The body in front of Aeron looked more like a construction than a human being.
To be perfectly fair, Aeron Vale had not woken that morning expecting a corpse to knock on his door. He had expected tea. Silence. Maybe the luxury of pretending he didn't have student loans looming over him like a hungry demon.
His life in the infamous science academy was anything but delightful. Full of wasted chemicals, runaway specimens, hungry books, and utter despair of food combinations.
So that day, against his better judgement of fate, what he got instead was Captain Bhrithi – the kind of woman whose mere presence made brass fittings stand straighter – and behind her, two Cogwheel Guards pushing an automatic iron cart that tried to run away, rattled with the unmistakable weight of problems.
"This is a joke," Aeron said flatly, squinting at the cart's contents.
Unfortunately, it wasn't.
The corpse inside looked like someone had attempted to combine a man, a clock, and a fever dream and then given up halfway through. Gears bulged beneath bruised skin. Brass filaments threaded from the eye socket like festive ribbons from hell. Something in its ribcage ticked with the smug self-satisfaction of a machine that knew it shouldn't be alive and yet absolutely was.
Bhrithi grunted. "It walked here."
Aeron blinked. Slowly. "Walked?"
"Staggered might be more accurate. Collapsed on your doorstep. Tried to knock, according to the witness."
Aeron stared at the corpse. The corpse stared back — or at least the glass bulb where an eye should be flickered ominously, which counted as far too much engagement for something that should have been, by all rights, dead.
He took a deep breath and regretted every past decision leading him to this moment.
"All right", he said, voice tight. "Put him on the table. Gently, please. I don't want… pieces."
One of the cogwheel guards nodded and immediately dropped the corpse with a clang that suggested he had, in fact, always wanted to be a blacksmith.
Aeron pinched the bridge of his nose. The day was already a disaster, and it wasn't even sunrise.
To diagnose a corpse's final thoughts — a charming little neuro-romantic speciality that absolutely did not give people nightmares — Aeron had to use a set of delicate instruments, gently place memory-conductive threads, and convince himself that translucent brain static was more reliable than most politicians.
He pressed the probe against the corpse's temple.
The world flared white. And then Verrinth city twisted.
He stood in a cityscape that looked as if someone had taken his real city, dropped it in boiling water, and let it shrink and warp and blister. Buildings slouched into each other like drunks at closing time. Steam vented from cracks in the sky. The cobblestones pulsed.
A voice – a woman's – whispered behind him.
"Help us."
Aeron turned. Nothing. Only the city was breathing.
He walked toward the core of the memory: a sphere of light wrapped in writhing wires. This was the usual shape of traumatic last recollections, though they rarely pulsed like a heart with performance anxiety.
He reached out. Which was his first mistake.
A metallic hand shot from the memory sphere and grabbed his wrist.
It wasn't the victim's hand. It wasn't even entirely a hand. Some of it was steel. Some were bone. None of it was interested in letting him go.
A voice, distorted and wrong, scraped through the memory.
"You shouldn't have seen me."
Aeron yanked back — unfortunately too late to prevent the symbol searing into his mind: a gear, threaded with living veins.
The memory burst forth.
And Aeron was flung out of the mindscape like a very unwilling cork from an exploding flask.
Aeron gasped awake.
Bhrithi, who had seen enough horrors in her life to remain majestically unimpressed by most things, stepped forward. "What did you see?"
Aeron opened his mouth —
The corpse sat up.
Everyone froze.
The corpse's jaw unhinged slightly, a clear indication it had not read a single anatomy book in its life, and a woman's voice crackled from somewhere deep inside its chest cavity.
"You will do nicely."
What did it mean?
Bhrithi shot it. Because of course she did.
The bullet tore through the thing, sending it sprawling off the table. Gears spilt like confetti from a deeply cursed parade float. The corpse, however, did not stop twitching.
"Oh wonderful," Aeron muttered. "It's persistent."
"Burn it!" Aeron shouted as metallic filaments wriggled across the floor. "Burn it before it grows legs!"
Bhrithi hurled an alchemical flare that turned the creature's body into a plume of blue flame — the kind used on constructs that refused to accept normal death etiquette.
When the smoke cleared, the corpse was ash. Blessed silence finally settled.
Well. Mostly.
A faint tick… tick… tick… echoed from the floorboards.
Aeron pretended not to hear it. Life was easier that way.
Bhrithi exhaled, pinching the bridge of her nose with her good hand. "The palace has assigned someone to help with this investigation."
"Oh, joy," Aeron said. "Is it another corpse?"
"No."
"So a noble brat, then?"
The door slammed open.
In rushed a young man with bright white hair, soot on his cheeks, and the expression of someone who had just seen something exciting explode and slightly hoped it would happen again.
"Hi!" he beamed. "Aeron Vale? I'm your new partner!"
Aeron did not move.
The young man did not stop smiling.
Bhrithi groaned into her palm.
Aeron looked at the stranger who was, by all accounts, looking as out of place as the corpse had.
The ticking under the floorboards got louder.
And Aeron Vale realized, with the kind of clarity only trauma can deliver, that his peaceful life had just died a swift and horrible death.