I’m sorry, Sham.

I’m so, so sorry. This isn’t how I’d wanted you to find out. Nothing… None of this was supposed to go this way.

Sham please… please don’t cry. I can’t. I can’t watch this. Not because it hurts to see you weak, but because it tears me apart to know that I am to blame.

Please, Sham. Please, stop crying.

Let me explain. Let me explain how this happened, how we got here. Please. It’ll… it’ll help, I think.

I pray to the gods that it helps.

Hester gazed at the man she loved, and pondered just how she’d ended up here. She’d had her whole life planned out from an early age. She did well in the schools of the Dripcanal, got the highest grades in her class. She passed the entrance exam for the Lightmark Academy—the most prestigious university in any of the great cities. She studied the physics of their world, the science of the cosmos, the fabrics that made up every being in Haven. She’d always wanted to be a scientist, since she’d been a little girl, and she’d succeeded.

But part of that envisioned journey had always been her ascension to the Sunrise District. To spend her leisure time surrounded by the rich, the famous, the powerful. She would wear her favourite green dress and she would sip cocktails from a bar overlooking the most beautiful parts of the city. She would marry a handsome gentleman—perhaps a business magnate, or a lawmaker. A man who would make her father proud.

She had never intended to end up with a man like Sham Tilner. He was the antithesis of everything she’d dreamed of. He possessed no slim-cut suits, no shining pocketwatch, not so much as a comb for his messy hair. He was not rich, nor famous, nor powerful, and he held no glamorous job. He was—or rather, had been—simply a petty thief. On paper, he could not have been the man for her.

And yet she loved him.

Which meant it was oh so difficult to see the illness take hold of him. It had been subtle at first. Or, if not subtle, then it had seemed as though it would be fleeting. As though it was one of the winter viruses, and would be flushed from his system within a week at most. But that wasn’t the case.

The disease persisted. Weeks turned into months, and with every passing day Sham seemed to get worse. His skin turned a mottled shade of grey, his eyes swollen. There was little that Hester could do to get him out of bed, out of the apartment, to get him to wash himself, or feed himself. Though she didn’t resent him for it—his illness was not his fault, after all—she couldn’t help but feel as though she’d been lumbered with a patient instead of a fiance.

None of the understaffed, underfunded doctors of the Harbour District, where they’d made their home, had been able to help them. Some implied that they’d seen this illness before, to both better and to worse degrees, but none had successfully treated it.

But Hester had a nest egg. A fortune that her father had left her. A wealth that was intended for when she started a family of her own. Hester’s stomach twisted as she decided to break this promise to her departed father; but how could she hope to start a family with her partner in such dire straits? So Hester delved into this nest egg, and she used it to fund appointments with physicians in the richer areas of the city. In the Dripcanal. In the Diplomatic District. In Sunrise.

Her savings dwindled fast, each doctor charging exorbitant amounts for even a fleeting visit, and some—with visits scheduled on days when the man Hester loved was at his worst—were forced to pay house visits, which cost more still. Yet even with the aid of finest doctors that the city had to offer, there was little to be done. This was not an illness with a known cure, they all told her, though they suggested avenues they could take.

Hester’s desperation had grown great by this point. She would have done anything to see the man she loved return to her. She would have killed for him, if that was what it took. So she pushed the doctors’ recommendations onto Sham—regular exercise to build up his energy levels, specific diets, even going so far as to purchase certain gemstones. Hester was a woman of science, not of spirituality, but she did not possess so much pride that she would not even try such strange methods.

None of these avenues worked, of course. Hester tried to convince herself that they were, that there was progress, but any fool would have been able to see that her partner was just as sick as he had been, all that time—and money—ago.

There came a point, on a morning that Hester still remembered clearly, that she realised she would have to find the answer for herself. She’d been perched on the end of their shared bed, a late spring storm battering the windows, and she was staring down at the man she loved. Sham hadn’t washed in days—hadn’t had the energy to, and Hester was too emotionally drained by this point to help—and a long, straggly beard was near all she could see poking out the top of the bedsheets. She barely recognised Sham, Hester realised, and rapidly she was losing sight of herself, too.

But how could she help him? That was the question. There didn’t seem a medication alive that would cure—or even diminish the symptoms of—Sham’s disease. One of the many dozens of doctors they’d paid visit to would surely have found the cure, if it existed. Hester was forced to think outside of the typical realms of medical treatment for the solution.

The answer came at a tea room. Hester had been taking more and more trips out of the apartment, the pain of seeing Sham in such a state having grown to overwhelm her. The man she loved didn’t seem to care, either, or rather he didn’t notice. So little awareness did Sham have of his surroundings that it didn’t matter much if Hester was there or not; he would still be bed-bound, still be drifting in and out of consciousness.

Hester was sipping a perfect cup of tea—two sugars, lots of milk—as she gazed out onto Wallow Road, watching the world go by. Her mind was blank; she was not consciously looking for her answer, only making the most of the short break she had from the misery of home. Her glazed eyes passed over the people of the city, going about their days with smiles on their faces, smug in their relative happiness and freedom. She looked from a young family, dragging badly behaved children by their hands, to an old couple, content in their shared silence, to a young woman hauling a keg of beer to a nearby pub.

