"Do you consent?"
Cassian did not.
The voice had come from inside his own neck, and it belonged to Adel.
He pushed his fingers into the seam.
He found the little mouth and caught its tongue first.
The mouth asked again.
"May I open your neck?"
"No."
"Then don't come in."
A door opened beneath the burned wagon wheel.
Stairs led downward.
There was no handle on the inside of the door.
Only one white handprint.
Ria placed Adel's prescription over it.
A bell rang below.
It was not sound, but a pulse.
The patients lying underground all felt their hearts beat at once.
Cassian stepped onto the first stair.
One finger of the white handprint folded down.
"You did not consent."
Adel's real voice came from below.
"I know."
"And yet you're coming down?"
"You told me not to come in."
"What difference does that make?"
"The door was already open."
Adel sighed.
It was far colder than the imitation inside his neck.
* * *
The underground hospital had no name.
No sign.
No license.
The patient cards at the foot of each bed were blank.
The moment a name was written, the Church would seize it as a treatment record belonging to the dead saintess.
The patients called one another by bed number.
First.
Fourth.
Ninth.
Only the twelfth bed held two people.
There was one body.
And two voices.
When the man inhaled, he groaned in his own voice.
When he exhaled, he spoke in Cassian's.
"I forgive you."
The shackles around the man's wrists had been severed.
He was one of the eleven released from the western execution ground.
An accounts clerk who had stolen imperial taxes.
Bran Ork.
Adel sat beside the bed.
She wore no saintess's white.
Her black apron bore no crest.
A scalpel rested in her right hand.
Her left hovered an inch above Bran's throat without touching it.
"He has not permitted contact."
"Him?"
"That voice."
Bran wept.
Cassian's laughter came from his mouth.
"Forgiveness is treatment."
Adel looked at Cassian.
"Are those your words?"
"I don't speak like that."
"I wasn't asking about the words."
"Then what?"
"Whether you fathered that voice."
Cassian did not answer.
He had cut off the idol's head.
He had scattered the lies.
He had never made the voices.
Only the mouths.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
Adel accepted his silence as an answer.
"The prescription was not sent to you."
"It had my name on it."
"I sent it to patients infected by your voice."
Adel opened an empty medicine cabinet.
Dozens of identical prescriptions lay inside.
Relief wagons.
Prison trays.
Burial shrouds.
One had been hidden in every object believed to carry the Black Saint's grace.
Cassian had not found one because he was a patient.
He had found it because he was the largest object carrying the sickness.
"You've been following me."
"A hospital cannot move when a plague walks toward it."
Adel closed the cabinet.
"Where is the original record of my death?"
"It was in the cathedral."
"Was?"
"Cut apart with three thousand others."
"And the copies?"
Ria answered.
"One in the imperial court, one in the Papal recovery vault."
"Bring me both."
It was not a request.
"Why?"
"So I can decide whether to remain dead."
"Do you want to live?"
"You ask me that?"
Adel selected a clean scalpel.
"The man who kept my body alive and killed my name."
Cassian watched her hand.
The scar left by the black mouth remained on her fingertips.
With that hand, she demanded ownership of her own death.
"Is that the fee?"
"I am not treating you."
"What about him?"
Adel looked at Bran.
"He pays by his own choice."
"Then why am I fetching them?"
"Because you're the debtor."
Ria wrote on a fresh page.
`Adel Venati.`
The dead name would not set in ink.
It ran down in black drops.
Ria pressed a finger to it and trapped the name in her fingerprint.
"I will record it."
Adel shook her head.
"Only bear witness."
"Is there a difference?"
"A record always ends up owned by someone."
Ria put down her pen.
This time she did not write.
Cassian did not apologize.
He stared for a long time at the blank Ria had left.
Even an empty record could bear witness.
* * *
Bran's belly had swollen into the shape of a key.
Metal turned beneath his flesh.
It was the freedom he had gained when his shackles broke.
Freedom had pushed out an organ and settled in its place.
Each breath dragged the key along the inside of his ribs.
Ria asked,
"Was he infected by hearing the command?"
"No."
Adel pointed her scalpel at the swelling.
"It grew because he obeyed and profited."
"Profited how?"
"For him, freedom."
Adel indicated the other beds.
Bread crust grew over First's tongue.
He believed he had eaten the Black Saint's grain.
The faded conscription brand on Fourth's ankle peeled away like skin.
He was a soldier who believed he had permission to desert.
Ninth carried her dead husband's hand inside her belly.
She was a widow who believed the command to return.
The hand taken from the coffin knocked from inside every night.
"Sound is only the entrance," Adel said.
"What the sickness feeds on is benefit."
"If they give it back?" Ria asked.
"Some may recover."
"Then he only has to surrender his freedom?"
"It means returning to prison."
Bran sat up.
"No."
For the first time, only his own voice emerged.
"Don't treat me."
Adel set down the scalpel.
"Understood."
Cassian asked,
"You'll let him die?"
