The Borisch Manual of Catoptric Pest Species, 100th Ed.
Guy stands at the back of the small crowd, arms crossed.
There have been no teratopod calls for days now, but that has given him no relief.
In their place, calls come of a smaller but no less dangerous animal, a hunched, humanoid thing found in the streets around Sreckt headquarters.
Unemployed and idle, limbs burgeoning from their shredded uniforms, the casualties of the teratopod infestation crawl through the alleyways, humming the company jingle and harassing passersby.
The vengeful creatures can be found in seedy bars and relatives’ apartments and their former offices, malformed and toxic and dying—or worse, trying to survive.
Guy hasn’t killed one himself, but he’s watched Dawn kill three.
“‘Belligerent and soft-bodied,’” Dawn reads aloud. “‘The Contaminated Srecktman is generally susceptible to blades, truncheons, BSPAF, projectiles, and vehicular force.’”
Something pinches Guy’s finger. He retracts his hand, and finds Tyro glancing up at him.
“Not now,” he tells her.
“It’s important.” She emphasizes this by stretching onto her toes and whispering his thumb name into his ear. “Em. Please.”
He glances at Dawn and follows her back to their apartment, to the sleeping nook, where she tears back the blanket.
“I think I got stung,” she says calmly, then bursts into tears.
He bends into the nook, stomach turning. At first he’s not sure what he’s looking at, but as he shakes loose the sheet and examines the mottled red stain, he deflates with relief. “Is this why you’ve been hiding, grub? Why you’re sleeping outside?”
“I’m sick,” she says. “I don’t know how, but I got stung. I just started to—”
Guy strips the foam, trying to keep from smiling. “You’re not stung, Tyro.”
“I’m not going to change. I’m not—”
“It’s all right, Ty.” He pushes her away and folds the sheet. While Tyro holds her belly and shakes as if she has witnessed a killing, Guy finds comfort in the perfect mundanity of her panic.
“It stopped for a while,” Tyro says. “I thought I would live. But it came back.”
“Oh, princeling. It comes back a lot.”
“How many times?”
“I don’t know. A couple dozen, at least.”
As her face scrunches, a needle of shame pricks at Guy.
He should know better than to let her glean this information on her own.
He should’ve had at least one story that did not pave the passage to adulthood solely with duels and riddles and romantic conquest and, in the case of Classicist operettas, killing and ritually devouring one’s father.
He figures he ought to take her to someone. Disturbing Nic this early in the morning is a good way to earn a punitive lobotomy. Bell would try to charge for the information, and Margot is out of the question.
“Fuck me,” he sighs. “Come on, Ty.”
She shrinks at his offered hand as she would a threat. “Where are you taking me?”
“We’re gonna see if Three’s around.”
She slips her hand into his. They walk for a few minutes in silence, shivering in the misty wind. “It’ll just come again,” she says eventually. “I know what this is. It’ll come again, over and over. Until I die.”
“Ty, you’re not dying. Just shedding velvet, like the stags in Hart Park.”
He wants to laugh at her. He wants so badly to give her a playful shove, to pull her hair and shake some sense into her.
But he recognizes the look on her face, her initial brush with the helpless mutability of the human body.
He wore the same one when he first saw Ripest Fruit, the first time he realized the crucifixion was not performed but performed, the blood too bright to be believed, the moans too musical, the begging too profane.
As the crew lowered the dying criminal to prepare him for the matinée, caking his wounds in makeup, Guy came to realize the cruel beauty of a part that can only be played once.
“What Manual entry do you want tonight?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Tyro replies. “One with lots of blood. The one with the murders.”
“Bast Street Butcher?”
“No, where the bug scientist is sacrificed.”
“The Price of Beauty,” he says. “That’s a nasty one.”
“Yeah. That one.”
“Okay. Soon as I get off. So stay around the apartment.” He knows he will be exhausted by day’s end, but the thought of letting a tale loose, of releasing it into the night air, relieves him.
“I get to sing Sigmund, though,” Tyro says.
“Whatever part you want, princeling.”
Florian’s new perfume is the product of seven tireless days in the solarium.
Determined to show she is hale enough for work, Aster distills his scent with the same obsessive diligence as she makes the Marshal’s bath oils.
She leaves her organ only to eat, barely to sleep.
