The Exorcist Doctor

The Heartcord Clinic’s second-floor surgical chamber had been many things over the past few years. It’d been an operating theatre. It’d be a gang’s headquarters. It’d been an accounting office, an emergency dormitory, an illegal pharmacy, a tea room, an improvised dining hall, and once, Evelyn had apparently tried to turn it into a gambling den for about forty minutes before Cara found out and threatened to staple her to the ceiling by the wings. True story.

Right now, however, it felt like a war room again.

The large central surgical table was currently buried beneath maps, reports, coffee mugs, half-sorted medicine ledgers, more maps, and three scalpels Gael was fairly certain he didn’t leave there—which meant somebody got cut open while he wasn’t here—but more importantly, all eight of them were gathered around the table.

Gael and Vivi only just returned from the Patchwork Tenements, still smelling like dirt and gunpowder from all the sparring. Maeve must’ve come from the receptionist counter downstairs since she still smelled nice. Cara held two accounting ledgers under her arm, which meant she’d probably spent the entire day in one of Miss Alba’s many noodle shops. Evelyn was chewing on double-headed eel skewers she could’ve only gotten from the Black Bloom Bazaar, so she must’ve been out running errands, while Liorin was still holding a tray of uprooted medicinal flowers, so he must’ve forgotten to put it down from the Fogspire Forest in his rush to get here. The only one who didn’t look rushed at all was Fergal. Each of his six arms held a different report, which meant he’d probably been here organizing his gang’s eyes and ears for the past… however long he’d been here.

But nobody looked particularly well-rested, which, to Gael, was reassuring. Rested people in Bharncair usually died shortly afterwards.

Fergal still takes the cake for looking like he’s about to die, though.

I wonder how many reports he’s had to go through.

Probably somewhere north of a hundred… maybe two hundred… well, most likely three hundred a day. At least. After all, the Saint’s Hands were tentative friends with the Steelborn and the Three-Faces, and—the Steelborn aside—the Three-Faces already had a vast information network scattered across the city. Add the Saint’s Hands’ eyes and ears to that network, and the clinic now had access to more information than Gael could ever process by himself.

Most of the reports the clinic received during the early months of their three-way partnership were redundant reports. In the gangsters’ defence, Gael did ask them to write back about anything and everything, but that quickly backfired on him when they started writing about noble hairstyles for the weekend and local complaints about water salinity after a particularly heavy acid rain. It took him only a month before he gave up and left all the report-reading to Fergal. Now his delegation duty was paying off in the form of a new lead—and he didn’t even have to suffer one-bit.

I’m a fucking genius. Suck it, Ferga—

“This came from one of our men stationed in Wraithpier last night,” Fergal said, slapping the main report in his hands onto the table. All of them leaned in to look, but the piece of paper was turned the wrong way around, so Fergal sighed and quickly turned it right. “The incident happened three nights ago. A middle-aged man known by his neighbors to have contracted rustfish parasites recently exploded in the Drowned Parish’ fresh fish market.”

Evelyn grimaced around her eel skewer as she skimmed the report. “‘The man smelled of fish guts, human fat, and rottin’ tidewater. The fishmongers had spent the mornin’ guttin’ black cod and deepwater eels, so the drains were already runnin’ thick with scales and pink washwater. When the man burst, pieces of him vanished directly into that slurry, and the canals carried him away in strands with little pale curls of flesh bumpin’ against dead sardines—’”

“Don’t narrate the gory bits,” Cara scolded, whacking her on the head.

“What? I’m just readin’ what the guy wrote—”

“Don’t,” Liorin said cheerily, whacking her with his tray as well.

“Cara can hit me. You don’t get to hit—”

Fergal coughed, bringing their attention back to the report. “Skip the part where my man describes the smell for three pages. The main point is: six local coroners arrived on scene ten minutes after the explosion, and upon examination, they discovered metallic debris embedded throughout the flesh remains.”

That stopped the teenagers’ bickering.

Gael’s lips were already pursed, though.

Metal debris, huh?

“Fourteen minutes after the explosion, three Saint’s Hands stationed in Wraithpier also arrived on scene and collected samples of the metallic debris,” Fergal continued, setting down the rest of the reports in his other hands and claws. There were illustrations and diagrams on each of them. Gael skimmed them quickly. “It wasn’t easy for them to carry out comparative experiments with the shitty lab equipment they have in Wraithpier, but they’ve confirmed the metallic components share the same chemical makeup as the bombs implanted in all artificial Myrmur Hosts, which means—”

“The Breeder is in Wraithpier,” Jin finished coldly. “And working out of a new production lab.”

“... But why?” Vivi asked quietly, frowning at pictures of the exploded corpse before her. “We beat him so surely back in Bleakhearth, but six months later, he suddenly starts manufacturing artificial Myrmur Hosts again? Surely he knows we’re going to hear about this at some point and come knocking on his door.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelPhoenix for the genuine story.

Cara crossed both arms. “It means he’s either confident we won’t be able to find him this time, or he’s confident that even if we do, he can deal with us.”

