Break the bell, and the Recovery Saint stopped.
So did the patients' hearts.
Cassian learned that when the first crack appeared in the bell.
The Recovery Saint's hand entered his chest.
It pulled at the sinmarks copied from the first treatment ledger.
Saintblood pooled in the lungs.
White threads joining the joints.
Memories that made another person's sin feel like one's own.
Cassian's flesh turned like pages.
The Recovery Saint tore them out one by one.
"Recover the original."
Cassian caught its face with the relic right arm.
The eighth complete movement.
One cleric's name left a cathedral seat.
The prayers he had memorized over a lifetime entered Cassian's fingers.
Cassian did not know their meaning.
Only his mouth remembered the order.
He recited the prayer backward.
The palm-eye vomited white light.
The Recovery Saint's head struck the altar floor.
Stone split.
Its armor did not.
Nor did the arm reaching for the ledger stop.
Cassian hauled himself upright.
He dragged the Recovery Saint to the central bell rope.
The rope passed between all three thousand seats and rose to the ceiling.
It was as thick as a man's waist.
It had been braided from the confessional hair of two hundred eighty thousand citizens.
Cassian wrapped the rope around the saint's neck.
He pulled with his left hand.
The bell rang.
The Recovery Saint's neck stretched with the rope.
Once.
Its spine pulled free.
Twice.
The saintblood pouch inside its armor burst.
On the third pull, the saint reached out.
It struck the bell tower's foundation stone.
A crack opened.
The bell's voice split in half.
Screams rose outside the cathedral.
Bram's quarantine ledger shone white.
The pulse columns of ninety-three patients in the outer hospital went blank at once.
Adel raised her head from the center seat.
"Set the bell upright!"
"It has to break to stop that thing."
"If it breaks, the patients die."
"How many?"
"Ninety-three right now."
Bram's voice traveled along the White Line.
"The next crack takes fourteen hundred."
"And the one after?"
"I cannot count it."
Cassian released the Recovery Saint's neck.
It fell to the floor.
He rang the bell once more.
The broken sound joined again.
The ninety-three hearts that had stopped in the hospital began beating.
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The Recovery Saint rose too.
The same sound gave life to patient and monster.
"Find another way," Adel said.
"It keeps moving while we look."
Cassian raised the relic arm again.
Adel caught it.
"Eight people now."
"I know."
"Every time you move, one person becomes an empty shell."
"People break when that moves too."
The Recovery Saint shoved the nearest seat aside.
The bound cleric and chair fell together.
An arm broke.
The saint did not look.
It moved only toward the ledger copied into Cassian's chest.
"Then I'll stop it with my body."
Adel stood in its path.
The saint did not recognize her as a target.
Only an obstacle.
It swept her aside with the back of its hand.
Adel rolled down the center-seat steps.
Her back struck the chair bearing her dead name.
The empty name and living body overlapped for a moment.
The sins of three thousand rushed into her.
Blood poured from Adel's mouth.
Cassian moved the arm for the ninth time.
His palm punched through the Recovery Saint's chest.
One cleric forgot the faces of every patient he had failed to save.
That guilt entered Cassian's arm.
Faceless patients wept inside his fingers.
Cassian tore out the saint's saintblood pouch.
He did not throw it down.
He bit through it.
Saintblood entered the alignment seam around his neck.
The Recovery Saint tried to follow the undiluted blood into Cassian's body.
He closed his throat.
Black thread and white mission bit each other within.
Only the saint's armor remained on the floor.
The bell rang.
The nearest corpse did not rise.
The mission was trapped inside Cassian.
"How long can you hold it?" Elodie asked.
"Until the next bell."
"It just rang."
"Then a little while."
Inside Cassian's chest, the Recovery Saint moved his organs aside.
It was making a straight road to his heart.
Adel rose.
She wiped the blood from her mouth.
"I will open the center seat."
"Still?"
"I said eleven minutes."
She looked at the hourglass.
Eight minutes remained in the upper chamber.
Three had passed in the fight.
"All forty-seven are still alive."
The first rescue candidate spoke his own name.
The second followed.
The voices were weaker, but the names were right.
Adel placed her hand on the back of the center seat.
The dead name and the living hand rejected one another.
"Give me back my name," she told Cassian.
"Cut it now, and the reason you wanted it may blur too."
"Who has the right to decide that?"
Cassian did not answer.
Adel held out her hand.
