The words did not echo. They simply settled into the room's perpetual chill, a new and terrible piece of furniture in the charnel house. And I was the practice.
Alistair's breath left him in a rush, as if he'd been struck. He could not hold her shattered gaze. His own dropped to the water-stained stone between his boots, tracing a crack that spiderwebbed toward the drain. Shame, hot and slick as fresh blood, coated his skin. He gave a single, jerky nod, a useless admission. The truth was a physical presence now, a third occupant in the dungeon, breathing with them.
He braced for the storm. For her to scream, to curse his name to the low, damp ceiling, to shatter the remaining glassware in her fury. He longed for it. Hysteria would be a language he understood, a justified reaction to the monstrosity of it all. It would confirm the monster he feared he'd become.
But Elara did not scream.
Instead, a terrible, weary calm seemed to descend upon her. With a strength that seemed to drain the last colour from her face, she moved. Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself up, using the shelf of horrors behind her for support. The rough burial shroud slipped from one shoulder, revealing the sharp, frighteningly pale line of a collarbone. She was wraith-thin, a sketch made of bone and nerve. The cough had been a relentless sculptor. She stood there, swaying slightly like a sapling in a foul wind, a ghost dressed for a funeral, trapped in a room built by a desperate man.
Her eyes, those startling hazel pools, were no longer on him. They were tracing the contours of his damnation with a dreadful, analytical purpose. She was inventorying her prison. Her gaze skimmed over the stacked medical texts, their leather spines cracked with use, paused on the yellowed pages of alchemical formulas scrawled in his own frantic hand, lingered on the precise, beautifully rendered diagrams of the human thorax he'd drawn himself by lamplight, each line a prayer for Clara's survival.
She was seeing the mind behind the monster, and the contradiction was paralyzing her. How could such meticulous, almost loving detail exist alongside the cold, clinical reality of the slab?
Her attention, inevitably, was drawn to the small, clean space in the corner. To the second table, with its fine, delicate tools laid out with reverence on a strip of clean linen. And to the portrait beside it.
She took a step toward it, her bare feet making no sound on the cold stone. Alistair's breath hitched. A primal, possessive instinct flared in his chest that is mine, that is private, that is all that is good, but he forced his body to remain still, a statue of guilt.
She didn't touch the small, framed painting. She simply looked. She studied the gentle slope of Clara's smile, the softness of her brown hair, the profound, unutterable sadness in the painted eyes that no pigment or brushstroke could ever truly capture. It was a sadness that spoke of a life closing in, of a world seen through a window she could no longer open.
"She's beautiful," Elara said. Her voice was flat, stripped of all emotion, as if all the feeling had been scoured out of her by the dirt and the dread. It was merely an observation, a rock-solid fact in a world that had turned to quicksand.
"She is," Alistair whispered, the words torn from a place deep beneath the shame, a place that was still raw and human and wholly devoted to his sister.
"The cough…" Elara began, and as if summoned by the word, her body betrayed her. A dry, rattling hack seized her, bending her slight frame double. It was a sound that spoke of torn tissue and exhausted diaphragm. She pressed the already-damp cloth back to her lips, her shoulders hunched as if waiting for a blow. When the fit passed, she was left gasping, paler than ever, her brief moment of strength utterly spent. She leaned heavily against the shelf, her energy visibly gone. "It's the same."
It wasn't a question. It was a diagnosis. A sentence. A thread of connection, thin and foul, tying the three of them together in this basement: the doctor, the victim, and the sister who knew nothing of it.
"Yes," Alistair said. He found himself nodding, a frantic, helpless motion. "The doctor said… he said there was no hope. That it was just a matter of… of time. I couldn't… I can't just stand by and let her…"
"Die," she finished for him, her voice still that awful, hollow calm. She turned from the portrait to look at him, and her expression was unreadable, a mask of utter exhaustion. "So you decided to play God down here in the dark. With us."
Us. The word was a punch to the gut, knocking the air from his lungs. She was grouping herself with the nameless, faceless subjects he had coldly categorized as donations to science, as practice. She had given them a collective identity. She had made herself a person, and in doing so, had made all of them people. His carefully constructed wall of clinical detachment crumbled to dust.
"I thought I was alone," he said, the confession spilling out into the silent, judging air. "I thought I was the only one who cared enough to…" He trailed off, gesturing weakly at the tools, the books, the grim harvest of his nights. To damn my own soul. To wade through this black river, if there was even a chance of pulling her out.
Silence descended again, thicker this time, weighted with the shared, unspoken understanding of mortality. Elara's last vestige of strength seemed to leave her all at once. Her legs simply gave way. She didn't fall, but slid down the shelf to sit huddled on the floor again, drawing her knees up to her chest and resting her forehead upon them. She looked small. And young. And infinitely, heartbreakingly tired. The rough linen of the shroud pooled around her, and he could see the sharp, delicate knobs of her spine through the fabric.
A long minute passed. The only sound was the soft, wet rasp of her breathing and the occasional drip of water from a pipe in the corner. Then, a voice, muffled by her knees, emerged.
"My name is Elara Vane."