Now that’s a woman with a high grade Vigour skill, Hester thought, and in that moment, a plan pieced itself together.

Vigour.

It wasn't the natural answer to a disease, of course. Skills never were. But if she could get Sham to artificially level up his Vigour skill, it might be enough to overcome his chronic fatigue. But it couldn't be boono. Those vials did more harm than good, and Hester wasn't willing to risk any more damage to the man she loved. No, instead she would need a purer boono. Something entirely new, with no downsides.

It was a damn good thing that she was a biologist by trade.

Hester began by trying to purify existing Strength boono vials. She had no dealer contacts, of course, but she couldn't say the same of her fiance. Hester bypassed Sham entirely, choosing not to involve him in this, not to worry him, and reached out to one of his old, shady associates—a man by name of Fog, who had only recently been released from the dungeons, and would be in dire need of cash.

Fog came through quickly. Despite having been locked away from the world, he still knew a few people here and there who could get Hester what she needed, if at a high price. Hester eyed her savings numbly; they were dwindling by this point, but she couldn’t muster the requisite emotional energy to care.

Merely three days after asking, Fog returned to their meeting place with three such vials, and spoke a forced politeness to his tone as he asked to see Sham. Though Hester possessed no such Heart of Janus skill, she spoke around the truth, said that Sham wasn’t able to see him right now, that she would let him know when he was. Fog was insistent at first, but Hester stuck to the same story, and eventually the peculiar man backed off.

Few in this city understood how the three boono vials now in Hester’s possession would have come to be. The fact that boono existed purely on the black market was not just related to their impurity and downsides, but because their very creation required transgressing normal social boundaries. Even Sham, Hester suspected, did not know of the darkness behind their creation—and it was only known to her because she’d taken an elected module at Lightmark which delved into such matters.

Boono could only be created one way: by the letting of blood from someone who had achieved the skill through natural methods. In doing so, the owner of the skill lost some of its power, made it permanently less effective, but as a result created a temporary, corrupted version of the same skill in liquid form. Of course, recompense for such donations were great. This liquid would then be cut with other substances—typically absinthe—by the dealers, who could then spread the boono out further, and pocket more cash as a result.

Hester had requested three vials for a reason. The bloodlet skills were a diluted version even before being cut further by the dealers, and Hester needed more than a watered down Vigour skill. She needed the real thing. She hoped, by combining and refining the three boonos, that she might form from them a true skill vial, one of common—or even higher—grade.

She no longer had the laboratory of Lightmark at her disposal, however, and was forced to make do with pots, with pans, with discarded vials found in the streets and a simple gas stove with which to burn off the excess. But even combined, even diluted, the boono was a poor reflection of the real thing.

Hester, being the good scientist she’d always been, formed a new hypothesis. It was not the diluting of the blood that was the issue, here; it was the fact that those who had donated it had not given the full skill, only part of it. If Hester was going to create a whole new type of boono, she’d need to find someone willing to, as Sham might have said, “go the whole hog”.

It would take insanity for someone to do such a thing willingly.

Hester’s mind lingered on the word “willingly”. She stared down at the man in the bed in the corner of their apartment, and she wondered just how far she would go to save him. Would she fix him if it meant losing herself in the process?

Yes, she decided. She would.

And so the scientist returned to Fog with the last of her savings and a much greater, much darker, request. ‘Find me someone with the Vigour skill. Someone that nobody would miss.’

Fog asked no questions; even a man like him could see when he really didn’t want answers.

It took Fog longer, this time, to fulfil Hester’s request, and in the meantime, Hester found that she could not sleep. The thought of what she had planned was plastered in front of her mind’s eye. Nothing dulled the pain of it. Not tea, not whisky, not pressing her thumbs into her eyes until the ache became too great. Many a time she perched on the end of their bed, considering waking Sham, considering leaving him, considering running for the hills and leaving it all behind, just so she could save herself if nobody else.

But she didn’t. She stayed strong.

And soon Fog arrived at their scheduled meeting place to confirm that the job was done. ‘I’ve got one,’ he said. ‘In a basement, not too far from here. Nobody will disturb you for a day or two, but after that…’

‘That’s all I’ll need,’ Hester replied.

Fragile, strained, and exhausted, the scientist got to work.

In the basement of an abandoned shop, Hester found the sedated body. She tried not to think of the young man in front of her as a person. This was a corpse—or, perhaps, soon would be—and nothing more. This was just like dissecting flesh for study. Nobody would be harmed. Nobody would know.

This was how she justified it to herself.

Hester pushed a needle into the body’s arm, letting the blood from it, ignoring how abnormal it was that this body—not person!—was bleeding. The red liquid glowed the gentle yellow of Fleet of Foot as it ran down the tube into the first of Hester’s prepared vial. As the glow changed to green, she moved the tube to a fresh vial. And so it went, the full strength of each skill being let into a vial, until Hester saw the deep crimson of Vigour. This was what she was here for. This was what all of this had been about.

The body on her table gasped, then shuddered, and then any illusions about the young man being dead were no longer illusions.

