The silence that settled after the tea was drunk was different from before. It was not the silence of terror, or of accusation, but the silence of a temporary, exhausted truce. The only sounds were the soft crackle of the furnace and the ragged, wet rhythm of Elara's breathing, slightly eased by the herbal draught but still a long way from clear.
Alistair busied himself with putting the supplies away, his movements mechanical. The cheese and bread went into a tin to keep the rats out. The milk bottle was set in a basin of cold water, the best he could do for refrigeration. Each ordinary action felt surreal, performed as they were in a tomb surrounded by the dead.
He could feel Elara's eyes on him. She was watching him with a quiet, unnerving intensity, her head tilted. The fear was still there, a low hum in the background, but it had been joined by something else. Curiosity.
"You really are a doctor," she said softly. It wasn't a question.
"I told you I was."
"I know. But it is different, seeing it." Her gaze traveled over his shelves, not with revulsion now, but with a clinical interest. "You have... order here. Despite the... setting." She gestured vaguely at a jar containing a preserved lung, blackened by soot. "Your notes are precise. Your diagrams are beautiful."
He followed her look to the stack of journals filled with his meticulous sketches of the human thorax, every muscle, every nerve ending rendered in painstaking detail. They were the maps for a journey he had been too terrified to take. Until last night.
"It is the only way to be sure," he replied, his voice low. "There is no room for error."
"Not for my sister," she said, and he flinched. She didn't say it with malice. It was, again, just a fact.
"No," he agreed. "Not for Clara."
The mention of his sister seemed to suck all the air from the room. The guilt he had momentarily escaped outside came crashing back. Upstairs. She was right upstairs. He had been down here for over a day, consumed by the catastrophe of Elara, while Clara was alone in her bed, waiting for a brother who never came, for a medicine that never worked.
He must have made a sound, a sharp intake of breath, because Elara's expression shifted from curiosity to concern. "What is it?"
"My sister," he said, the words ash in his mouth. "I haven't... I need to check on her."
Understanding dawned on her face, followed by a flicker of what looked like pity. It was the one thing he could not bear.
"I have to go up," he said, more to himself than to her. The thought was terrifying. Leaving the basement meant reentering the world. It meant facing Mrs. Dobbs, his part-time housekeeper and nurse, and the inevitable questions. It meant seeing Clara, and seeing the inevitable decline he had been powerless to stop.
He walked to the stairs, his legs feeling like lead. He paused, his hand on the rough wooden banister, and looked back at Elara. She was watching him, her form small and vulnerable in the gloom.
"The bolt," he instructed, his voice rough. "Do not unbolt it for any reason. Do not make a sound. There is a... there is a woman who comes. The housekeeper. She cannot know you are here."
Elara nodded, pulling the greatcoat tighter around her shoulders. "I will be quiet as a mouse," she promised.
He gave a curt nod and began to climb the stairs, each step a monumental effort. The transition was jarring. The clean, clinical smell of the apothecary shop above was a world away from the damp earth and formalin below. Sunlight streamed through the front window, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. It was a world of life, of normalcy, and he felt like a ghost haunting its edges.
He could hear movement in the back room, the soft clatter of a spoon against a bowl. Mrs. Dobbs.
He took a steadying breath and pushed the door open.
The small room was neat and orderly, dominated by the large bed where his sister lay. The air smelled of beeswax, weak broth, and the faint, sweet odor of sickness.
Mrs. Dobbs, a stout woman with a kind, weary face, looked up from stirring a pot on the small hearth. Her eyes widened in surprise.
"Dr. Finch! Good heavens, sir, we were getting worried. You've been locked in your study for an age." Her gaze swept over him, taking in his disheveled hair, his shirt sleeves rolled up, the faint, impossible-to-remove scent of the basement that clung to him. "Are you quite alright? You look peaky."
"I am fine, Mrs. Dobbs," he said, forcing a calm he did not feel into his voice. He walked to the bedside, his heart clenching. "Just... absorbed in my work. How is she?"
Clara was asleep, her breathing a shallow, whistling struggle. She was so thin the shape of her skull was visible beneath her pale skin. Her dark hair, once so thick and lustrous, was fanned out on the pillow like a ghost of itself. She looked smaller, as if the illness was slowly erasing her from the world.
"No change, sir," Mrs. Dobbs said, her voice softening. "She asks for you when she's awake. I told her you were working on a new medicine. A miracle cure." The older woman's voice held no judgment, only a deep, abiding sadness. She had long since given up on miracles.
Alistair's throat tightened. A miracle cure. He had been down in the dark, digging up corpses, while his sister held onto the hope he had given her.
He sat on the edge of the bed and took Clara's hand. It was light as a bird's bone, and so cold. He chafed it gently between his own, as if he could rub life back into it.
