Archive of Our Own

It makes sense to show the bull blood to Dankovsky, he keeps telling himself, like a dubious mantra, as he limps along the rails, trying to avoid the infected districts on the way. He is the man with the microscope.

It makes sense to show the bull blood to Dankovsky …

By the time he reaches the eerie, deceptive quietude shrouding the Stillwater, he is on his last legs and making it anywhere else—even the relatively nearby Shelter—is out of the question, anyhow.

After dissuading Eva Yan’s repeated attempt at convincing him to teach her steppe-walking, he finally manages to laboriously limp upstairs. At least, this time, she did not attempt to stop him. 

The Bachelor is inside this time, huddled by the desk and seemingly glued to his microscope. He does not so much as twitch as Artemy drags himself inside, knocks perfunctorily and pointedly clears his throat. 

Exhausted and increasingly annoyed, Artemy crosses the odd circular room and claps a hand on Dankovsky’s snakeskin-clad shoulder. 

“Oynon.”

Dankovsky jerks in surprise, almost dislodging the slide he’s been readjusting under the lens. “Christ alive, Burakh,” he snaps, “you gave me a fright. Did nobody ever teach you to knock?”

Artemy grits his teeth, attempting not to regret his choice of destination already. 

“How’s it going?” he asks instead. 

Dankovsky heaves a great sigh. “A shoddy vaccine for tomorrow, but nothing that would hold. Only another … fruitless attempt.” Shutting his eyes, he folds his gloved hand in a fist before bringing it down onto the table. “But there must be a solution to this problem,” he grits out, as though to himself. “There must.”

The misaligned slide in the microscope wobbles slightly. 

For a moment, Artemy studies the strained sloping line of Dankovsky’s narrow shoulders and the glumly stubborn look on his grey face. Eyes flitting towards the window, he notes the cup of old, cold … whatever it is, coagulated and brownish-grey as it is … abandoned, lonesome, on the windowsill.

Artemy sighs. “You look exhausted, erdem. You should get some sleep. Twyre is in bloom.”

Dankovsky scoffs dismissively. “Tell that to Rubin. He doesn’t sleep at all though, he’s well aware of that twyre of yours.”

Briefly, Artemy entertains a vision of attempting to tell Stakh to sleep more, or altogether convince him of anything. He sighs again. “I will if I get a chance. It’s like he has a death wish.”

Dankovsky doesn’t seem to be listening anymore. “Anyway,” he says, staring forlornly at the microscope, “how’s it going with you? Any progress?”

Artemy bites down at his lower lip. Well, nothing for it. “I got something,” he admits. “Bulls can’t get infected.”

At last, Dankovsky looks up properly from his microscope. He straightens a little and blinks at Artemy, very fast, several times. His eyes are somewhat red-rimmed.

“Are you sure?” he asks, inanely. “I had the same line of thinking. At least that’s the first thing I checked.”

“No,” Artemy says slowly, “I’m not sure. That’s why I came to you.”

Once again, he seems to have lost Dankovsky’s attention as his gaze strays somewhere to Artemy’s shoulder and remains suspended midair. “The whole bull thing …” he says vaguely, “I found one, you know. Got it in here … the blasted thing is lost now. I injected it with a strain, intending to collect a blood sample the next day. Somebody led it away from here in the night.” He stares at the desk. “I don’t suppose you know where it might be?”

Yes, Artemy thinks, I personally oversee bull theft in this town. I orchestrate it, in fact, just for your enrichment.

Instead, he reaches into the front pocket and produces a glass vial. “Take a look. A sample of bull blood.”

Dankovsky stills. Finally, his entire attention is captured: dark eyes flicker from the vial to Artemy’s face.

“… Are you a mind reader?”

There is a sudden spark of animation in his eyes that gives him an odd, intense aura—something that breaks through the sluggish fugue. 

No, Artemy should say, I’m simply not useless.

Instead, he does something in the way of a tired shrug. What comes out of his mouth is a cryptic, “Sometimes. A bit.”

