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H e didn’t want to be at Achilles House. He wanted to be locked in a stifling greenhouse with a beautiful woman solving Dublin’s problems. In fact, he feared if they didn’t, the Plague would spread through Ireland, and though they were an island, who was to say it wouldn’t reach further? Across the Irish Sea to Wales, across the Atlantic to Canada or New England?

Instead, he was standing over a Stage 1 corpse, some of her blood still red, and making false observations for a Society he hadn’t trusted in a long time.

“Hey Prof,” Gibbs said from his doorway. “Lynch is in, and he wants you to take a look at the new arrival.”

“And he sent you, did he?”

Gibbs looked at his shoes. The lad had been awfully strange with him since that night in the pub. “I was on my way up the stairs.” He shrugged.

“All right. I’ll be right down.”

waited for Gibbs to leave, heading in the direction of the data office before he left his lab and descended the steps to the chill chamber. It was empty, save for several stiffs in their metal drawers and one laid out on an autopsy table. put on his glasses and looked her over. She was young, early twenties. Nothing was significant about her body at all, save for the small amount of what appeared to be menstrual blood on her upper thighs. If he didn’t know any better, he’d say this person hadn’t died of the Plague—of possession—at all. Surely she had, or why would the body be brought there for study?

donned gloves and took a vial of her blood—still healthy crimson. He made to return to his lab to look at it under a microscope, but he noticed something. The cadaver’s nails were caked with a substance. Lifting her hand, he inspected it, unable to tell what it was aside from seeming to be something earthy. He decided to use a spoon scraper to pry some out and deposited it into a clean specimen vial. Perhaps he would be able to decipher what it was under his microscope, or he could see if Atta might know.

Vial in hand, returned to his lab, but the moment he stepped inside, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. Something was different. Slowly, he walked around the room, trying to recall how everything was positioned—what someone would want inside his office. But everything incriminating was at home. Or with Atta.

Except her research paper. And her thesis he’d been looking over.

Oh fuck.

rushed to his desk, searching frantically for the papers. When he found them, he sank into his chair with relief, heart hammering in his chest.

But then he noticed a smudge. Looking closer, he noticed it was ash from a cigarette. The lowest form of nicotine—the kind he never partook of.