The kiss landed wrong.

  Really not her fault. I turned at the last moment, some reflex kicked in, and her lips caught the corner of my mouth instead of the center. Four seconds of contact. I could tell you the pressure and the angle and that her heartbeat peaked in the moment before. I could not tell you what I felt.

  I was already cataloging the contact when I caught myself doing it. My mind dissociated while disgust moved through my body.

  Nyssara pulled back. That look was on her face again. Fifty percent longing, fifty percent frustration. Like she was reaching for something but her hands kept slipping.

  "Sorry," I said.

  "Don't be." She was already pulling on her sword belt, eyes on the clasp and not on me.

  "You're still going, right? To the Bent Spoon."

  "The letter asked for me specifically."

  "From a woman no one's heard of. Who knows about your condition. Who slipped a note under our door without anyone seeing."

  She looked at me sternly.

  "It's a trap."

  She was an unknown actor. Had specific knowledge of my corruption. The variables hinted toward danger with overwhelming clarity.

  "Probably," I said. "I'm going anyway. I need you at the secondary entrance. Cover both escape routes, maintain visual on the primary exit."

  Something moved through her face. Not anger. Worse than anger.

  "Visual contact," she said. "Escape routes." She set down the sword belt. "That's what I am to you right now. That's when you say you need me."

  "That's not what I meant."

  "What did you mean then."

  The question hung between us. I searched for the right answer a human would give, to reassure their partner. That came easier to me before the Portal, before Alia burned through me like light through old paper.

  What came out was nothing. The silence was its own kind of answer and we both knew it.

  "I'll be back before midnight," I said.

  Nyssara looked at me for a long moment. Then she nodded, in a professional, military way. All the softness from thirty seconds ago packed away into a place I wasn't sure I could reach anymore.

  "And if you're not?"

  "Then your tactical assessment was correct and you should respond accordingly."

  I left before I could see her reaction to this.

  The Sump smelled like copper and rotting sweetness these days. The concentration had increased since my last visit. Spreading northwest at roughly two blocks per day. More and more brass plague victims releasing compounds into the air that I didn't have names for yet.

  The first victim I passed was an old man sitting against a wall. Hands folded in his lap. His skin fully coated in tarnished metal, dull gold spreading from his fingers toward his wrists. Hadn't been able to move for at least a day. But his eyes were open.

  Watching. Aware. He would be conscious through all of it.

  I waited for the horror. The grief. The natural response to human suffering. But I was just curious. The brass visibly ran through his veins, meaning the infection attacked deoxygenated blood. I was looking at him like a scientific experiment, which felt wrong, so I made myself keep moving.

  "You're adapting well," Malgrin said, somewhere behind my thoughts. "The detachment. Very professional. The Yozi from three weeks ago would have knelt beside him or at least stopped for a second."

  "Three weeks ago I was a different person."

  "Were you? Or were you just pretending better?"

  I didn't answer. Ahead, a woman sat on a doorstep with a child in her lap. Both brass. The child had been reaching for something when the transformation froze her, and the mother had been reaching for the child, and now they sat there, a statue made of desperate love and metal. The child's eyes found mine. Pleaded.

  I kept walking.

  "The audience is fascinated," Malgrin said. "A human walking past breathing metallic objects and somehow he is the least human in the frame. Excellent drama. I'm starting to wonder if they're watching a tragedy or something educational. "

  The bent spoon, I mean Mira's, was a tavern in the part of the Sump where hope went to drink itself unconscious. The sign had been painted once, decades ago. The windows were darkened. The door hung crooked on its upper hinge.

  I stopped at the alley across the street and took a look. Front entrance, one guard visible through the cracked shutter. Side access via the tannery passage, locked but manageable. Roof access from the building adjacent. Three exits. One unknown person inside.

  I used my shadow step to reach the top in less than a second.

  "Such a boring ability." Malgrin commented dismissively.

  "You were the one who came up with it."

  "I take pride in my gift-giving capabilities. I am painfully aware of what you find enjoyable."

  I really did enjoy it. I just needed to entirely stand in one shadow, and register a different shadow large enough to cover me, and I could instantly swap locations.

  "It's useful." I said.

  "I know this is your way of saying you love it. I know it and it almost makes me cry. I felt inspired by your lack of stage presence. And also aggressively bored whenever you think before you make a move."