Dankovsky blinks, fuller this time—and then tilts his head and smiles strangely, looking up at him from hooded eyes. It’s somewhat annoying, Artemy thinks, as most things he does are. He attempts to mirror the expression and winces. This does not seem to deter the Bachelor, who’s somehow managed to deftly the phial out of Artemy’s hand without him noticing. 

“Leave it with me,” he says, brutally pushing aside a stack of paper and slides he’s only just been conscientiously studying ; they fall limply behind the desk. He places the phial reverently in the middle of the desk instead. “I’ll study it. Will only take a few hours.”

Having declared so, he turns in place, and bestows Artemy with a somewhat offensively obvious once-over.

“While I’m busy,” he says, “you may hit the cot over there, by the folding screen.”

Grandly, the Bachelor gestures towards the unmade bed in the alcove to the right. Artemy glances sideways. 

Hm.

“You need it,” Dankovsky diagnoses. Then, with an audible smirk, “I’ve seen corpses prettier than you.”

Artemy looks back at him somewhat heavily.

“Thanks, erdem,” he says. A refusal lingers at the tip of his tongue, but each of his limbs appear to suddenly weigh more on their own, than his own weight combined. His eyelids are leaden. “I need to finish something first. But … I might.”

Dankovsky makes a vague gesture in the air, “Far be it from me to stop you from … whatever errand it is you’re running. Be my guest either way. I’m—” he pauses, strangely discordant. “Not going anywhere for the night anymore. I’ve run out of time.”

Again that vacant, almost haunted look in his eyes, arresting movement. Artemy fights the shiver of unease: there is something discordantly ominous in his illogical declaration: to Artemy’s knowledge there is no externally imposed reason for Dankovsky to sequester himself in the Stillwater. Still, he is in no mood to pry. 

Dankovsky pays him no mind and begins eyeing the blood sample hungrily. Taking his cue—and trying to ignore the near-magnetic pull of the invitingly half-obscured bed to his left side—Artemy nods curtly and leaves.

He just about makes it down the stairs without tripping. Once outside, and away from the prickling, low hum of the Stillwater clinging to him like some sort of film or touch of invisible hands, he exhales heavily, before leaning against the blue wall of the Stillwater. 

He runs a hand down his face. What was it that Kain said? 

 ***

It’s over an hour later when he’s done dragging himself from door too door all the way across Bridge Square, listening for knocking and attracting half-curious, half-hostile looks as he draws menacing marks in white chalk. Following a brief scuffle with Maria Kaina and resorting to dispatching a teenager to relay his message to Victor in exchange for one chestnut, he finally makes his way back towards the circular building. Both his legs hurt by now, the left one bordering on unbearable. His ears seem to be ringing with exhaustion. 

No, that’s ashen swish. There, by the water. And blood twyre. Stiffly, Artemy bends down to pick it, following the soft noise, and nearly trips over his own unlaced boots.

Damn it. Best get going before a mugger sees him here: in this state best he could do is yawn in defence. And anyhow, if Dankovsky is done with his analyses, Artemy may yet make it back to the Lair for a solid … four … three … hours? Of sleep. He winces, involuntarily.

He stuffs the stalks ungainly inside his breast-pocket and makes it for the Stillwater’s door. 

Back inside, he grunts a vague greeting towards the ever-awake, lingering visage of Eva Yahn perpetually hovering by the piano. She casts him a look of hooded eyes, as untethered as someone so house-bound can seem, and says little as he trudges back upstairs, burying his unease and the prick her eyes draw on the back of his neck back down.

He finds Dankovsky eerily as he’d been before: hunched over the microscope like a bee glued to pollen, under the hulking mass of the scrawled-over decree board. He likewise does not react to Artemy’s heavily dragging, uneven footsteps. There is incongruity to it, too: the rapt stillness inside the room, the somehow-stagnant dimly warm light, almost as though forcibly captured as in a picture.

Instinctively, Artemy glances to the grandfather clock. The reading is wrong: the clock hand mistakenly stuck at two in the morning. Perhaps that’s what confused Dankovsky’s sense of time, earlier.

