Once, Bharncair and Vharnveil were one: a city rising, a city struggling, a city dreaming. Then the sky rent open, Year Zero, and from its blackened wound came horrors of bioarcanic flesh and chitin, twisting the streets into charnel pits. Blood baptized the gutters, and those who endured the demonic onslaught of the Nightspawn did so not by grace, but by clawing hunger.

  The strong grew stronger, the wretched were trampled beneath, and from the marrow of ruin, true power took root. Year Thirty, when prophecy spoke of a greater doom, the Blood Barons raised Vharnveil into the heavens, swearing salvation for all. “We shall reach the skies and strike the Plague God down before it can reach Bharncair”, they said. But even after the Saintess fell and took the Plague God down with her, Year Thirty-Three, the floating city never came down. The rich had escaped the Vile. The poor had become its inheritance. And so Bharncair rots, while Vharnveil feasts on its corpse.

  The rich drown in excess, the poor drown in need. Either way, the city always gets another corpse to clean.

  – From ‘Of Blood, Blight, and Betrayal’ by Mouric the Hollow, Exorcist-Turned-Heretic

  The light filtering through the shattered ceiling above wasn’t sunlight. Not really. Bharncair didn’t have ‘sunlight’. It always had this pale, sickly green tint, like light filtered through a jar of spoiled absinthe. The Vile saw to that. Thin, poisonous, omnipresent—it was practically the city’s signature cologne.

  Not that Gael could do anything about it as he continued laying sprawled on his altar, staring up at the jagged wooden edges framing the misty sky. The prayer hall in front of the altar was a war zone. The walls had holes in them, every rotten bench was flipped upside-down, half the mossy floorboards were cracked all over, and all of it was just one big testament as to why he should never take late-night jobs ever again.

  Oh, and the five-meter-tall statue of the Saintess was face-down on the ground, her legs snapped in half. Thank the Saint she fell off the altar, because if she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have had such a comfortable bed to spend the night on.

  “Stop shuffling around. You’re noisy,” he muttered aloud, unsure if he was talking to himself or to Maeve, who was sleeping… somewhere under his altar.

  A low groan answered him. She was still alive. And awake. Probably.

  His head pounded like a smith’s hammer on iron, and every muscle in his body protested the mere idea of motion. He hadn’t gotten a wink of good sleep throughout the night, and he was sure it was for a very, very different reason compared to Maaeve. Sure, his symbiote elixir had saved his life, but he hadn’t realised a successful ‘curse interception’ would make him feel like absolute shit afterwards. A vital detail, in his opinion.

  Maybe I didn’t need to down half of the flask.

  Maybe just a few gulps would’ve been enough.

  Gotta keep refining the elixir, then.

  Another groan from Maeve. Groggy, he turned his head and peeked over the edge of the altar. The Exorcist was still where she’d fallen last night, on the cracked, rotten, mossy floorboards. It was probably uncomfortable, but she hadn’t moved an inch, so maybe not.

  And she’s out because she got flung through half a dozen walls last night.

  How many broken bones does she have?

  As he rubbed the back of his neck and felt around his nape, his spine, his back—trying everything he could to open his ‘status interface’ or whatever the bioarcanic engineers called the neural magic of the systems—a sharp knock rattled the front door on the far end of the long prayer hall.

  Gael ignored it at first, but then there was another knock. Louder this time.

  Nope. Not today.

  The knock came again.

  Fuck off, man. Can’t you tell I don’t feel like—

  “Gael!” Cara bellowed from upstairs, shrill enough to pierce the fog in his head. “Get the door!”

  “You get it!” he shouted back, rolling over on his sofa and attempting to plant his face into the cushion, but he was thwarted by the curved beak of his mask. With his pointy mask on, it was uncomfortable burying his face in anything, so he groaned and rolled back over, resting a hand over his eyes to block out the sunlight.

  He wasn’t going to take his mask off no matter what. Nobody—not even himself—should be subjected to the horror that lay underneath.

  Just ignore it, just ignore it. What a peaceful morning—

  “Gael!” Cara screamed. “Get the damn door!”

  So he groaned again, clicking his tongue in irritation as he dragged himself upright. Every bone in his body felt misaligned, and he was pretty sure his spine cracked in three places as he swung his legs off the altar. Still, he managed to find a bottle of alcohol tucked behind the chunk of stone, so he took a long swig as he shuffled to the front door like a cripple.

  He spat out his drink not even three steps away from the altar, glaring at the shifty black label on the side of the bottle.

