Cassian did not cut Elodie's throat.
A throat that would give him nothing could wait.
He chose the open door instead.
Cassian's neck opened again.
It happened just after he crossed the door descending to the Red Table.
The black alignment seam parted like lips. Blood ran to his chest.
His mouth was closed.
Yet a voice came from his throat.
"I can make them forget."
The dead adjudicator's voice.
Cassian pushed his fingers into the wound. He tried to catch the black thread, but this time there was more than one.
"Close the gate."
Another voice.
"Burn it."
Another.
"The child first."
The final desires of those he had killed breathed between the streams of blood.
Cassian braced a hand against the stairwell wall.
Stone shook beneath his palm.
No.
His body was shaking.
When he dropped to one knee on the next step, a woman spoke from the dark.
"Take your hand away."
"From where?"
"Your neck."
"It is my neck."
"Which is why you should not dig through it carelessly."
A lamp came on.
An old wine cellar waited below the stairs. Six beds stood where the casks should have been. Bloodstained bandages dried along the walls.
A woman stood in the center.
Adel Venati.
Twenty-eight. Once the saint most beloved by the White Church. Now an excommunicate whose name alone could end donations to a hospital.
She wore no saint's white.
Only a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a bloodstained apron.
Old incision scars climbed both arms in layers from wrist to shoulder.
Marks left by moving other people's wounds into her own body.
Five patients occupied the six beds.
One man screamed as if his fingers had been cut off, though both hands were whole.
On the next bed, a woman with no wound on her stomach curled around herself as if her organs had been torn open.
The old man in the last bed begged forgiveness in his sleep.
There were no sinmarks on their bodies.
No wounds.
Only pain.
They were the people who received the suffering discarded by nobles in the ballroom above, carried down through the drains.
Without taking her eyes off Cassian, Adel reached behind her and found the pulse of the man screaming over his missing fingers. When his cries returned to a steady interval, she released him.
"Did you come to treat them?"
"No."
"Then?"
"I came to find who signed an order for these people to suffer."
"When you do?"
"Their pain goes back into their own bodies."
"They will die."
"That would be a judgment, not a result of treatment."
Adel looked at Cassian's neck again.
"And I am not a judge."
Adel spoke.
"Treatment is necessary."
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"I can see that."
"Not for you. For me."
She listened to the voices leaking from his throat.
"If I listen much longer, I will want to treat it."
"Is that not what saints do?"
"With permission."
Adel pointed at the floor.
"Put down the sword."
Cassian did not move.
"If you refuse, leave while you bleed. The door is over there."
She pointed to a wall.
"There is no door."
"That is not my problem."
Cassian unbuckled the sword at his waist.
He set it on the floor.
"The dagger behind your back."
The dagger joined the sword.
"Left sleeve."
A thin wire fell.
"Boots."
Two short blades emerged.
Adel waited.
Cassian pressed his tongue against his right rear molar. He spat out a poison needle.
"Enough?"
"If you hid more, that is your responsibility."
"And if I stab you during treatment?"
"That is mine."
Adel approached.
"May I touch your neck?"
Cassian did not answer.
The alignment seam opened wider.
Bone scraped out of place against bone.
Adel spoke.
"I ask once."
"If you do not answer, I do not touch you."
"Even if I die?"
"Afterward, I will ask Rosalyn."
Cassian watched her eyes.
She counted another person's pulse when they lied. Now her thumb rested against her own wrist.
She was listening to herself.
"You have permission."
Adel raised her hand.
Her palm touched the alignment seam.
It was not cold.
It was far too warm.
Heat passed through flesh and entered the spaces between bone. Severed tendons writhed as though trying to remember her fingers.
Cassian stood with his neck entrusted to her.
It was more unpleasant than offering it to an enemy with a blade.
An enemy did not hide the desire to kill.
A healer's hands chose what to save and what to discard first.
Adel's other hand supported his jaw.
"Breathe."
"An order?"
"Does it sound like a request?"
The same words Seraphina had used.
The voice was nothing alike.
Cassian inhaled.
The wound began to move into Adel.
A thin black line appeared across her neck.
Cassian's faded slightly.
One inch.
Two.
As the wound transferred, their senses reversed with it.
Cassian learned that Adel's left ribs ached whenever it rained.
Her right shoulder held a patch of cold, as though the arrowhead of an unknown soldier were still buried there.
The final fevers of hundreds overlapped within her palms.
Adel was reading his body too.
The cold of his beheading.
The pain lodged in Derrick's knee.
The sweetness of the adjudicator's breath dissolving on his tongue.
Their contact resembled intimacy, but neither could choose what the other saw. It was closer to intrusion than confession.