Once Artemy makes it fully inside, Dankovsky suddenly sniffs the air, straightening.

“… Have you been picking herbs?” he demands abruptly, in an incongruously present tone. “I swear—those local herbs, the scent is so peculiar—”

Artemy stuffs the blood twyre deeper into his pockets; the stalks scrunch unpleasantly against the somewhat soggy couple of lemons and kashk.

“Twyre’s in bloom,” he grunts.

“Ah!” Dankovsky seems distracted again, eyes faraway even as he gazes at the device in front of him. “Yes …”

Artemy tries to focus. “So?” he asks. “The blood?”

Dankovsky smacks his lips audibly, shaking his head. “Nothing—yet. But I’d like to keep looking, if you don’t  terribly mind.”

“I don’t. I brought it to you for a reason.”

“Mm,” Dankovsky hums noncommittally, already consumed with scribbling something on paper without looking, eyes cinched to the lens. “Yes. An hour or two, it’ll be … no more. I—”

Suddenly he stiffens. His eyes flit to the clock almost warily. For a moment, he seems to watch the clock hand for movement. As it fails to twitch, Dankovsky’s shoulders seem to relax, somehow. 

An hour or two. 

Right.

Standing in the middle of the room, Artemy feels suddenly unfathomably heavy. He tries to recall the last time he’d slept—before five, for sure. Yes, at the Lair, before that goddamned dream of Lara’s school had jolted him awake.

I hope Sticky is fine in there. I should check on him. I hope he didn’t break the alembic. 

Still, he does not move. He tries to picture himself walking down the steps out of Bridge Square and stumbling along the train tracks, swaying from side to side until he inevitably collapses in a heap of useless limbs at the very crime scene which commenced his sweet homecoming. 

Fuck it, Artemy thinks. 

“Does the offer still stand?” he manages.

“Mm?” Dankovsky asks, belatedly. “What offer?”

Blunter, then. “Can I still sleep here?”

Slowly, almost comically, Dankovsky raises his pale face. Blinks at Artemy, as though seeing him for the first time. 

At length, “Oh—yes,” he says. “Of course. I … offered, didn’t I? I did offer. I didn’t think it … But who would I be—to rescind it now.”

“Right,” Artemy says, making a vague pivot towards the bed. If he cared to give it more thought, he might have questioned the continuing sense of dissonance in Dankovsky’s words. He does not. “Thanks.”

Dankovsky, on his part, hardly moves, casting a long and oddly probing look Artemy’s way instead. 

“What?” Artemy asks hoarsely.

Dankovsky smacks his lips. “You can freshen up as well, if you like,” he offers, in what sounds like a carefully polite tone. “There’s a washbasin and some soap, in the alcove—there, behind the folding screen.”

Artemy makes a point of levelling him with an unimpressed look. “Subtle.”

“Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas,” Dankovsky says, whatever it means. “We could all stand to be scrubbed and laundered in a vat by this point. Perhaps that’d do away with this pestilence. Now, here’s a degree idea; Roman baths …”

Despite himself, Artemy snorts. “If only.” 

There is a pause. 

“Besides,” Dankovsky says, sniffling. “Hadn’t you only just accused me of stinking of pond scum? In front of god and Olgimskys at that … Follow your own advice, if you will. I’ve taken it to heart, you know. If the goddamned water pumps weren’t broken, I’d drink them all dry.”

In truth, Artemy does not even vaguely remember ever saying anything of the sort, especially around the Olgimskys; it seems like the sort of thing he’d perhaps think and not say out loud to a man that’s virtually a stranger. Still, Dankovsky appears tired enough to be somewhat confused, to put it mildly, and Artemy can’t exactly lie and pretend like he hasn’t been dreaming of skinny-dipping in the polluted Gorkhon for days now. In fact, the Bachelor’s comment has made him maddeningly aware of each point of contact his grime-ridden clothes make with his skin, as well as the miasma from ploughing through infected districts still clinging to his face.

A kingdom for a bath.

