Florence stared at the strange book.

  "Consider it a first installment," Alice said. She held the book out, her arm trembling with the effort.

  Florence took it. The cover was cool to the touch, smooth, and faintly tacky in a way that made the skin on the back of her neck prickle. It was heavier than it looked.

  "What is it?" Florence asked, turning it over in her hands.

  Alice let her arm drop back to the blanket, the effort spent. Her eyes were heavy, the mana sickness pulling her back under, but she held Florence's gaze.

  "A grimoire," Alice said.

  Florence looked at the cover. Looked at Alice.

  "I don't know what that is," Florence said.

  "I know you don't." Alice shifted against the wall, settling deeper into the pillow. Her eyes were half-closed but her voice had found a thread of its usual authority, the tone of someone who had grown up surrounded by books like this and considered the knowledge ambient. "A grimoire is a text written by a practitioner. Not a textbook—those are theory. Descriptions of technique, diagrams, principles. Useful, but passive. A grimoire is different. The author poured their own mana into the ink when they wrote it. Their experience, their instincts, their understanding of the craft. When you read it, the knowledge doesn't just sit in your head like words on a page. It settles into you. It becomes part of how you think, how you cast. Like muscle memory, except someone else built the muscle and handed it to you."

  She paused, gathering breath. The explanation was costing her.

  "That one is a sanguimancy text. Beginner to intermediate. It focuses on the medical and kinetic applications of blood magic—circulation, healing, pressure manipulation. The things a doctor would need."

  Florence was turning the book over in her hands. The gold lettering caught the grey light from the window and threw it back, and the velvet of the cover had a depth to it that seemed to pull the eye inward. She ran her thumb across the spine. The craftsmanship was extraordinary—the binding alone looked like it belonged in a museum, or a palace, or somewhere considerably more important than an attic room on Baker Street.

  "This looks expensive," Florence said.

  "Florence."

  "The binding is velvet. Actual velvet. And this is real gold leaf."

  "Florence, did you hear a single word I—"

  "Magical book. Your mana goes in when you read it. Medical applications." Florence tilted the book, watching the gold shimmer. "How much was it?"

  Alice closed her mouth.

  "Alice."

  "It's not relevant."

  "You just gave me a gift and won't tell me what it cost. That's suspicious."

  "It's polite. One doesn't discuss the price of a gift. It's common etiquette."

  Florence lowered the book into her lap and looked at Alice with the patient, level expression of a girl who had spent her formative years extracting confessions from a younger brother who ate the last of the jam.

  "Did you steal it?"

  Alice's eyes widened. "Excuse me?"

  "Did you find it somewhere? An abandoned mansion, a—"

  "Who do you take me for?" The outrage cut through the fever like a blade through gauze. Alice sat up straighter, her jaw tight. "Of course I bought it. With money. My money. Through a legitimate—" She caught herself. "Through a transaction."

  "Then how much was it?"

  Silence.

  Florence waited.

  Alice looked at the ceiling. She looked at the curtain. She looked at a point on the far wall that held no particular interest but had the advantage of not being Florence's face.

  "Alice."

  "Fourteen thousand," Alice said.

  The words came out flat, thrown away, the verbal equivalent of tossing something over your shoulder and walking briskly in the other direction.

  Florence didn't move.

  "Fourteen thousand," she repeated.

  "Crowns," Alice added, because the silence was worse than the number.

  Florence went rigid.

  It started in her hands. Her fingers locked around the book, white-knuckled, the tendons standing out like bridge cables. The rigidity climbed her arms, seized her shoulders, and settled into her jaw, which opened and closed twice without producing sound. Her eyes, which had been warm and steady all morning, went very wide and very still.

  "That's—" Florence started.

  She stopped. Tried again.

  "Fourteen—"

  Stopped.

  "Thousand—"

  "Florence."

  "That's a house, Alice." The words finally broke free in a rush, pitched high and climbing. "That's a house. You could buy a house for that. You could buy ten houses and furnish them and have enough left over to—fourteen thousand crowns? For a book? I could run the bakery in Briar's Crossing for—my parents' whole—Thomas makes—"

  "Florence." Alice's voice was firm, cutting through the spiral. "Listen to me. I don't know exactly how much my life is worth. It might not be much by some estimates. But I am fairly confident it's worth more than fourteen thousand crowns."