  The price for using it was a slight desaturation of my vision for a day or two. Which was a steal considering I never cared for colors.

  "Please, remind me. What color are tangerines?"

  I had a job to do.

  The Shinobi variant was designed for jobs like this. Ten knives made of shadows and silence emerged and making me just as sharp and concealed. I came down through the ventilation shaft above the storage room with a noise that amounted to nothing.

  The guard at the front never moved. I was already past him.

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  The common room was empty except for shadows and the smell of old beer layered over something else. Something recent. I came through the storage door low and fast with a blade in each hand and stopped.

  Nyssara was already inside.

  She stood at the bar with her sword drawn and her eyes on the woman sitting at the center table.

  She had come in through the side passage.

  Of course she had. I had told her to cover the secondary entrance.

  She had decided that secondary entrance meant inside.

  The woman at the table was perfectly still. Hands folded on the wood in front of her. Mid twenties, curly dark hair, long sharp nose contrasting the soft and kind facial features. Posture precise without being rigid, nothing excessive, nothing soft. She was watching Nyssara the way a physician watched a patient, making notes behind her eyes.

  I recognized it immediately. Because that is how I usually sat and watched.

  Behind the bar, the body of a woman, arranged with a care that made the violence worse. Hands folded across her stomach. Eyes closed. The angle of her neck wrong.

  I heard Nyssara's breath change when she saw where I was looking.

  "Mira,"

  the woman at the table said. Her voice was clinical, her finger pointing non-chalantly at the body.

  "She asked questions. Noticed things. Started to wonder why a physician would want to meet the Bloody Left Hand in secret."

  She looked at me, not at Nyssara.

  "You're late, Mr. Yozi."

  "Why did you kill Mira?" Nyssara's question was loud and sharp and sounded like a threat.

  "I removed a variable for the sake of operational security."

  The woman's eyes moved to Nyssara with the specific attention of someone encountering a complication they had already modeled. "You were told to wait outside."

  "I make my own decisions about where I wait."

  "Noted." The woman looked back at me.

  "Mr. Yozi. Please. Sit."

  I sat across from her. Kept my hands where she could see them. The shadow-blades stirred beneath my skin.

  "Convince me not to kill you within the next minute."

  "I understand you." She said it without preamble.

  "I know what you're becoming because I'm already there. You're running numbers instead of grieving like a human."

  The words landed like blades. Unforgivingly accurate.

  "You're sitting across from the person who killed Mira. That innocent lady that offered you shelter and food your whole life. But the information I offer is more important to you than the life she lost."

  She met my eyes.

  "You hate that I'm right. That hatred is the last human thing you have left and I'd like to help you keep it."

  "That doesn't make the murder acceptable," Nyssara said from the bar. Her voice was controlled but the control was costing her.

  "No," the woman said. "It doesn't." She looked at Nyssara with a mix of acknowledgement and irritation.

  "You're the Inquisitor. You feel it properly. The horror, the disgust." A pause. "Lucky you. Hold onto that. It matters more than you know."

  Nyssara said nothing. She looked at the body behind the bar and her jaw was tight and her sword was still in her hand.

  "Dylana Senna," the woman said, turning back to me.

  "Vekros was my mentor. For seven years, before his decline. The corruption, the brass plague, the techniques for binding demonic essence to human flesh. I learned all of it from him."

  "And his decline," I said.

  "He became emotional. Desperately attached to his goals." Her eyes were steady. "That killed him. Not your blades. His own sentiment."

  I thought about Vekros at the end. The attachment to his wife that died three centuries ago had blinded him. How that blindness had created the opening I'd walked through. The comparison was uncomfortable precisely because it was apt.

  "The plague," I said.

  "Spreading faster than the Empire's response can contain. Within two weeks, the Sump will be effectively quarantined. Within six, the infection will breach containment. Within three months, forty thousand casualties, conservative estimate." She reached into her coat and produced a vial. The liquid inside was the color of brass but it moved like something alive. "The plague was never meant to be released in its current form. The transformation was designed to be reversible. Vekros died before he could finish the control mechanisms. I have his notes. I can complete the cure."

  "What do you need," I said.

  "Resources. Access. Protection from the Empire's default response."

  She pushed the vial toward me. "Three drops under the tongue, morning and evening. It won't cure the corruption but it will slow the progression."