  Fifty-two percent alcohol content?

  You trying to kill me?

  Where’s my seventy percent stash?

  Oh, he wanted to stumble back and look for another bottle tucked behind the altar, but whoever was knocking was being an annoying prick, so he tossed his bottle aside and just grumbled the rest of the way to the door. Stumbling past the rows of broken benches and then opening the door it felt like an impossible task, but he managed to turn the doorknob after a good few seconds of heaving and struggling.

  The moment he did, he raised a brow and blinked at their visitor.

  … Huh.

  The man looked like he’d stepped out of the kind of nightmare people don’t wake up from. His hooded coat was long, ragged, and blackened with streaks of filth. Something between blood, soot, and the kind of grime that clung to Bharncair’s alleys. His hood covered his head. Not an inch of his skin was exposed to the air. His boots and gloves were mismatched: left side metal, right side patchwork leather, stitched like it was pieced together from scraps found in the gutter. A massive greatsword leaned against his shoulder, its blade dull and nicked, like it’d been used to hack apart something that wasn’t wood.

  Anything but wood.

  But the strangest part? A mask covered his entire face, a thing of crude, hammered iron and leather straps, with circular holes for eyes that were more like sunken pits leading into the darkest of abysses—or maybe that was just the man’s actual face underneath.

  Gael blinked again.

  “Uh. Can I help you?”

  The man’s voice came out low and gravelly, like rocks scraping against one another. “I’m here for the job.”

  Gael’s brow furrowed. “What job?”

  “The cleaning job.”

  A pause.

  Then Gael glanced over his shoulder to holler at Cara in the surgical chamber.

  “Cara!” he screamed.

  “What?” she screamed back.

  “Did you call for a cleaner?”

  “Yeah! Let him in!”

  Gael turned back around, waving dismissively at the man—more specifically, at the greatsword resting against his shoulder.

  “No, no, no,” Gael mumbled, “we need the other cleaner.”

  The Cleaner tilted his head—seemingly befuddled for a moment—but then he peeked over Gael’s shoulder to study the destruction wrought in the prayer hall, and it was like something just clicked in his head.

  “Excuse me,” he mumbled, voice tinged with something close to embarrassment. Before Gael could respond, he slammed the door shut.

  Ten seconds later, the door creaked open again.

  This time, the man standing there was... different. He now wore a stained gray leather cloak, patched in all the wrong places, with a broom emblem stitched awkwardly onto the chest pocket. An actual broom also leaned against his shoulder, though it looked old and splintered. Gael had no idea if he could do any actual cleaning with that thing.

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  The mask underneath the hood, unfortunately, remained.

  “I’m here to clean,” the Cleaner said.

  Gael rubbed the lenses on his mask and yawned. “How much?”

  “One Mark.”

  “One Mark? How do you even stay in business charging that low?”

  The Cleaner shrugged. Sighing, Gael reached into his pocket and fished out a tarnished bronze coin, flipping it into the man’s gloved hand. The Cleaner pocketed it without a word and stepped past him, broom immediately sweeping up shards of glass, splinters, and tiny debris.

  He probably didn’t need to supervise the man, and he didn’t have the luxury of doing so, anyways.

  “Gael!” Cara’s voice erupted from the second floor one more time, breaking the morning silence. “I’ve cleaned up the surgical chamber! Get up here, the two of you! And bring some stools with you!”

  While he waited for Cara to parse through everything he’d just said, Gael’s forehead smacked the surgical table with a dull thud. He didn’t have the strength to lift it. Sleep clung to him like a persistent stink, the aftereffects of the symbiote elixir still wrapping his brain in a fog so thick he couldn’t see through it.

  We should get a proper dining room table with some proper chairs real, real soon.

  Right now, the three of them were seated around the long, cold surgical table in lieu of an actual table. The only chairs that weren’t broken because of last night’s fight were the uncomfortable metal stools in the storage room downstairs that Gael had tried—and failed—to get rid of for years because they were just so goddamn heavy.

  Well, now the three of them had a use for them.

  Beside him, Maeve sat slumped in her stool, her head lolling dangerously close to her chest. She was every bit as sleepy as he was, and the two of them looked like a pair of marionettes with their strings cut. Across the table, though, Cara’s arms were crossed in a way that promised almost certain death. Her stool creaked as she leaned forward, legs parting. Gael had heard that creak enough times to know trouble was coming.

