The cathedral is falling apart in the patient way that things fall apart when nobody cares anymore.
Half the roof is open to the sky. Rain comes through and nobody has fixed it. The stained glass is boarded over with raw planks.
Somewhere in the back a few people are sleeping on cots, coughing quietly.
At the altar end, where the holy things used to live, a man has built a chemist's lab out of salvage.
He's decanting something clear from a copper coil into a porcelain teacup with the kind of focus usually reserved for defusing things.
"Place is closed," he says.
"It's a cathedral. Cathedrals are supposed to be open."
He looks up.
Aldous Harrow. Maybe fifty. Suit vest wrinkled, hair wanting a cut, three days of silver stubble.
His hands are steady but his eyes are the kind of tired that sleep doesn't touch. They run over me quick and clinical, top to bottom, and I can see him writing a diagnosis in his head before I've said another word.
"Black-Marrow Blight," he says. "Advanced. The pallor under the jaw, the weight carriage, the way you're breathing." He goes back to his decanting. "You've got four days, maybe less. I'd offer sympathy but I've got a dozen worse cases sleeping back there."
"Three days," I correct.
"I said maybe less."
"I need your floor plan of Vexar's estate." I walk down the aisle. My boots on stone are very loud. "Specifically the cryo-silo."
"Ah." He sets the teacup down. "You're robbing him."
"I'm retrieving something he has no right to hoard."
"That's a very charming way of describing larceny."
I take the GADX-147 vial from my coat and set it on the altar stone.
The glow catches Harrow's face and for a moment the tired, cynical doctor disappears completely.
He goes very still. He stands, walks over, picks it up with both hands like it's made of something fragile.
His lips move.
"Stage Four Goliath," he breathes. "You extracted this tonight."
"Hour ago."
"Live extraction?"
"Obviously."
He sets it down carefully. Looks at me. Looks at the vial. Looks at me again.
"You're building Bane," he says. "The Witherlord counter-toxin."
"I need the Euphorionite to stabilize it. Vexar has it. I need your map."
Harrow is quiet for a long moment. He picks up his teacup, takes a slow sip, sets it back down.
"If it gets traced back here," he says carefully, "he won't just take the cathedral. He'll take everyone in it."
"And if the vanguard reaches Iron-Vein City, none of that matters." I hold his gaze. "You spent a year on the frontier watching towns die. You wrote a paper about it. He burned that paper because it was inconvenient."
I pause. "You've been sitting in this cathedral for four months. Give me something useful to do with your anger."
The teacup goes down hard.
"That," Harrow says, voice flat, "was beneath you."
"Was it wrong?"
He doesn't answer that. He goes to the wooden chest behind the altar and starts digging.
The blueprint is on dark canvas, detailed, hand-drawn from memory with a precision that tells me what kind of doctor he used to be before the world made him otherwise.
"Thermal exhaust shaft at the rear," he says, pointing.
"Bypasses the outer wall entirely. The vault is on the lower level. Four minutes from the moment the pressure drops before the lockdown seals everything." He looks at me over the map. "Four minutes, Mercer. Not five."
He finds the frosted thermal flask in the chest and slides it across to me.
"Don't drop it," he says.
"You said that like you think I might."
"I said it like I'm covering all possibilities." He sits back down and picks up his teacup. "Come back alive. I want to see if the compound actually works."