Adel's pulse quickened beneath his fingertips.
"Only the wound," she told herself.
"I take only the body record."
The adjudicator's voice stopped leaking from Cassian's throat.
A moment later, Adel opened her mouth.
"I can make them forget."
The adjudicator spoke through her.
Adel's eyes shook.
She spoke.
"Do not break contact."
"If we stop now, the wound will split between us."
Cassian did not lower his hand.
A scene flowed through Adel's palm.
The adjudicator's memory.
Beneath the Red Table.
Blood ran through channels of white stone.
Nobles thrust their arms into holes in the ceiling.
Blood fell from their wrists and gathered below. From farther down, someone's screams climbed against its flow.
The adjudicator read a ledger beside the channel.
Isen Bale.
Forty-five years of life recovered.
Forty-two memories stored.
Legal death approved.
A gate stood at the end of the channel.
One palm print was carved into it.
The Saintblood Drain, admitting only a saint's blood.
The adjudicator picked up a black coin.
The memory changed.
The scaffold.
Derrick's hand.
The sword passing through the adjudicator's throat.
Adel's right hand clenched.
There was no sword in it.
Yet a new wound opened on Cassian's neck.
An invisible blade followed the alignment seam.
Adel caught her breath.
The same wound appeared on her neck.
She clenched her teeth.
"Take only the wound."
"The desire is not yours."
"You already spoke it with your own mouth."
"Be quiet."
Adel pressed harder.
She was treating Cassian.
At the same time, she was becoming intoxicated by the sensation of killing the adjudicator.
One sweep of the blade passing cleanly between flesh and bone.
The completeness of ending a life without error.
Adel hated the ecstasy.
That made her feel it more sharply.
She spoke again.
"Do not let go."
Half the voice belonged to Adel.
The other half belonged to the adjudicator.
Cassian watched the line forming across her neck.
If he waited a little longer, his alignment seam would close.
Adel would receive all of the adjudicator's final desire instead.
The treatment would be complete even if she died.
Cassian calculated.
The Saintblood Drain.
The palm print.
The blood of a living saint.
Adel was useless to him dead.
He spoke.
"Stop."
Adel did not hear him.
The adjudicator spoke through her mouth.
"Do not break it."
Cassian caught Adel's wrist.
She pressed harder against his neck.
"I withdraw permission."
No response.
Cassian pushed her finger joint with his thumb.
The bone slipped out.
Adel's hand fell from his neck.
Dozens of black threads stretched between them.
Cassian seized them barehanded.
The flesh of his palm burned.
He tore through them at once.
The impact split the two bodies apart.
Adel fell backward against the edge of a bed. Black blood spilled from her mouth.
Cassian's neck opened again, only half closed.
The bones had joined, but the flesh parted with every breath.
Adel coughed on the floor.
"Are you insane?"
"You are alive."
"That is what you say to someone who nearly died?"
"Not me. You."
She caught the dislocated finger with her other hand and forced it back into place.
After one brief scream, she steadied her breathing.
"Did you break contact to save me?"
Cassian collected the weapons from the floor.
Sword.
Dagger.
Wire.
Two boot knives.
The poison needle was bloodied and could not be used again.
"No."
"Then why?"
"I need your hands."
Cassian did not explain the palm print he had seen in the memory.
Adel looked at her bloodstained hand without needing the explanation.
She spoke.
"The Saintblood Gate."
"It is beneath the Red Table."
"You saw it?"
"You did."
"Will you come?"
"No."
Adel answered at once.
"I am going to stop you from using people as tools."
"The result is the same."
"That is why I hate you."
"I have heard it before."
Adel stood.
She remained one step below Cassian, but her gaze was not lower.
"The next time you break contact without my consent, I will not treat you."
"And if you cannot hear me next time?"
"Break my voice, not my finger."
"Tell me how."
"Finding that is your work."
Adel wrapped her finger in a bloodstained bandage.
One step separated them.
Moments ago, life and desire had crossed that distance. Now it was a boundary neither could shorten without permission.
Adel lifted the lamp.
"The channel is this way."
She pushed aside the cask at the back of the cellar. Water sounded behind the wall.
A thin stream of red water ran beneath it.
Adel let one drop of blood fall from her finger.
The red water flowed backward.
Hundreds of nails scraped stone inside the wall.
Cassian drew his sword.
Adel spoke.
"I have not opened it yet."
"Something inside is opening it."
The drain beneath the wall inhaled.
Then it spoke in Adel's voice.
"Please save me."
Adel's mouth remained shut.
The same voice rose from the drain again.
"Before Cassian Crow kills me."