Jin snorted. So did Evelyn. But whether or not the rest of them shared their confidence, there was still something they had to acknowledge.

Fergal said it aloud.

“Don’t be reckless. At the end of the day, we still don’t know why he’s doing any of this to begin with,” he said slowly. “We poured through all four thousand five hundred and fifty-six research logs, journals, procedural records, and operational notes that we retrieved from his laboratory in Bleakhearth. Not one of them explains whyhe’s mass-producing artificial Myrmur Hosts, so until we figure it out, we can’t be stupid. We don’t know what he’s still got under his sleeve.”

At the mention of the Breeder’s research notes, Gael’s mind went back to those sleepless nights six months ago. The notebooks. The surgical diagrams. The Myrmur-Host compatibility percentages. Just thinking about them made him want to sit down and down a few bottles to clear his head.

What’s he trying to accomplish, really?

“... Gael.”

He’s working with dad—or for dad, by the looks of it—so he’s probably helping out with dad’s final objective, which is…. bringing back my mom?

“Gael.”

But what do these Myrmur experiments have to do with the most blasphemous research any scientist can ever embark on?

“Gael.”

What’s the point of breeding and cultivating so many Myrmurs? It can’t just be for fun. What are they really building up to? What’s their end—

“Gael!” Cara said, snapping her fingers in his face. “You here?”

Gael blinked.

Everyone was staring at him, but he must’ve been staring holes in the surgical table before him.

“... Hm? Oh. Right.” He straightened, grinned, and clapped his hands once. “Wonderful. Cool. Uh… Fergal, you give the men who sent in the report a bonus, and everyone else start wrapping up their current assignments. Delegate your work to your sub-sub-subordinates, settle all your affairs, and prepare for travel. We’re gonna beat the shit out of the Breeder once and for all.”

Nobody moved at first.

Gael had to wave them off.

“Shoo, shoo,” he muttered, turning around. “Go and get ready already.”

Taking the initiative was the right call. The moment he turned around, everyone else started dispersing. Fergal immediately pulled up a few more reports to start reassigning responsibilities, Evelyn sprinted for the window to finish her deliveries, Liorin raced downstairs—likely to plant the new herbs in the underground botanical garden—while Vivi and Jin walked off together, probably going to get a quick bite of lunch at Miss Alba’s before going out to look for Myrmurs.

Maeve turned and went into her mother’s bedroom, but Cara grabbed Gael by the sleeve before he could leave the chamber.

“Oi,” Cara whispered.

“That tone usually precedes viole—”

“Come here.”

Unfortunately, she was physically stronger than him—mentally speaking—so she dragged him to the far end of the surgical chamber beside the medicine cabinets while everyone else left the room.

Gael sighed dramatically the entire way.

“You know, most women at least buy me dinner before cornering me in dimly lit rooms—

“No lady has ever willingly approached you. Shut up.” Cara finally released his sleeve once they were in the corner, and then she fixed him with the exact same stare she used whenever the teenagers tried lying straight to her face.

He immediately disliked where this was going.

“... What?” he asked cautiously.

“Do something about the tension between you and Maeve.”

“There’s nothing tense between us.”

But Cara stared at him flatly enough to flatten steel, making him shiver.

“We’re… perfectly normal,” he said.

“You two barely talk anymore.”

“Not true. I asked her to pass the salt last night.”

“Doesn’t count.”

“Sure it does. When’s the last time you ever asked Fergal to pass—”

“It’s been half a year already,” she said sternly. “Saintess protect me, I didn’t even know there was something in this city that could make you awkward, but please. It’ll be your third-year meeting anniversary in four months. If you have any plans on making it a good one like you did last year—not that I’m telling you to crash Old Banks’ manor again—then you better clear the air before we set out for Wraithpier. Got it?”

Gael clicked his tongue softly and leaned back against the cabinet.

Honestly, he thought he’d been handling things fairly well. Sure, things were… slightly quiet between him and Maeve, but they’d both been busy. The clinic was growing, the Saint’s Hands were growing, and Blightmarch was changing. They couldn’t be lovey-dovey all the time.

But despite all that, the joke he was about to make stalled halfway up through his throat when he saw the look Cara was giving him.

Somehow, it felt far worse than actually getting yelled at.

The grin on his face weakened little by little until it finally gave up, and he looked down at the tiled floor slowly.

“Alright,” he muttered at last. “I’ll… deal with it.”

“Good.”

And for her part, Cara took him at his word too, turning to leave the moment he agreed with her.

He rubbed one hand slowly across his chin, exhaustion already dragging through him as he thought about how he should handle it—because the truth was, he had been thinking about it. A lot. It was basically all he could think about apart from the Breeder and his dad and his mom, and he knew…

He was just being a coward. Avoiding. Deflecting. ‘Waiting for a good opportunity’. As if all that wasn’t what he’d been telling Vivi not to do this entire time.

So much for being a good mentor.

But damn it all, Cara was right. He needed his head in the game. He had to be whole by the time he got to Wraithpier.

They had to be whole.

… Ignore everyone else.

Nobody else needs to be involved in this.

But at the very least, Maeve needs to be.