"He refused treatment."
"That voice may have said it."
"And that gives you the right to decide?"
Adel looked at Bran.
"I will ask again."
The key inside Bran turned.
A lock opened beneath his skin.
A black mouth pushed through his navel.
"Don't treat me."
This time it was Cassian's voice.
Bran covered his own mouth with both hands.
He shook his head.
Adel raised the scalpel.
"The refusal has been withdrawn."
The blade opened his belly.
Keys spilled out before blood.
Doors Bran had failed to open in prison.
The safe that held the stolen tax ledgers.
The back door of the house he had failed to flee.
All his freedom became metal and rolled across the floor.
Adel reached among the keys.
The black mouth bit her finger.
Cassian caught her wrist.
Adel spoke at once.
"Let go."
He did.
The mouth tore flesh from her finger.
Instead of screaming, she pinned its tongue with her other hand.
"You may hold it now."
Cassian reached in again.
This time he seized the mouth, not Adel's wrist.
The little tongue trembled between their hands.
At that distance, no one could tell who was treating whom.
Adel let her blood run over the back of Cassian's hand.
"If I tell you to let go, will you?"
"Once."
"And twice?"
"We'll see then."
"That is why I do not treat you."
She cut off the tongue.
* * *
Bran did not die.
The keys inside his belly did not vanish.
Only the largest came out.
The key to the western gate of the imperial prison.
A black thread extended from its tip.
Cassian recovered one severed tracking thread.
It passed through the hospital wall toward the relief court.
"Aaron."
Ria spoke the name.
Adel's hand stopped for a moment.
"His records are still there?"
"Both the record that says he died and the one that says he lived."
Cassian pulled the thread.
Bran's neck moved instead of the wall.
The man's face turned toward Cassian.
"Cut it," Adel said.
"If you keep pulling, his vocal cords will tear first."
"It gives me the path."
"Will it give you the man too?"
"He's already here."
Cassian fed the end of the thread into his seam.
He joined Bran's voice to his own throat.
Adel caught his jaw.
One finger pressed the black crown mark.
"I can paralyze it."
"What?"
"The crown and the voice."
"For how long?"
"As long as you live."
"The command authority too?"
"Your words will never open another door."
Adel's was a healer's hand.
It was also the hand that could kill the cheapest power he had ever gained.
Cassian refused.
"Let go."
Adel did not.
"You killed my name without permission."
"I remember."
"Because you kept my body alive."
"That too."
"This time it is the reverse."
She pressed harder against the crown mark.
"Killing this power can save your body."
"I don't consent."
Adel watched him for a long time.
His pulse beat beneath her fingertips.
Once.
Twice.
She withdrew her hand.
"Understood."
Cassian had won.
Because Adel had kept her principle.
That hurt more than treatment.
"Instead."
Adel lifted the bloody scalpel.
"I decide when to sever the connection."
"Why?"
"Because it is that patient's body."
Cassian did not answer.
Bran's voice entered his lungs.
* * *
The connection opened both ways.
Cassian saw the tax ledgers Bran had stolen.
Bran saw the necks Cassian had cut.
The adjudicator.
Isen Bale.
Odric.
And Aaron.
Thirteen years old.
A face with one broken front tooth.
One hundred and thirteen people's sins lived inside him.
Not one belonged to Aaron.
The boy cried.
He begged to live.
Cassian heard him.
And carried out the sentence.
Bran screamed inside Cassian's memory.
It was not Bran's voice.
It overlapped Aaron's final cry.
Not a voice Cassian had killed and consumed.
It was a living child's plea left in his seam at the instant he cut the name Aaron Bale.
Every patient in the hospital raised their head.
First spoke in Cassian's voice.
"The child made a request."
Fourth continued.
"To end his pain."
The dead hand inside Ninth knocked on the coffin door.
"He asked Cassian to kill him."
"No," Ria said.
She opened the ledger.
"Aaron begged to live."
Her words could not cross the hospital wall.
The lie had already found its key.
The freedom Bran had gained through pardon.
Cassian's innocence, gained by turning Aaron's pain into a mercy killing.
The two benefits engaged within the same command.
A bell rang in the west of the capital.
Once.
The condemned repeated,
"The child asked to die."
Twice.
The Black Feather Society knelt.
"The saint granted his request."
Three times.
One letter moved in Aaron's death record at the relief court.
`Let me live.`
The first letter bled black.
A new sentence was written over it.
`Let me die.`
Adel cut the connecting thread.
Bran survived.
He opened his mouth.
No sound came out.
He scratched at the sheet, trying to write his name.
His finger stopped after `Br`.
Because he had refused to return his freedom, his voice had been seized first.
Adel did not promise to repair the result.
Bran did not ask for treatment again.
He hung the severed shackle around his neck.
So he would not forget what he had gained and what he had lost.
Ria did not finish his name for him.
She left the final two letters blank.
Only Aaron's cry remained inside Cassian's neck.
The entire city called that cry mercy.