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A splinter lodged itself beneath his skin as he slunk back from the window. lifted his plague doctor mask and yanked the damned sliver of wood out with his teeth. Tossing the mask onto the pile of papers atop his desk, he made for the dank corridor, sucking at the little red bead of blood that bloomed on the pad of his finger.

“Gibbs,” he said by way of greeting as he strode into his quiet corner of Achilles House. “Did you give someone medical tools as payment for cadavers?”

Bernard Fitzgibbon was kind, with big brown eyes and a mind for statistics and organisation, but he was a sheepish young man and had a habit of making a right bags out of just about everything. It drove out of his skull. He wanted to throttle sense into the lad.

“Ye’.” Gibbs risked a fearful glance at before returning his attention to his desk, his glasses slipping down his nose where he was hunched over an open ledger. “That pretty, macabre girl? She asked me for them instead of money, and I thought saving the House some cash would be a good thing,” he stammered.

looked over his shoulder out into the hall. There were always rats listening. Reporting back. Maybe if he spoke slowly, the lad would understand. “You know anything at the House must be disposed of properly.”

Gibbs finally looked away from his ledger, but he still didn’t look him in the eye. couldn’t fathom what in hell he did in those ledgers all day, but it benefited Achilles and its overlords while the rest of the anatomists stayed busy with their hands dirty, so he kept Gibbs around.

heard the back door finally bang shut and the girl’s tyres crunch down the gravel. He crossed the small room to Gibbs, hauling him up by the arm despite his half-hearted protests. “You need to get out of here.” pulled him along, the blood on his leather apron smudging Gibbs’s pristine white shirt. “If Walsh opens his mouth about what you did, retribution will be expected.”

“I’ll leave,” Gibbs whispered shakily. “Just please let go, you’re getting gore all over me!”

The lad followed him down the front stairs. “I left a perfectly good cadaver to save your sorry arse,” 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 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.”

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 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 to believe he’d never taken off at a run in his life. He could just make out Gibbs’s shadowed form as he flopped over a bed of tulips, and winced, turning to go back into the House.

“Doctor Murdoch,” came Dr Lynch’s voice just as closed the massive oak door. The doctor eyed him keenly, from his soiled apron up to his face and 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.

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 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 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.”

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 were vines wrapped around the man’s spine? Vines . Clawing their way up toward his heart—one even reaching for it. As if it was almost, almost there 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. 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.

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 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.