Hester swallowed back the rising bile, and concentrated on her work. She transferred the Fleet of Foot to a cast iron pot first, not daring to risk the Vigour on her first attempt, and she set about distilling it.

The task was simple: extract the essence of the skill from the “donated” blood without corrupting it. Or, rather, the description of the task was simple. In practice, this was significantly more difficult.

Hester had plenty of practice in distillation from her time at the Lightmark Academy, but never before had she attempted the process with such a fragile substance. She started with a low heat, achieving barely a disturbance on the surface of the morbid liquid, and ramped the heat up slowly.

No luck.

She was forced to open the vial on the gas burner further, until the flame was more powerful, raging greater than she would have liked. Slowly, as the hours passed, the remaining liquid cleared into a pure and vibrant yellow—the distilled skill.

Hester had nobody on whom to test but herself. With a grimace, she raised the pot to her lips and slurped at the leftover liquid.

Speed (Uncommon)

>

A rage consumed Hester, and she found herself throwing the empty pan across the room. The heat had corrupted the skill; just what she’d been trying to avoid.

But Hester had two more skills on which to test before she’d be forced to use the crimson-tinted Vigour. She pulled herself together, rubbed her sleep-deprived eyes, and got back to work.

The next vial, and the one after, were distilled to the same result. Hester told herself that it couldn’t be that the process was flawed. This was a lie, she realised that, but she knew not what else to try.

When the last of the skills, the Vigour, ended in the same way, Hester screamed at the body before her—as though the dead man was to blame, as though it was some flaw in his biology that had caused the issue.

As the last of the screams escaped her throat, she collapsed to the floor, wrapping her arms around her face to shield her from the world.

And then she swore to try again.

Fog raised an eyebrow at her repeated request. ‘I dunno how many of these are gonna be out there, you know. At some point, people are gonna start noticing that—’

‘Can you do it or not?’ Hester snapped at him.

The man shrugged. ‘Sure. You got the cash?’

‘No,’ she said, suddenly becoming hyper aware of the rate of her blinking. ‘I’ll pay after this time. You know I’m good for it. I’ll pay after.’

She couldn’t pay after, of course. Her savings were dry. But by then, maybe it wouldn’t matter. By then, maybe she would have fixed Sham. By then… maybe everything would be different.

It wasn’t. Again the experiment was met with the same result, the let blood still impure, resulting in an error message as she tested them on herself. She could feel that she was closer, though; despite the error, Hester felt no downsides, and though the strength of the skill was not the same as one gained the natural way, it was closer. She just needed more time. She just needed—

The sedated body gasped as it stirred from unconsciousness, eyes wide as it blinked the dingy basement into focus. The woman moved swiftly into action, recognising Hester—and her needles—as a threat. As the naked victim fled for the door, Hester took a leaf from her sick partner’s book. She grabbed the heavy iron pot in which she had been distilling the skills, and she threw it directly at the fleeing woman’s head.

It hit hard, the force of the blow dropping the woman to the floor.

Hester stood over her.

If the woman escaped, this would all be over. If they fled, Hester would be caught. She would be sent to the dungeons. She would not be able to help Sham.

So she did the only sane thing, and wrapped her hands around the felled woman’s throat.

Hester hadn’t slept for over two weeks on the day that she finally broke.

She sat at the end of the bed she’d once shared with her fiance, and she stirred him. She remained still, staying quiet for a minute or two, and she could tell from Sham’s face that he knew something terrible was about to happen.

Finally, he asked her, ‘What’s wrong?’

Hester felt herself choke on her answer. The words that escaped her mouth were not those she had intended. ‘I can’t do this any more,’ she said. ‘I… I need to have a life of my own.’

Sham’s eyes widened. ‘It’s… Hester, no…’ He reached for her hand, but Hester pulled it away. ‘It’s not my fault, Hester. I can’t help it. It’s the illness, it… I can’t do anything about it.’

‘I know, Sham,’ Hester replied, and turned herself away. She could not bear to look at the face of the man she loved any longer. It was too painful. It was better, now, to let him go. She took one last look at that old, faded daguerreotype of them—the one that captured them when they’d been at their happiest—and then place it down on the old rickety table.

‘Goodbye, Sham,’ she whispered at the door, though she knew the man inside had not heard her.

Three days later, as she stirred from sleep on a rigid bed at a hostel in Heron Piers, she found that a man, dressed in the dark clothing of the Prime Minister’s personal police force, was standing over her.

Hester didn’t run, didn’t fear for herself; if this was the end for her, then it was an end that she had deserved. It was a small price to pay for the crimes she’d committed.

The man in black considered her, his eyes locking on the rings around her own, on her shaking hands, on her fidgeting feet.

‘Miss Cray?’ the man asked.

‘...Yes?’ Hester resisted the urge to gulp; this was a sign of guilt, she decided.

‘The PM’s office sent me. You need to come with me.’

‘But I haven’t done anything wrong!’ Hester protested. ‘I haven’t—’

‘Wrong?’ the officer of the Legion repeated. ‘Who said anything about “wrong”? As far as the Prime Minister is concerned, you’ve done something very, very right. Enoch Chambers just wants to help.’