Capitulating, Artemy drags himself behind the pithy folding screen and begins doing away layer by filthy layer with his cloak, gloves, smock and boots. It’s a bit of an ordeal, what with how tired he is, because he seems to have lost the talent for maintaining balance. He loses it several times, bumping into the folding screen and dislodging it somewhat.

At some point, he becomes acutely aware of Dankovsky’s eyes having unglued themselves from the microscope and affixed to him instead.

He sighs, straightening somewhat awkwardly. “What?”

“Nothing.” Still, Dankovsky’s eyes remain as prying as they are perceptive; and as always, he seems unable to entirely let the thing go: “Are you in need of having your dressings changed?” The Bachelor asks. “I can see you’ve got several—and I still have some spare bandage.”

Artemy makes a dismissive hand gesture. “It’s old.”

“How old?”

“Old.”

“Predating your arrival old?” Dankovsky wheedles. “Or do you mean, old as in caused by the incident by the train tracks, in which case your five-days-old stab wounds are in fact in dire need of redressing?”

Artemy continues the perfunctory clean-up, balling up his jumper and dunking a washcloth in water.

“Aren’t you busy?” he asks, tetchy. “Quit fussing, erdem.”

He notices the Bachelor has a straight razor, and wonders if it is worth it to shave. Instead, 

“… Indeed I am,” comes Dankovsky’s belated voice, followed by the creak of a chair as he—presumably—returns to his task. “And, I suppose. It’s … bit too early, isn’t it? For all that. After the trial … yes, not yet … I’ll keep the bandage in the clock.”

Artemy sighs, tuning out the incoherent mumblings, wrings out the washcloth, and returns to his task.

 ***

The mirror next to Dankovsky’s bed is cracked.

By the time Artemy’s head actually hits the pillow, his whole body jointly sings a song of gratitude so potent the relief of not standing upright is almost indistinguishable from more pain. Trying to convince himself the pain is both ignorable and vincible, Artemy stares at the crushed mirror and breathes strenuously.

It’s not just a splinter, but a vivid spider-web rupturing the whole surface of it. Dimly, some discordant memory swims up to him, muddy as though long-forgotten, though it could not be older than a couple of days: 

The Bachelor, kicking a mirror in the maze of the Warehouses before sprinting off with shocking agility towards the graveyard. Strange man. 

“… Are you in pain?”

“Huh?” Artemy grunts.

“Your breathing sounds—laboured, I suppose. The dressings—perhaps they need changed in the end? Or do you feel short of breath, because in that case—well. There is protocol—”

“I’m fine, oynon,” Artemy lies through his teeth, closing his eyes as a wave of long-ignored migraine pain and nausea hits him. “Focus on your blood, and not my breathing, will you?”

“I am perfectly capable of multitasking,” Dankovsky claims. “In fact, you would be surprised. But, fine, I will let you sleep now.”

“Why, thank you.”

There’s a lull, afterwards, as Artemy tries not to touch any of the raw-edged wounds of his unprocessed, hastily put-away grief the same way he avoids rubbing the shoddily dressed stab-wounds on the mattress. In truth, he should make use of Dankovsky’s fidgeting, overeager hands and have them re-wrapped. An opportunity like this is rare. Instead, he presses his eyes shut and listens to the rhythmical clinking of Dankovsky rearranging the test tubes he’s poured the blood into as he swabs at each batch.

He tries to empty his head.

Still, his thoughts become a heavy hive of miserably unfinished jobs and half-fulfilled commitments, whispers of guilt and duty fighting to drown out one another in real time.

His last coherent thought is of the little girl picking twyre by the graveyard.

I should have checked on her, too. Murky. Where does she even live?

That weird friend of hers.

Then the heaviness presses onto Artemy, pushing his lids closed.

 ***

The dream of the Termitary ends, but remnants still cling to him like lentigines: The Termitary door, blood spilled under, the wounded, tortured wailing coming from inside; the voice of his father behind the luminous, desiccated Grace, her body falling to the floor, Murky and Sticky dead in the lair, small and unmoving, Stakh buried; Lara snuffed out like a candle in the Changeling’s hands and Grief nailed to the warehouse wall, dead, all dead, and Artemy himself is walking to the scaffolding, watching the coiled rope of a noose, hanging in the—

 ***

He wrenches himself upright, gasping for breath.