For days, she grinds and decants, distills and mixes, blanketing the room in scents so cold they wilt half her plants.
Trying, and failing, to push aside her thoughts of Mallory, she steels her breath against the chill, tying his frayed handkerchief over her mouth.
By the time she adds the final drop of ecdytoxin, shivering and blue-lipped, she almost faints with relief.
It fits Florian like a glove, slipping over his skin with a subdued sheen. She watches him demonstrate his new scent for the Marshal from the garden balcony, feeling the cold even from two stories high.
Florian resembles his mentor like a son, circling the tulip beds adorned in essence of chillbug and liquid argentum.
Two of the Chancellor’s nephews kneel blindfolded in the flowers, while Sorav stands nearby, flanked by Tender Guard and the faint scent of mayfly exudate.
The Marshal watches his successor with a blank, almost saddened look, as if haunted by a face he can’t recognize.
Florian positions himself behind the first prisoner, then disposes of him.
Devoid of his usual sadistic flair, he places his sidearm to the man’s head and fires a single shot.
The second is identically dispatched, cleanly and tastefully.
The tulips rustle in pleasure, and a sparrow flutters from a nearby shrub.
Florian hands his firearm to the silk-gloved bailiff, and the Tender Guard applauds politely.
Aster examines the scene under the churning purple clouds as an artist her work, the glint of stained glass, the flutter of insect wings and falling petals, life on death on life, a tableau composed with more extravagance than Rebau ever could’ve dreamed. It strikes her as painfully crude.
A tendril of gunpowder and misted blood snakes up to the balcony.
Though it shouldn’t, the smell of her own work sends a spasm up her throat.
She lifts her hand to her breast pocket, hiccups, then the rattle of her cough breaks the quiet dignity of the execution.
A dozen eyes turn toward her, and she backs away from the balustrade, then flees into the hall.
A few Tender Guardsmen find her in the corridor.
They bend to help her, to ask if she’s all right, and she only gasps, crawling wordlessly along the wall.
When the youngest Guard sees the blood she leaves behind, he flees to fetch the Marshal.
Aster shoos the others away, struggling to the nearest washroom, and when she locks the door, securing an ounce of privacy, she slumps with Mallory’s handkerchief to her face.
She coughs, paces across the emerald tiles, groping helplessly along the amber mirrors, the gold faucets and basins.
Each breath comes shallower than the last. She grips the sides of the sink, trying to force air into her lungs, until her head swims, empty but for the panicked thought that this will be the one, this attack will be her last, this will be the position she dies in—alone, flattened on a bathroom counter, arm draped over her forehead in the classic position of the fatally infatuated soprano. She would laugh, if she had the breath.
She pushes out one last cough, strains for the strength to force another, and a solid, slick mass fills her windpipe.
It crawls upward in painful peristalsis, a long, soft plug.
She bears down, jaw wide, already too air-starved to make out the wormlike thing in her pharynx, large, too large, and expanding as it rises.
Purple-faced, ribs aching, she attempts to expel it, but she can’t—she reaches into her mouth, probing deep and blindly, until her fingertips brush something solid.
She pinches the slick cast, but it rolls between her fingers.
Shaking, tears spilling down her cheeks, she tries again, then again, then splays Mallory’s handkerchief in her hand and tries once more.
Finally, scraping the fabric along the back of her throat, she manages to grasp it.
She tightens her hold, steels herself, and pulls.
Branch by agonizing branch, it emerges. She chokes on a wail as the bronchial cast struggles out of her.
The world darkens in her periphery, and she grips, begging, praying, to God and her parents and Elspeth and Mal, clinging to the image of his face, the taste of his lips, his hums of an Aufhocker ballad fading in and out with the rush of blood in her ears.
Right as her strength fails her, as her knees buckle and her exhausted lungs give in, the thing pulls free.
It slips from her mouth in a rush of blood and mucus, in a streak of raw, exquisite pain.
She moans, pulling loose the last flaccid branches, and collapses against the counter.
She gulps down the cold air and grips the washbasin, waiting for the teary after-spasms to relent.
Slowly, her sight realigns. She drops Mallory’s handkerchief beside the thrashing mass in the sink, and lifts her head.
She examines herself in the mirror, lips spattered with blood, makeup running down her cheeks.
Then she takes a deep, painful breath, and realizes it is clearer, smoother, than any she has taken in years.