"Give me Oath Severing."
The ability could not be handed over.
Cassian stood before the center seat instead.
He placed the black line in his left palm against the dead name.
One stroke would sever Adel's name from the center seat.
The escape route for forty-seven would open.
The city's success rate would fall by eight percent.
Before he drew his hand, an Imperial document descended from the ceiling.
Red wax burned through the White Line and entered.
Seraphina's signature.
`By authority of the First Princess, judicial entry into the sealed cathedral is granted.`
A smaller clause appeared below.
`All surplus sin within the cathedral shall vest in executioner Cassian Crow.`
Ria read the sentence from outside the line.
"What is surplus sin?"
Odric answered,
"Sin with nowhere to go after execution."
"So if all three thousand are killed, every sin goes to Cassian."
"Correct."
Seraphina's face appeared in the wax above the altar.
She sat in her Imperial office.
A bill rested in her gloved hand.
"You said you needed my signature."
"Did you design this?" Cassian asked.
"I authorized the final outlet for the rite network."
"To put the sins of three thousand into me."
"Otherwise they return to the capital."
"If I refuse?"
"Two hundred eighty thousand citizens receive their own sins back."
Seraphina did not use the word justice.
Nor inevitable.
She presented the choice she had built in its bare numbers.
"I also added addresses for the six hundred refugees."
"Six hundred one."
"The White Line ate another."
Seraphina amended the clause.
"If you carry out the execution, they become citizens of the capital."
"A transaction."
"It always is with us."
Adel looked at the face in the wax.
"Forty-seven can be saved."
"Probability of success?"
"Ninety-two percent."
"Cassian."
Seraphina called him, not Adel.
"Decide."
"Your law has no answer?"
"My law can only execute you after the result."
She did not say she could love him.
That made her voice feel closer.
Seraphina unfolded the bill.
Forty-seven names stood on the left.
Three thousand on the right.
"Save the forty-seven and the city's sins may reflux."
Seraphina touched the left side.
"The one who performs the rescue bears responsibility for the damage."
She touched the right.
"Execute the three thousand, and the residual sin goes into Cassian."
Adel looked at the blank on the left execution order.
"Write my name."
"A dead name cannot bear responsibility."
"I am alive enough to be a defendant."
Adel did not look at Cassian.
She stabbed the law with the same logic he had used when he said he had at least kept her body alive.
Seraphina wrote in the blank.
`Temporary defendant: Adel Venati.`
Her right to treat did not return.
Only responsibility did.
Adel signed with her bloodied palm.
"Accept it."
Seraphina folded the bill instead of answering.
After folding it, she showed black wax only to Cassian.
A number was written inside.
`Eight minutes.`
The same number branded itself into Cassian's palm.
Eight.
With every heartbeat, one edge of the number burned.
Cassian closed his hand.
His glove covered the number.
Outside the White Line, Ria saw the folded bill.
She could not see the hidden clause.
Instead, she wrote in her own ledger,
`The princess folded time.`
She could not write the number.
Ria did not know how many minutes remained.
Adel did not see it.
Seraphina did not show her.
She gave Cassian the choice.
She did not give Adel the right to see the choices with him.
Cassian did not correct her.
He no longer needed to lie.
Silence was enough.
Odric opened the execution chamber.
There was no blade inside.
Only one white line crossing the cathedral floor.
An execution line joining all three thousand throats.
When Cassian entered, the Recovery Saint followed inside his body.
The mission seeking the original gathered at the execution line.
"If I kill that thing?" Cassian asked.
"The connection between all three thousand breaks with it," Odric said.
"The bell?"
"It must ring until the end for the patients to live."
"The forty-seven?"
"They can be saved if the center seat is opened first."
Odric hid nothing.
"There is still time."
Adel came up behind Cassian.
"Cut the line."
Cassian looked at her from inside the chamber.
Close enough to touch if he reached out.
The names of forty-seven people covered Adel's hand.
"How much time is left?" she asked.
Cassian knew.
Eight minutes.
He did not answer.
He closed the execution chamber door.
Adel's hand entered the gap.
Cassian did not cut it.
With the relic right hand, he pushed her fingers out one by one.
The tenth complete movement.
One cleric forgot why he had believed in God.
The door closed.
Cassian barred it from within.
Outside, Adel asked again,
"How many minutes remain?"
Cassian turned over the hourglass.
As if the eight minutes had never existed.