Page 51

G ibbs blinked at her where she stood with a dripping bottle still poised to spray a fern. “. Please don’t take offence to this, but are you seriously going to walk into a patient’s room and squirt him?”

“We’re not trying to look grand,” she spat. “We want effective.” She gestured roughly to the plant that had gone from wilted to steaming to a dried-up husk.

“I’ll grant you it appears effective.” He stood, shoving his hands into the kangaroo pouch on his Trinity hoodie. “Nothing left to do but drive you lot there, then.”

The three of them must have looked completely mental in their plague doctor masks, pulling up to a fancy house in a Volvo. Their appearance didn’t seem to deter the woman who came rushing out as soon as Gibbs’s tyres hit her drive.

She was an average middle-class wife in Chinos and a knit blouse, but she was clearly beside herself. Mrs Byrne rushed for the moment she exited the car, her lip wobbling and eyes watery.

“Oh, thank goodness you’re here. You must hurry.” The woman pulled along so quickly she almost tripped, Sonder on their heels.

Before they even made it through the lavish entryway with its polished floors, it wasn’t difficult to understand why she was in such a rush. The Inhabited, Mr Byrne, bellowed from wherever he’d been stored to await his final moments.

exchanged a look with Sonder, cursing that she couldn’t make out his face, and they all picked up their pace, climbing the stairs two at a time.

“Oh my. Oh Jesus,” Mrs Byrne cried. “What’s happened? He hasn’t made a sound in days. I–”

Outside the door of the sick room, Sonder gripped Mrs Byrne’s shoulders firmly. “This is where you trust us to do what you called us here to do. Go outside. Get some air. Do not come in, no matter what you hear.” Tears streamed down her face. “Do you understand?”

The poor woman was shaking, looking from Sonder to the closed door and back, but she nodded.

“There you are.” He gently squeezed her shoulders and turned her around, back toward the stairs.

Whether it was the screaming or curiosity that drew him, didn’t know, but Gibbs had ventured inside the house and was standing at the foot of the steps.

“Go with my friend, there. He’ll keep you right as rain, yeah?”

“Okay.” The word was barely a whisper, but she made it down the stairs, only looking back twice.

Gibbs, bless him, wrapped his thin arm around Mrs Byrne and ushered her back out into the drizzly afternoon.

Sonder ripped off his mask and did the same. There was something bordering on fear in his eyes, and she had little doubt the same was reflected in hers. “He’s screaming,” she said stupidly, but it made Sonder’s face change.

It was Professor Murdoch who looked back at her. “The plan has not changed. You are well equipped for this. Trust your gut.”

Her gut was afraid. Roiling. “First things first,” she said to Sonder, forcing her back ramrod straight. “I need to see what I can sense.”

“I’m at your command, darling.”

She nodded once and took hold of the knob, inhaling deeply before she twisted it and opened the door.

Nothing in all the world could have prepared her.

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.

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.”

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.

gasped.

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

“But the vapour!”

“Now!” she commanded.

“, 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 do something .”

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? 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,” said. “We can open our eyes. Just don’t look in its face.”

Fighting back a bout of terror that she might be mistaken, 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.”

Sonder only gave her the briefest of nods, a pained look in his eyes before he used his scalpel to slice the heart irreparably. The last breath, the first Mr Byrne ever took when he was free of his mother’s womb, left him.

There was no longer any need to rush. Something about that fact was what caused the first fissure in her heart. But there was still no time for that. Not yet.

On wooden legs, bent to retrieve the open specimen jar next to their satchel filled with the embalming liquid of Sonder’s own design.

“Move the heart,” she directed Sonder, who reached into the chest again. “Careful of its eyes,” she warned. He nodded and looked away, moving the heart just so. “A little more to the right,” she instructed, hoping the faerie was still in the same position she’d sensed, so that her eyes would meet only its bony feet.

There they were, skeletal. Tiny.

She pushed away a leafy frond with her fingers, pinching at the creature’s phalanges with tweezers. Still as stone, as if it were frozen or taxidermied, it slipped free from Mr Byrne and Sonder let the heart go. He moved to hold the specimen jar for her, but his hands were too slick with blackened blood. Cursing, he wiped it on his coat and managed to get a grip on the jar. Very carefully, slipped the faerie inside.

Sonder closed it, and they stood back, watching in awe as the embalming liquid sizzled. The faerie twitched and went still again. Dead. Frozen in time. It was a scientific success. It was miraculous. But looked at Mr Byrne’s body. Thought of his wife. And the success felt hollow.

While Sonder slipped off his ruined coat and called the medics using a phone down in the kitchen, collected samples of the flora that had crawled up the wall behind Mr Byrne as they’d worked. It had all but taken over the ceiling, too, the fan drooping like a weeping willow.

“Shall we?” Sonder asked quietly from the doorway and nodded, pulling a sheet up and over Mr Byrne.

They gathered their supplies and walked outside to alert Mrs Byrne of her husband’s death.