  If she ain’t gonna say anything anytime soon, I guess I’ll just go back to slee—

  A sharp “ahem” from his older sister snapped the air like a whip. He shot upright, blinking blearily, while Maeve nearly fell out of her chair. His sluggish brain struggled to catch up with the situation. Surgical table, Cara, Maeve. Right. He was about to get roasted alive.

  “... So explain to me again,” Cara said. Her voice was calm—the kind of calm that made grown men consider throwing themselves into an oncoming carriage just to escape it. “What, exactly, happened last night while I was away?”

  Flicking off his top hat, Gael ran a hand through his messy hair and sighed. “I bumped into a Myrmur outside. It was parasitizing Miss Alba. Maeve here tried to save her, but in order for me to save her, I had to feed her some of my herbs directly, and that made her cuffs snap onto me. Then she passed out, and Miss Alba also passed out, so I carried both of them back here, married Maeve, and then I removed the Myrmur’s heart from Miss Alba with the symbiote elixir, which allowed Maeve to kill the Myrmur for good.”

  “I see.” Cara’s expression didn’t shift an inch. “So that’s why, in that bedroom right behind me, there’s a strange lady sleeping on my bed and a dead monster stinking up yours.”

  Gael shrugged. “Half of that bed is mine.”

  “But the dead, filthy monster is on my side of the bed while the nice-smelling lady is on yours.”

  “The monster’s on the right side, I say.”

  Cara was about to smack him, but then Maeve stirred beside him, looking vaguely horrified. “About that ‘marriage’ thing…” she muttered, her voice hoarse as she adjusted her glasses, trying her damndest to avoid Cara’s steely gaze. “I… you know, last night, I wasn’t in my right mind. I was weak, anemic, desperate—”

  “Oh, that’s romantic,” Gael deadpanned, “trying to backpedal out of a blood pact now. That’s just like a Symbiote Exorcist for you.”

  “I made no such covenant with you,” Maeve snapped, whirling on him. “I promised I’d marry you, but honestly? Who in their right mind would marry a Plagueplain Doctor?”

  “Someone who likes a man with charm. Ingenuity. A knack for stitching wounds while dodging debts. You know anyone else like that?”

  She glared at him, unimpressed, clearly not even trying to engage with his joke. Gael sighed, tapping a finger on the table. “Must’ve hit your head harder than I thought when you were being flung around by the Myrmur, I suppose,” he muttered. “Two hundred and six bones in the human body, but I guess your funny bone didn’t survive the impact—"

  “Shut up, Gael,” Cara snapped. The room went still. “A fight is a fight. Only the Plague God knows how many times I’ve dragged you back here after you picked a stupid brawl with some stupid boys who looked at you kinda stupidly funny, but this?” She whipped an arm behind her to point out the broken door, out into the wrecked prayer hall, her face red with anger. “This is on a whole other level. You’ve wrecked the place. You’ve wrecked the statue. We’ll be bleeding money for years! You got a clue in your drug-addled brain about how fucking screwed we are?”

  “It’s fine,” Gael shrugged, waving her off. “Maeve has money. Now that she’s my wife, she’ll happily foot the bill for all the repairs—”

  “I don’t,” Maeve said quickly.

  “What do you mean you don’t?”

  “I told you last night,” she said slowly. “I don’t have money.”

  “Oh, sorry. I thought I must have misheard you last night. You can say that again.”

  Maeve clenched her jaw. “I am a Symbiote Exorcist. I’ve got the emblem to prove it…. but I’m on an ‘indefinite probation’. Last night was my first ever Myrmur hunt, so I’ve never been paid by the organisation. Even if I were to report this kill to the nearest Exorcist Establishment, I don’t think I'd see a single coin.”

  He was about to pick her up—stool included as a package deal—and toss her out the window for the Cleaner to deal with, but Cara kicked him under the table and smiled cordially at the Exorcist.

  “I don’t know why they put you on probation, and it’s not my business to know, but what did they give you when you were sent here?” Cara’s anger softened, her tone gentler now. “Equipment? A partner? All Symbiote Exorcists work in pairs, right? Where’s the Host partner you came here with now?

  “I didn’t come here with anyone or anything,” Maeve muttered, looking away shyly. She was gripping so tightly onto her briefcase her hands were shaking slightly. “I haven’t been connected to a Host since I was put on probation three years ago, and the organisation only let me out of my cell three weeks ago. They didn’t give me any supplies. Any money. Just an order to garrison here in Bharncair’s southern ward… Blightmarch, was it? Mm. I have to do my best to clear out all the Myrmurs here.”

