I arrive at the cathedral dripping black trench water and carrying three things that could kill everyone inside.
Harrow takes one look at me, says nothing, and points at the altar.
He moves like a different man when he works.
The bitter, self-medicating exile disappears and what's left is a surgeon, hands steady, eyes clear, everything stripped back to function.
He puts on gloves. He lines up his equipment. He doesn't ask me if I'm ready.
"Pupils unequal," he says, not looking at me. "Mercury exposure. How long?"
"Twenty minutes."
"Still affecting perception?"
"A little."
"A little," he repeats, and there's something in his voice that sounds like controlled irritation. "You extracted serpent mercury, got into and out of Vexar's estate, fell into a harbor, and you're here with a mild hallucination and a shoulder wound."
He looks at me briefly over his glasses. "You are going to tell me how you're still standing. Not tonight. But soon."
"Deal," I say.
He works in silence. One drop at a time.
The GADX-147 first, the Euphorionite added in measured drops that make the mixture convulse through colors, blue to purple to boiling green.
He watches it settle. His breathing is slow and controlled.
"Stable," he says quietly. Like a word he's been waiting to say for a long time.
He loads the syringe.
"This is going to be the worst thing you've ever experienced," he says. "Not pain, exactly. More like your body running a war inside itself. The Goliath enzymes will tear through every cell looking for the Witherlord rot. Your nervous system will interpret it as full-body combustion."
He meets my eyes. "It may kill you before it cures you."
"How likely?"
"I don't know. Nobody's survived the full synthesis before." He pauses. "That I know of."
"Do it," I say.
He hands me a rolled leather strap. I bite down.
He finds the vein at my elbow, calcified and thick, and drives the needle through.
* * *
The cold comes first.
Real cold. Bone-deep and spreading outward.
My breath comes out as visible fog and I think, that's wrong, it's not that cold in here, and then the fire starts and every thought I have disappears.
It's not pain. Pain is local. This is systemic, everywhere at once, the Goliath enzymes hunting through every cell and the Witherlord rot fighting back and my nervous system trying to report all of it simultaneously.
I hear myself screaming through the leather. I feel my back arc off the stone.
I feel Harrow and two of the patients holding me down by my shoulders, my legs.
The thing in my cells, the rot that has been eating me since the plague reached Blackwater, fights like a cornered animal.
And then it stops.
All of it. Between one second and the next.
I sag back onto the stone, coughing, gasping. My chest opens. Fully. Completely. Like a door unstuck after years of swelling.
I pull in a breath that has no bottom to it and it hurts in the best possible way.
Harrow has the stethoscope on my chest. His face is still professional but his hand is shaking slightly, which tells me everything.
"Necrosis receding," he says quietly. "Black veining clearing." He pulls the scope away. He just looks at me for a moment. "It worked."
looks at me for a moment. "It worked."
COMPOUND 7-A (BANE): Administered. Result: Witherlord Infection Eradicated. LEDGER BALANCE: 81 Hours Remaining.
I let my arm drop.
The Blight is still there, patient in my marrow. Bane didn't fix that.
But the Witherlord's rot is gone, the accelerant that was eating me on two fronts at once.
"Sleep," Harrow says, and drops a blanket over me with the quiet efficiency of a man who's done this before.
Not for a dying patient. For someone he thinks might actually make it.
I sleep.