"I am here, Clara," he whispered. "I am so close. Just hold on."
She didn't stir. Her sleep was too deep, too close to something else. A cold dread seized him. Had he waited too long? Had his obsession with perfection, his fear of failure, cost him his only chance?
He stayed there for a long time, just holding her hand, listening to the terrible, fragile sound of her breathing. Mrs. Dobbs moved quietly around the room, straightening things that were already straight, giving him space with his grief.
Finally, he rose. "I will be in my study again," he told Mrs. Dobbs. "I cannot be disturbed. It is... a critical stage."
"Of course, Doctor," she said, though she looked at him with a mixture of pity and concern. She thought he was losing his mind, chasing phantoms in his books while his sister faded away. She wasn't entirely wrong.
He retreated back to the basement door, a different kind of heaviness in his heart. He had to face the truth. His time for practice was over. He was out of chances, out of time. He would have to use the next body he acquired on Clara herself. The risk was unimaginable. The alternative was unthinkable.
He gave the coded knock and heard the bolt slide back. Elara stood there, her expression expectant, almost anxious.
"How is she?" she asked quietly, before he could even step fully inside.
The question, coming from her, was like a punch. This woman he had wronged, this woman fighting her own battle with the same thief, was asking after his sister.
"Worse," he said, the single word laden with a despair so profound it felt bottomless. He closed the door and bolted it, leaning his forehead against the cool, rough wood. "She is so much worse. I have... I have run out of time for theories. For practice."
He turned to face the room, his eyes falling on the second table, the clean one, with its delicate, terrifying tools. "The next one... the next subject... it will have to be for her. Directly."
Elara followed his gaze. She understood immediately. He saw her swallow hard, her hand going unconsciously to her own chest. She knew exactly what he was proposing to do.
"You could kill her," she said, her voice barely a whisper.
"I know." "And if you do nothing?" He met her gaze,his own bleak. "Then I will watch her die. Slowly. And I will know I did not try everything."
The two terrible futures hung in the air between them. There was no good choice. Only a choice of horrors.
Elara was silent for a long time. She looked from the surgical tools to his face, etched with exhaustion and despair. She looked at the portrait of the kind-eyed girl.
"Show me," she said finally.
Alistair blinked. "What?"
"Show me," she repeated, her voice gaining a strange steadiness. "The procedure. The... the phrenic nerve. Show me on your diagrams. Explain it to me."
"Why?" he asked, bewildered.
"Because you are alone down here," she said, her hazel eyes holding his. "You have no one to tell you if you are brilliant or a madman. You have no one to hand you a tool, or to wipe the sweat from your brow. Maybe... maybe you just need someone to listen. Maybe talking it through will make it seem less like madness."
It was the last thing he expected. In the midst of his nightmare, she was offering not just her silence, but her attention. Her presence. It was a lifeline thrown to a drowning man.
Hesitantly, almost numbly, he walked to his desk and picked up a large leather-bound journal. He opened it to a detailed diagram of the human chest cavity, the nerves and muscles rendered in intricate shades of ink.
He began to talk. He explained the anatomy, the path of the nerve, the precise point of incision, the staggering risk. His words started out clinical, detached, but as he spoke, the passion he had buried under guilt and fear began to surface. He showed her his calculations, his notes on anesthetic dosages, his plans for aftercare.
Elara listened intently, her eyes fixed on the diagrams, following the path of his finger. She asked questions. Intelligent, insightful questions that betrayed a quick mind. "What if there's more bleeding than you anticipate?" "How will you keep the area clean?" "What is the sign that it's working?"
He answered them all, the words pouring out of him. For the first time, he was not alone with his terrible, beautiful idea. He had an audience. A witness.
When he finally fell silent, the room felt different. The plan was still monstrously dangerous, but it felt... real. It felt like a plan, and not just a desperate man's delusion.
Elara looked from the detailed drawings to his face. "You have thought of everything," she said, and there was a note of genuine awe in her voice. "It is... it is the most terrifying and brilliant thing I have ever heard."
She believed he could do it. The realization was like a shot of adrenaline to his heart.
"And you," she said, her voice dropping again. "When will you... acquire the next subject?"
His eyes flickered to the empty slab. The thought of going back out there, of digging another grave, made him feel physically ill. "Tonight," he said, the word tasting like dirt. "It must be tonight."
Elara hugged herself. The brief color that had come into her cheeks during their discussion faded. She looked small and afraid again. "And you will... you will do it? Tomorrow?"
He looked at his sister's portrait, then at the tools. He looked at Elara, the living, breathing consequence of his actions.
"Yes," Alistair Finch said, his voice finally, terribly calm. "Tomorrow, I will save my sister. Or I will kill her trying."