.”

“And if it isn’t just a figure of speech?”

“I would prefer not to consider the possibility that he meant it literally, and I am not well-versed in the varied morphs of the Evoy. I specialize in human grafting, after all. Look into it on your own time; you ought to have access to the relevant sections. Texts regarding the Great Plague could be useful, though the involvement of Vedesians in that conflict was tertiary at best. Conflicts going further back into the past would enlighten you more as to how the Evoy became the way they are now, but those records are too dense even for my tastes.”

“I presume you cannot simplify them for my own insufficient mental faculties, then.”

Firminus stopped his ceaseless testing and sighed, thinking.

“Let us see how much I remember from the schola after all these years. They have… become docile, you could say, but also more clever. Warring with them, rooting them out of our midst, stamping out their influence, it was once among the Twin Churches’ most crucial of tasks. It still is, merely not so straightforward. Without a warlord or something greater, many of them strayed from the Vedesian faith and integrated properly into the societies of man, but they’re still the envoys of an outer god. The potential remains within each of them to become a weapon for Vedesis, or for someone blessed by her. As I see it, there is only one realistic possibility that can be drawn from the assumption of your man’s words being literal. He believes that someone in Audunpoint’s Vedesian subpopulation plans to enact a rite of communion at some point in the near future. Why or how, I can’t say. Theorizing on the motivations of purely theoretical Vedesians is not my specialty… It’s making sure you don’t stroke out in the street because you forgot your rejection suppressants.”

“I’ve not missed a single dose. Do relic grafts not have a near-zero rejection index?” she complained, though she was well aware it was a matter of accounting for edge-cases and making sure everything was going well, even if it wasn’t truly necessary.

“Near-zero. Not zero,” Firminus rebutted. “Even then, it is not a flaw in the graft, but merely accounts for non-ideal compatibility, issues with the implantation, or the aftercare. Some individuals are simply not cut out for grafting. It is the same as any other natural predisposition. We can do much to lessen the impact, but you are still changing your worldly shell far faster than any training could achieve. Also, I made it abundantly clear that spines are some of the most complication-prone grafts possible. Even without rejection, you can suffer severe issues due to small hitches in connectivity. That’s what I am trying to prevent.”

She spent another half-hour there, going through various tests and exercises meant to expose any flaws in the integration of both spinal and rib cage grafts. Once all was done, Firminus applied an oil of some kind to the exposed musculature on her back and commented, “As expected, there was some marginal desiccation due to the rushed procedure. You likely would not have noticed any issues, but this will help smooth out the bumps and accelerate the melding of individual muscle bundles. The graft muscle should fully merge within the next two months, keep it covered as much as possible until then; not that I expect you would do anything to the contrary even if I did not tell you. That looks about done. You may go now.”

Krahe rolled her shoulders and stretched after getting up off the chair, and Firminus rolled off across the room to grab another cigarette. He’d smoked the whole thing, unbothered and unburnt by it somehow. As she closed up the back of her suit, Krahe remarked, “You’re much less ill-humored of a doctor than I had anticipated.”

He responded with a somewhat sour chuckle. “And you’re much less of a headache to work on than I had anticipated,” he said, lighting the new cigarette. Wisps of blue smoke, alongside ash, rose up from it. “I have some experience working with anathemists. Torment, hair-pulling torment to work on. Every single one is a different tangle of comorbidities and horrific internal damage. Like a puzzle box made of rusty razors. As far as I have seen, it appears that you indeed possess the faculties for metabolizing anathema and its remnants.”

“A puzzle-box made of rusty razors, huh. Reminds me of something. Would you happen to know of methods to harness anathema without exposing oneself to it?”

“There are some. Why?”

“It’s not for me. I’m looking into someone at the Lost Sun Society whom I believe may be involved in something of that sort. I insinuated the suspicion on a hunch, and got a reaction that suggested I hit close to the truth.”

“I will disappoint you; the most help I can render on this matter is pointing you to a particular restricted section in the Temple of Records and submitting the access request in your stead. Section Fifty-three. If they approve it, I will send you the access permit through Casus, or failing that, give it to you when you next come for a checkup.”

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