His skin prickles with cold sweat. He is dressed down to his undershirt; which he has not done in the Lair, too cold for anything but layers, filthy or not.

In momentary confusion, he takes surprised stock of his surroundings: it’s not the threadbare cot underneath him but the mattress of a bed; not the low, dun ceiling of the Lair over him but an odd circular canopy of a tall room, bathed in fickle, burnished light of a lamp. The scent which pervades the air is neither blood, herbs nor boiled organs, but something clinical and aseptic, with dim notes of camphor, underneath.

The Stillwater. Right. 

A dull, persistent pain pulses in Artemy’s shoulder where one of the muggers’ knives got him, and where he had unthinkingly rolled himself in his sleep. His mouth is dry. He can’t remember when he’d last drunk clean water. Rubbing both his eyes, he exhales and slowly lowers himself onto the uninjured elbow. 

As he glances to the side, trying to see if there is any drinking water about, he finds Dankovsky asleep at his desk: forehead pressed squarely to the wood, mouth open, cheek laid out upon his gloved hand; all of it surrounded with a bizarre halo of varyingly bloodied test tubes.

Before Artemy can form a coherent thought about the image, a horrible scream sounds out outside and Dankovsky jerks awake.

“I’m awake!” he bursts out, sitting up ramrod-straight and nearly unbalancing his own chair. “Is it—daylight, is it—”

He trails off, strangely confused. He says, “It is still night.”

Dankovsky seems to have descended elbows-deep into research while Artemy slept: his coat is flung over the chair, ascot loosened and shirtsleeves hiked up. 

Right now, he also wears a stupid, half-stupefied expression on his face under a fringe of mussed up dark hair as he meets Artemy’s eyes. He looks startled to see him there; as one seeing a ghost.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he insists, rather stubbornly, and seemingly to no one in particular.

“No?” Artemy croaks out—never one to let up a chance to take the piss when one presents itself so conveniently. “Me neither, you know. In fact, I’ve been awake all this time, watching you sleep.”

For a moment, Dankovsky stares at him dumbly with his spooked-owl face.

Then, deadpan, he says: “Ha, ha.”

Stiffly, he reorients himself in his chair. Something clicks unpleasantly in his neck—a bone. Artemy winces in sympathy.

“… It’s done, anyway,” the Bachelor pronounces sourly. “No harm, no foul.”

“You mean the blood?” Artemy guesses, sitting up. “And?”

Dankovsky sighs. He collapses his head in one of his hands and rubs his eyes with the other. “Well, seems like you were right,” he admits. “But it’s of no use to either of us.”

Artemy tries to jog his brain into functioning, half-slunk as it still is into a drowsy fugue. “So … bulls are immune to sand pest?”

“Indeed, they produce antibodies. A lot of them. But they’re useless to us.”

“Tell me more.”

Dankovsky inhales deeply. “Alright, well … how well are you versed in raw sample hyper-immunisation for xenogeneic serums? Do you know how immunoglobulins are extracted from a native serum?”

Artemy stares at him heavily.

The Bachelor inhales. “Sand pest evolves and mutates in human blood. Fast. It doesn’t do that in bulls. It’s as though bulls are of no interest to it. But their antibodies could theoretically be useful …”

“Of no interest, you say?” Artemy mumbles. Something dawns on him, dimly. “Hm.”

Dankovsky’s tired eyes move to him again. “Hm?” he repeats. “Hm, what? What does hm, mean, pray tell?”

Artemy catches himself. “Nothing. Just thinking.”

Daniil sighs. “Hm. Well, unless the disease is weakened, we can’t inject a person with those antibodies,” he says, sounding resigned. “It’s too risky. Children, for example, definitely wouldn’t survive the procedure. We are simply too different from bulls. Meaning what we need is …”

“… A minotaur,” Artemy guesses. “Creature that’s both man and bull.”