The offering of a full name in this place of anonymity felt monumental, a act of profound and unexpected courage. It was a reclamation. She was not just a body. She was Elara Vane.
Alistair could only stare, his mind struggling to reconcile the concept of a person with the reality of the situation. Elara. It was a soft name, a name that evoked starlight and open air. It was a name that did not belong here, amidst the smell of decay and despair.
"Elara," he repeated, his voice hoarse. He tested the sound of it. It made the air in the room feel different, less suffocating. It made her real.
Another cough shook her, weaker this time, a shudder rather than a convulsion. She was shivering violently now, the cold of the basement and the deep, bone-aching shock finally seeping into her core. Her teeth began to chatter, a soft, pathetic sound that was somehow more wrenching than any sob.
Action. He could handle action. It was a script, a series of steps to follow. It was the silence and the staring that were tearing him apart.
He stood, his joints protesting, his body aching with a fatigue that went deeper than the physical labour of digging. He walked to a wrought-iron hook on the wall and took down his spare coat an old, thick wool greatcoat, almost as worn as his own but clean. It smelled of lye soap and dust.
He approached her slowly, as one would a wounded fox, and held it out at arm's length.
"You're cold," he said, the statement so absurdly mundane it was almost laughable.
She lifted her head. Her eyes, glassy with exhaustion and the creeping effects of her illness, looked from the heavy coat to his face. The war was back in them, a fundamental, instinctual distrust warring with a basic, animal need for warmth. Trust was an impossible currency here. But the cold was an immediate, undeniable tyrant. After a long moment that stretched between them, taut and fragile, she gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
He didn't try to help her. He simply laid the heavy coat beside her on the floor like an offering and then took several deliberate steps back, turning his back to give her a semblance of privacy. The act of turning away from her, making himself vulnerable, of trusting her not to grab a blade and plunge it into his back, felt like the most dangerous and deliberate thing he had ever done.
He heard the rustle of rough linen and the heavier drag of wool as she shrugged into the oversized coat. It swallowed her whole, the hem pooling around her on the floor, the sleeves extending far past her fingertips.
When he turned back, she was enveloped in the dark, bulky fabric, a small island in a sea of stone. She had pulled the collar up around her ears. She looked like a child playing dress-up in her father's clothes. The visual was so strangely, innocently vulnerable that it made something clench painfully in his chest.
"Thank you," she murmured, the words barely audible, spoken to the folds of the coat.
He just nodded, his throat too tight, too knotted with unspoken apologies and fears, to form a reply. He busied himself with the practicalities, the mechanics of care, the only things he knew how to control. He went to the small, pot-bellied furnace in the corner and fed another lump of coal into its glowing heart, stirring the embers until it threw a wider circle of feeble, orange heat. The new warmth did little to dispel the deep chill of the place, but it was a gesture.
At his apothecary table, he poured a measure of water into a tin cup. His hands, usually so steady, trembled slightly, making the water shiver. He selected a blue glass bottle, uncorked it, and added a few drops of a syrupy, dark liquid that smelled of black cherry and something bitter underneath.
"It's for the cough," he explained, his voice low as he set the cup on the floor within her reach, far enough to be safe, close enough to be reached. "It's not poison. I swear it to you. It will… it will help the spasms. It will help you sleep."
She looked at the cup, then at him, her hazel eyes pools of exhausted suspicion. But the cough was a more immediate and vicious enemy than he was. It was a pain she knew. After a hesitation that spoke volumes, she reached out a hand lost in the sleeve of his coat, took the cup, and drank its contents in one swift, desperate gulp. She grimaced at the taste, a brief, human flicker of disgust crossing her features.
The silence stretched, but it was a different quality of silence now. It was not the silence of predator and prey. It was the silence of two survivors shipwrecked on the same desolate shore, listening to the other breathe, waiting for the tide to turn, unsure if it would bring salvation or a worse storm.
Elara pulled the greatcoat tighter around herself, burrowing into its scratchy warmth. The drug, working on a body starved of rest and ravaged by illness, took effect quickly. Her eyelids began to droop. The terrifying alertness in her gaze softened into a hazy, unwilling drowsiness.
"What happens now, Alistair Finch?" she asked, her voice slurring with the weight of impending sleep. Her head lolled back against the shelf. One of the jars beside her head seemed to watch them both. "When I wake up?"
The question hung in the air, the most important one yet. It was the question that had been screaming in his own mind since he felt the warmth in her wrist. He had no answer. He had planned for cadavers. He had planned for failure. He had planned for the eventual, soul-crushing guilt of success bought with a terrible price. He had never, in his most desperate and fevered calculations, planned for this. For a witness. For a woman named Elara Vane with a cough that mirrored his sister's, sleeping on his floor, wrapped in his coat.
He looked at her, at the way the lamplight now caught the delicate, sooty lines of her lashes against her pale cheeks. He looked at the portrait of Clara, her smile a silent beacon from another world.
"I don't know," he said, but the words were so quiet they were lost to the soft crackle of the furnace and the sound of her breathing, deepening and evening out as she finally, mercifully, escaped into sleep.
He was alone again. But for the first time, the silence of the charnel house was absolute torture.