  “Three years?” Cara tilted her head quizzically. “But I thought Gael told me the ‘Hunter’ end of the Exorcist has to periodically drain their poisonous blood to a ‘Host’ or they’ll die. How did you—”

  “While I was in my cell, the higher-ups let me cut my arm every month with a knife.”

  “And you were only ‘let out’ three weeks ago? Did they send you here immediately after?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they told you to hunt down Myrmurs in this district all by yourself without a single coin to your name?”

  Maeve nodded slowly.

  Cara furrowed her brows quietly, and Gael leaned back in his stool, glancing at the Exorcist from the side.

  Hm.

  The more she talked, the clearer it became: she’d been sent here to die. Dumped in the southern ward crawling with Myrmurs, given nothing to survive but for that briefcase-umbrella that seemed to be her tailor-made weapon. She was disposable. A black lamb the organisation didn’t want for whatever reason—and it had to be reason enough for them to lock her up for three years, because what he saw from her last night didn’t feel like her first ever fight with a Myrmur.

  She’d blasted a crater in the prayer hall downstairs, for god’s sake.

  “... So, what was your plan when you got here?” he asked bluntly. “So they sent you down here three weeks ago with nothing on your back. Were you just walking around looking for suspiciously pale-looking people to kill?”

  Maeve hesitated. “I didn’t… have a plan,” she admitted, pointing at her green right eye. “I just slept out on the streets, ate whatever I could find from the dumps, and followed my profane eye. It’s the passive mutation of the Wasp Class, so I have the right eye, and you have the left. When we’re looking at a Nightspawn, half of our vision will be tinted red, and the other person will also see the tint no matter how far away they are. So that was what I was trying to do. I was… hoping to stumble upon a Nightspawn by seeing if I could find one with my eye.”

  Gael blinked, a hand moving up to his left eye. He couldn’t see if his hazel left eye had really turned green without a mirror, but between the Cleaner and the elixir poisoning, he’d almost forgotten: she had a Symbiotic System, which meant she had access to magic and mutations and all the other biomodifications that came with it.

  He was about to start pestering her about the system they now supposedly ‘shared’ when Cara interrupted him.

  “And how long have you been eating out of trash dumps for?” Cara asked, her voice soft as she ignored Maeve’s unnatural green eye.

  “About… two weeks. The higher-ups did give me one meal before they sent me down here from the upper city, so I survived off that for a week before I had to look for a new, stable food source.”

  Cara’s expression shifted into something dangerously close to pity, as though saying ‘aw, you poor thing’. Then she turned to Gael, her eyes brightening. “You should marry her, then. She can stay here.”

  Gael shrugged. “Sure. That’s what I wanted in the first place. Also, about the system—”

  Maeve’s head whipped around, her eyes wide. “I just told you why you shouldn’t keep me around. I’d just be a burden on you two, so let me live somewhere else. Somewhere close by. As long as I’m still connected to you—”

  “Houses are expensive here,” Gael said matter-of-factly, “and there ain’t no abandoned ones in livable conditions around this area, so you’re staying here.”

  “A roof is better than no roof,” Cara added. “Oh, I guess we don’t have a roof for the prayer hall right now, but whatever. You can bunk with me. Gael can sleep downstairs.”

  “Fuck you too—”

  Maeve’s hands curled into fists. “But… from what I can tell, the two of you aren’t exactly well-off in terms of money. I’d just be making things worse.”

  The room fell silent for a beat before all three of their stomachs growled at once, the sound loud and pitiful. Gael and Cara exchanged a glance.

  “We haven’t eaten in a day, either,” Cara mumbled.

  Maeve’s stomach growled louder, almost as if to mock them. Her face flushed. “And I haven’t eaten anything proper in a week.”

  Before Gael could add an equally unhelpful comment of his own, a faint cough interrupted them from behind. All three turned toward the bedroom doorway, where Miss Alba leaned against the rotten wooden frame. Her thin figure was wrapped in a towel, and her eyes were sharper than her frail frame would suggest. Evidently, she was no longer cursed or dying.

  “... I have a lot I want to say to all of you,” Miss Alba began, her voice rasping like rusted hinges, “but first things first: if you’re hungry, why not come to my noodle shop? The bowls are on me.”

  Cara blinked.

  Then she turned to Gael and Maeve, smiling coyly. “Sounds like a fine plan. While we eat, we’re gonna sort out our bills, our debts, and figure out just how deep in the shit we are.”

  Gael mumbled under his breath, “We can’t be that deep in the red.”