Dankovsky stares morosely at the platelets in his microscope.

“Yes, well,” he says, “if you happen to run into any such specimen in the street, be sure to pass my name along. I would love to shake his hand.”

Artemy glances at him; the Bachelor has pressed his eyes shut again and seems to slump even more over his desk.

“… I’ll be out of your hair then,” Artemy says, making up his mind. With almost unfathomable effort, he swings both his legs off the bed and heaves his aching body upright, even as all his muscles jointly spasm in dire protest, stunting the efficacy of his progress. 

“Nonsense,” Daniil fires back, eyes still closed. “You’ve barely slept an hour, half of which you’ve spent thrashing about like you were trying to wear out my bed springs. I wouldn’t call that restful, exactly.”

Artemy frowns. “Who’s been watching who sleep, now?”

“Supposedly, you,” Dankovsky says mildly. He opens his eyes. “Besides, there’s still time. It’s night—we cannot move anyhow. Rules are rules. Ah, I’m dying for a smoke. Would you terribly mind? Or, better yet, would you care to join me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he rises from his seat and starts patting down his ridiculous coat in search of a somewhat worn pouch of tobacco and some rolling paper.

Artemy swallows down a retort along the lines of, What the bloody hell do you mean we cannot move at night? What do you think I’ve been doing each night so far—sleeping?

“I don’t really smoke,” he says instead, dubiously.

“No, no, me neither, of course,” Dankovsky returns absent-mindedly, sticking a makeshift cigarette between his teeth with the practiced motion of a habitual user.  Much in the same vein, he yanks open the circular window, somehow managing not to dislodge his forsaken coffee cup and leans against the wall.

He jerks his head invitingly towards the window. “C’mon,” he says. “For courage.”

Failing to come up with a sufficient counterargument after subsiding on chewing coffee beans raw for several days now, Artemy gets up from the bed and joins him at the window. He accepts a cigarette from Dankovsky’s gloved fingers and sways close enough for him to light it.

Once it’s done, Dankovsky leans out and exhales smoke outside.

With a slight lag, Artemy mirrors him. Improbably, he feels a little bit of life return to him, not so much spurred on by the hit of nicotine but the rustling night wind insinuating itself inside, raising the skin on his shoulders in goosebumps and picking at Dankovsky’s fringe.

Disrupting, at last, the choking stillness of the house. 

It’s fully dark, now: once more, a deceiving tranquility lurking in the hush and lowlight, dispersed only by the wanly twinkling fireflies circling the stalks of twyre. 

Dimly, distantly, the sound of a rueful piano wafts towards the open window, carried on the wind. 

“Damn sad melody, no?” Daniil muses. “I’ve been wondering whose it is—but never dared to ask her yet.”

Strange wording, Artemy thinks, dared.

A chill goes through him; he stifles a shudder. In September, the nights have a bite to them.

“It’s Capella,” he says, looking out of the window again. “Well, it’s related to her, anyhow. I followed the melody into one of the houses and she was there. Said her mother composed it and it was just … playing inside. Somehow. Same thing happened to a random man, a few houses down. They just suddenly … found the music in them.”

“Hm,” mused Daniil. Rather than outright reject the idea of a spontaneously acquired musical prowess, he tilted the cigarette in his fingers. Observing it closely, he said, “I doubt her mother composed it. I … knew it, I think. Even before Eva took to playing it  every night … it feels sometimes like she has lifted it out of my head. A … worrying thought.” He swallows, visibly. “It reminds me of something I’ve heard at the Capital.”

Artemy blinks. Eva? 

“Yeah?”

Dankovsky nods, still lost in thought, as though dragged back in time through the thick of memories. “I used to go about this woman’s house—an old baron’s wife. A widow. She was fussy, and particular, but mind-numbingly rich, and always half-willing to sponsor the research of any plucky scientist that best entertained her. She had a liking for … music … somebody played it this for her, I think—Platon, perhaps—and even decently. It was all a fool’s errand in the end. She said the music made her melancholy, refused to host us again. I’ve heard she killed herself shortly after. She would have lost her house otherwise, turned out she was destitute.”