  Florence stared at her. Her mouth was still open. No sound was coming out. She looked down at the book in her hands, then back at Alice, then down at the book again, as though she expected the number to rearrange itself into something less catastrophic if she looked away long enough.

  Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

  "You—" Florence managed. "Fourteen—"

  "You're looping."

  "I need a moment."

  "Take your moment. But hold the book carefully. It's not getting any cheaper."

  Florence pressed the Velvet Scripture against her chest with both arms, as if the air itself might damage it. She breathed. In. Out. The colour was returning to her face in slow, uneven stages, the shock receding enough for basic cognitive function to resume.

  Alice watched her with the expression of someone who had expected this reaction and was content to wait it out. When Florence's breathing had settled and her grip on the book had relaxed from desperate to merely protective, Alice spoke again.

  "Now. The next part is important, so I need you to actually listen and not let your mind wander onto property values."

  Florence nodded, mute.

  "Grimoires carry risk." Alice's voice had dropped, the arch and the banter gone, replaced by something careful and serious. "I told you the author's mana is in the ink. That's the mechanism. It's also the danger. When you read a grimoire, you're not just absorbing knowledge. You're absorbing a piece of someone else. Their instincts, their perspective, their relationship with the craft. For most disciplines that's harmless—read a pyromancy text, you might run warm for a few days or develop a craving for salt. Mild. Temporary."

  She paused, and the pause had weight.

  "Blood magic is different. Sanguimancy and necromancy are what they call high-corruption disciplines. The authors who write those grimoires tend to be… unstable. Obsessive. The mana they pour into the text carries that instability, and it can transfer. Warped thinking. Compulsive behaviour. In the worst cases, the reader starts to lose themselves—their memories shift, their personality changes, they develop urges that don't belong to them."

  Florence's arms tightened around the book.

  "That one should be safe," Alice said. "The author was a scholar. A doctor, actually. Not a fanatic. The text focuses on medicine, not ritual. It was appraised and the corruption index came back minimal." She held Florence's gaze. "But minimal is not zero. So you read it carefully, in small portions, and you pay attention to yourself while you do. If something feels wrong—if you start thinking thoughts that don't sound like you, or wanting things you didn't want before—you stop. You close the book and you put it away and you come talk to me. Understood?"

  "What does it look like?" Florence asked. "Corruption. How would I know?"

  Alice opened her mouth to answer. Then she stopped.

  Her right hand had drifted to the blanket beside her. Florence watched her fingers close around something—a small square of white cotton, crumpled and half-hidden in the folds of the quilt. A handkerchief, embroidered with a small daisy in one corner. Mrs. Gable's.

  Alice lifted it. She looked at it.

  The cloth was stained. Not red—dark. A deep, viscous smear that sat on the cotton with an oily heaviness, nearly black, catching the thin light from the window and giving nothing back.

  Alice frowned. It was a small expression, barely a crease between the brows, but something behind it was working—a calculation, a search, the particular tension of someone trying to locate a memory and finding the shelf empty.

  "When—" she murmured.

  The word was not directed at Florence. It was directed inward, at whatever blank space the search had uncovered.

  "Alice?" Florence said. "Is something wrong?"

  Alice's fingers closed around the handkerchief. The frown held for another moment—deep, private, unsettled—and then she folded the cloth in half and tucked it beneath her pillow. The motion was deliberate, final.

  "Don't worry about it," Alice said.

  Her voice was steady, but the steadiness was new. Constructed. Florence recognised it because Alice had been constructing things all morning—defences, justifications, explanations—and this had the same architecture. A wall, built quickly, mortared with will.

  "Corruption can manifest in a few ways," Alice continued, as if the interruption had not occurred. "Changes in behaviour are the most common. Acting strangely. Becoming obsessive about a subject or a person in ways that don't match your character. Loss of temper over things that wouldn't normally bother you."

  She smoothed the blanket over the hidden handkerchief.

  "Memory is the other one. Forgetting things. Misremembering events. Being certain something happened one way when it happened another, or finding gaps where there shouldn't be any." Her eyes flickered, just for an instant, to the pillow. "Those are the signs. If you notice them, stop reading. Immediately."

