Kael was nineteen years old and smelled like formaldehyde.
That was not a complaint. Formaldehyde meant the morgue. The morgue meant a paycheck. A paycheck meant his electricity stayed on for another two weeks, which was roughly the length of Kael's entire life plan.
He pulled his jacket tighter and walked the employee corridor of St. Arden General Hospital, basement level, where the fluorescent lights buzzed at a frequency that gave everyone headaches except him. He had worked here for eight months. Either he had adapted, or something in him had already broken.
Both options seemed equally likely.
"Voss."
Dr. Mirela Sands was standing in the doorway of the cold storage room, arms crossed, reading glasses pushed up into silver-streaked hair. She was fifty-three, built like a retired boxer, and the only person in the hospital who had hired Kael without asking why no one else had.
He had never thanked her for that. She had never asked him to.
"You are four minutes late," she said.
"Traffic."
"You walk here."
"Pedestrian traffic."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she handed him a clipboard and walked away.
That was their relationship. Kael was fine with it.
He scanned the intake log. Two new arrivals. One elderly, cardiac event, family already notified. The other was listed as John Doe, male, approximate age thirty, no ID, no next of kin, found in the Harrow District at 1:19 AM by a transit worker who had then called 911 and immediately quit his job.
Kael blinked at that last part.
He read it again.
The responding officer's note at the bottom said: Transit worker stated he could not explain what he saw. Refused to elaborate. No foul play evident on body. Cause of death: under review.
Kael set the clipboard down.
He picked it up again.
He told himself it was nothing. Cities had strange nights. People died in ways that confused other people. Transit workers burned out all the time.
He told himself this very calmly, and then he went into the cold storage room and stood in front of drawer seven, where John Doe was waiting.
He did not open it. He stood there for eleven seconds. He counted. Then he opened it.
The body was unremarkable. Young man, athletic build, no visible wounds. Pale the way the recently dead were pale. Nothing strange.
Except. Kael leaned in.
Along the inside of the man's left forearm, running from wrist to elbow, was a mark. Not a tattoo. Not a scar. It sat just beneath the skin like something pressed in from the inside, dark as ink but shaped wrong, the lines too precise, too deliberate, branching into a pattern Kael did not have words for.
He reached out. He did not touch it.
He had the sudden, specific, irrational feeling that if he touched it, it would touch him back.
He closed drawer seven.
He finished his shift. At 6 AM, he walked home in the pale grey of a city morning, and he told himself he had seen nothing unusual.
By 6:30 AM, the mark from the dead man's arm had appeared on his own.