Artemy stares at him—reminded, rather damningly, that he is looking at a stranger—and feeling again like he is seeing Dankovsky for the first time.

Dankovsky turns to look at him. “Ah, too much again?” he asks, with a strange smile.

Artemy shakes his head, attempting to shake off the uneasy feeling again. “We had a very different time at the Capital,” he says. “A recital at a baroness’s house … I got into a production of The Idiot at the Bolshoi once, with a hand-me-down ticket because someone at my lodgings had shingles. I fell asleep in my seat for two acts. Too tired, because I kept failing pharmacology. Woke up to applause.”

To his surprise, Dankovsky bursts out laughing. Actual laughter, too: not that unpleasant smirk he wears or any otherwise calculated expression. He grins from ear to ear. He looks younger like this, and much less strange. He has dimpled cheeks.

“Now, I can’t blame you ... I myself find theatre … boring. Film, now, that’s another thing. I bet a rushing train would keep you awake in your seat …” he trails off suddenly, his mirth fading somewhat. “Though I suppose, this town … has other priorities.”

Artemy frowns, half-expecting another jibe to perforate the momentary illusion created by laughter. “What?”

But Dankovsky’s smile has receded, replaced with a strange, hollow look in his eyes as he stares out into the night. 

“Say, my dear Haruspex,” he murmurs incongruously, in a low voice. Artemy almost flinches at the intimate address. “At night, sometimes, my eyes … I seem to imagine the Theatre opens as though there were no plague, no hospital inside it.” His voice dims somewhat, as do his eyes; as though something inside him is reverting deep into himself, and into that dark hush that reigns outside the small light of the Stillwater. “I cannot go, of course. I am … tethered, here. But I stand and think that I am surely … surely missing something crucial.” 

He swallows. “Have you … have you seen any of those night plays of theirs …? I ask myself—I can’t help asking—where do they keep the costumes—who does it? Where are the bodies? Who’s that onstage? I …” he trails off, abruptly, and hangs his head. “I drive myself mad wondering what I am missing, but all the same, I am too afraid to guess.”

For a moment, Artemy only watches him, suffused with a sudden but thoroughly paralysing dread. 

Then Dankovsky blinks, as though coming to. “… Or perhaps I am going mad,” he says. ”As per usual.”

It awakens Artemy from stupor as well. “You haven’t gone mad.”

A cautious look, sideways. “No?”

Artemy shifts, uncomfortable—though it has little to do with the many twinges of his joints and torn tissue. “I’ve seen some of them. The pantomimes.”

There’s a play being rehearsed now, something whispers in his mind. 

But Dankovsky nods, jerkily. “Not madness, then … nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu—a scientist ought to know to test a hypotheses … But I must stay away. It … disturbs me, I confess. Perhaps that’s odd to admit, given everything. All the horror around. Like I said, to watch one would likely give me direction. And yet I can’t stop this childish fear of … mirrors.”

He breaks off again, eyes drawn once more to the night outside. 

I’ve noticed, Artemy thinks. He is convinced by now that he is missing something, too—in parallel, or in reflection, to what Dankovsky is circling. There is something lurking in the depth of the Stillwater as unearthly and crooked as the night pantomimes and the tumbler-toy dream. 

He thinks of the clock. He knows, without checking, that the hand remains stuck at two.

“… We should go to one,” Artemy says after a while, led by an inexplicable impulse. “Together. See if we both see the same thing. Perhaps in a few days, if … if things quieten.”

Dankovsky’s dark eyes pin him down, at that, very intently. He smiles again—genuinely, if wanly, with only the corners of his mouth. “Ah, yes—that’s scientific method. Yes, perhaps. In a few days … I’d like that. Let’s go.”

He sounds like he is lying. I cannot go, of course. I am tethered here.