  I picked up the vial. It was warm against my palm. The liquid inside shifted, reaching toward my skin through the glass.

  "There's something else," Dylana said. "A gesture of good faith. Silas Attia, your friend. His son Pigol has early symptoms. Based on progression rate, he has approximately five weeks before critical systems are affected."

  I stopped the thought before it finished. The thought finished anyway.

  I heard Nyssara move behind me. Heard her sheathe her sword like she needed something to do with her hands. She had heard the calculation in my silence. She was good at that.

  "We'll need to discuss terms," I said.

  "Of course." Dylana stood. She stopped at the door without turning. "The woman you came with. She loves you. I can see it in how she positioned herself, optimized for your survival rather than her own."

  A silence I couldn't read anything into. "It will cost her eventually."

  Something moved behind the clinical precision of her voice. Something that might have been loneliness, badly preserved. "I had someone like that once. Before I understood what I was becoming."

  "What happened," I said.

  "They couldn't adapt."

  She left without another word.

  We stood in the empty tavern for a moment. Nyssara at the bar, looking at Mira's body. Me at the table, counting the stones at the wall. Fifty-three across, twenty-eight high.

  "She was a great cook," Nyssara said.

  "Yes."

  "She noticed something she shouldn't have and she died for it." Nyssara turned. Her eyes were dry. The dryness was worse than tears would have been.

  "And you're going to work with the woman who killed her."

  "The cure requires her knowledge."

  "I know what the cure requires." She crossed the room and stopped in front of me. Close enough that I could see the effort it took her to keep her voice even. "I'm asking you something different. I'm asking if you understand that Mira was a person. Not a variable. A person who is dead because she was in the wrong place."

  Forty thousand projected casualties. Mira was one confirmed death.

  "I understand," I said. "I'm going to work with her anyway."

  Something went out of Nyssara's face. As if I confirmed something she already suspected but had hoped was wrong.

  "Then we do it with our eyes open," she said. "Both of us. No secrets. No strategic omissions. If we're doing this we do it together and I need to know everything, including the things you think I'll react badly to."

  She held my gaze. "Can you give me that."

  The honest answer was that I didn't know. She was asking for honesty and honesty was the last thing I had that was still recognizable to me.

  "I'll try," I said.

  She accepted this answer, which was the most painful thing she could have done.

  We left Mira and walked back together without speaking.

  Malgrin was quiet for once, which meant he was watching carefully. Outside, the city continued its slow transformation, street by street, body by body.

  I thought about Dylana's hands folded on the table. Cool and clear and certain. The first person that made sense to me.

  I thought about Nyssara walking beside me in the dark, close enough to touch and further away than she'd ever been.

  Which one, the corruption seemed to ask.

  And I was getting good at not answering.

  AMA: Ask Malgrin Anything!

  Q: Is Yozi actually losing his humanity or is he just acting for the sake of drama? Asking for a betting pool.

  A: Have you ever watched fruit rot? Doesn't happen all at once. Slowly, over days, the color changes so gradually you don't notice until suddenly it's not fruit anymore. That's what's happening. He's not being dramatic. He's not even aware of how far gone he is. The real tragedy is that he thinks he's still fighting a fair fight. Current odds suggest 3:1 against full humanity retention by the end. I'd take those odds personally. But I'm biased.

  Q: After the disaster of a kiss, the female was overly professional in her mannerisms, but once Yozi gave her professional instructions, she snapped? What a weird woman!

  A: Oh, you noticed that. Yes, she snapped. No, she is not a weird woman. Her professional attitude was a defense mechanism and I actually wished she didn't need to have that. But maybe Dylana had a point.

  Q: Will Yozi and Nyssara be okay. I need them to be okay.

  A: Love is not enough. It is the starting point, not the destination. An anchor will keep you from drifting away but who knows how much the chain can endure. Nyssara is fighting for a man who may not exist anymore. Yozi is trying to remember why he should honor the effort.

  Let's say: It depends on your definition of okay.

  Q: How much of this are the demons actually watching?

  A: Every moment. Every breath. Every kiss that lands wrong and every calculation that replaces a feeling. The interesting humans are the ones who know they're being watched and choose to be themselves anyway. Yozi used to be that kind of human.

  We'll see what he is now.