  Florence nodded. She looked at the book in her arms—the wet-red cover, the gold title, the weight of it—and made a decision.

  "I'll be careful," she said. "I promise."

  Alice studied her for a moment. Then she reached out and pushed the book more firmly into Florence's grip, a gesture that was less giving and more depositing, as though she were placing the responsibility into Florence's hands alongside the leather and velvet.

  "Read it in small doses. A chapter at a time, at most. And not when you're tired or distracted. You need to be sharp when you open that book."

  "I will."

  "I mean it, Florence."

  "I know you do."

  Florence stood. She carried the Velvet Scripture to her side of the room and opened the wooden chest at the foot of her bed. She set the book inside, on top of her new folded winter shawl, and closed the lid. The latch clicked with a sound that felt more significant than it should have.

  She turned back. Alice was watching her, the fever-flush high on her cheeks, her eyes heavy.

  "I think I'll save it for later," Florence said. "I have a few things I need to do today."

  "Such as?"

  "University fittings, for one. Apparently there's a whole process for the uniform. Measurements, fabric selection. The pamphlet made it sound like enlisting in the army." She counted on her fingers. "Then I want to walk the campus properly. Get my bearings before term starts. Find the lecture halls, the library, the Anatomical Gardens—the clerk at admissions said not to touch the specimens, but I at least want to know where they are."

  She paused, something softer entering her voice.

  "And if I have time, I'd like to visit the Cathedral again. St. Silas."

  Alice nodded, the motion small, her eyelids drifting.

  "When are you leaving?" Alice asked.

  "Once I've washed the dishes."

  Florence crossed the room and collected the empty porridge bowl and the spoon from the floor. She stacked them neatly, tucking the spoon inside.

  "Mrs. Gable said she'd look in on you this afternoon," Florence said, pausing at the top of the stairs. "She'll bring something up if you're hungry. I should be back by evening, but if I'm late, she'll take care of you."

  "I don't need taking care of," Alice said, but the protest was automatic, a reflex firing without conviction. Her eyes were closing.

  "Of course not," Florence said. "You're just convalescing."

  She caught the ghost of a smirk on Alice's lips before she turned and started down the stairs. The boards creaked beneath her in their familiar, arthritic protest, and the sounds of Baker Street rose to meet her—Mrs. Gable's kettle whistling, the rattle of a cart on cobblestones, the distant chime of a clock tower marking the hour.

  Behind her, in the attic room, the sound of Florence's footsteps faded down the staircase and into the house below.

  Alice waited.

  The room was quiet. The curtain shifted in its draught. The grey light moved its slow blade across the floorboards.

  She reached beneath the pillow and withdrew the handkerchief.

  She held it up. The dark stain sat on the white cotton like a hole in the fabric—dense, oily, absorbing the light without returning it. She turned the cloth over. The daisy embroidery was pristine on the reverse, untouched, cheerful in a way that made the stain on the other side feel worse.

  Mrs. Gable pressed it to my lip. Last night. She said I was bleeding.

  Alice touched her lower lip. Smooth. Unbroken. No scab, no tenderness, nothing.

  I wasn't bleeding from the lip. Thomas caught me on the jaw. The glass cuts were on my palms and knees. I catalogued everything.

  She stared at the stain.

  So where did this come from?

  She closed her eyes. She tried to reach back—past the alley, past the walk through the crowd, past the pie cart and the empty streets. She had been walking. She had been exhausted. She had been alone on a street she couldn't name, and then—

  Nothing.

  The next thing she could find was Mrs. Gable's hallway. The smell of floor wax and lavender. The handkerchief being pressed to her mouth. But between the street and the door there was a gap, smooth and featureless, like a page torn cleanly from a book.

  Memory is the other one. Forgetting things. Gaps where there shouldn't be any.

  Alice folded the handkerchief. She folded it again, into a tight, precise square, and held it in her closed fist.

  She lay back. The pillow accepted her weight. The sloped ceiling hung above her, close and familiar, and the thin grey light from the curtained window fell across her face without warmth.

  She did not let go of the handkerchief.

  She closed her eyes, and the dark behind them was very still, and sleep came before the questions could follow her down.