Dankovsky continues looking at Artemy, with a puzzled frown, now, as though attempting to solve for something. As though reaching another tail-end of the same quandary, it strikes Artemy suddenly that he has found himself in the midst of a different evening from the one he’s been in before walking to the Stillwater.

Something anomalous, he thinks. And, unscripted.

Not how this usually goes. 

“What is it?” Daniil asks, frowning. His eyes are suddenly hawkish, catching onto Artemy’s own awareness. He reaches out abruptly, clearly driven by impulse himself, gloved hand seeking purchase on Artemy’s forearm: half-pulling, half-steadying. 

Suddenly overcome—heart hammering in his chest in restless agitation—Artemy wavers.

Has this happened before? he almost asks. Have we—

Daniil seems to be expecting it, too: the newest noose, newest sentence, delivered to him by Artemy like a harbinger of doom. An ending, Artemy thinks. Dankovsky looks hungry for it—ravenous.

Artemy looks away.

He can’t stand to diagnose the root cause of this fear yet. He can’t stand to part the curtains and look behind—not yet. Not with so much still unresolved. Sticky waiting at the Lair. Lara …

He redirects his thoughts elsewhere, to abstraction: they snag on the new point of conversation, yet un-explored. He runs it back: young people gathering at an old woman’s opulent house, a night at the Capital—a night anywhere but here and now. Artemy latches onto it; dragging back the illusion of chronology to force it upon them like a blanket.

“How old are you, oynon?” he asks.

Dankovsky’s breath hitches. His grip relents, hand falling away—visibly taken aback. It becomes obvious how fervently he’d been readying himself for the blow. 

“… Old enough to over-indulge at will,” he strains out, a touch stiffly. 

Half-turning, he raises the cigarette again and  flicks some ash out of the window.

Committed to his venue of grounding them, Artemy keeps looking at him.

With time, Dankovsky gives in. “Twenty-eight—twenty-nine, soon-to-be. But I smoke too much. And I don’t sleep enough.” He cuts Artemy a somewhat cutting look. “You’re—what, twenty-six?”

Artemy frowns at him. “Had a look at my medical file, did you, colleague? Badly done, oynon. Haven’t they taught you patient confidentiality, at the Capital?”

Dankovsky hisses in air through his teeth. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t looked into anything of the sort. I did the maths based on … what you told me. No need to accuse me.”

I haven’t told you a damn thing, Artemy thinks, though he’s beginning to suspect it’s not quite true. Not in the strictest sense. 

He sighs and runs a hand down his face. “I’m not accusing you of anything, oynon. I thought we were having a moment.”

Daniil tsks, newly impatient. “What is that word?” he demands. “Oynon, erdem. What is it?”

“I did tell you that.”

A quirked eyebrow. “Yes, you told me and yet I don’t believe you—”

“No? You claimed to trust me earlier.”

“Ah. So I did. Dulce est desipere in loco, no?”

“I don’t know what in the goddamned hell you are saying, and you know it—”

Dankovsky opens his mouth. A gunshot sounds out outside, jarringly close. A woman starts crying. 

They almost startle apart, huddled right by the window as they are.  

Reality sinks in, anchoring Artemy back in the night he had come from: the dread of it proves more reliable in dispersing existential doubt than anything else. The blood has been tested, and there is an experiment to run—and fast.

He says, “I really have to go.” 

A gloved hand shoots out to grasp at his forearm again, stopping him.

Raising his eyebrows, Artemy stills.

“… I don’t know if you’ve used my mirror, but you haven’t gotten any prettier in the past hour, Burakh,” Dankovsky says, sounding strained. “Stay and get your rest, or I’ll have to contend with having you on my conscience when they inevitably mug you on the street— ”

“You might need to lower your expectations,” Artemy interrupts. “This is how I look. And your mirror is in pieces, by the way, have you not noticed smashing it?”

Daniil smiles—it’s not a pleasant smile by far. “Stay,” he instructs, almost condescendingly. “And take your rest.”

Well, two can play this game.

Artemy parries back, “And what about you?”

Dankovsky takes a studious drag of his cigarette. “Me? I’m an insomniac.”

Artemy measures him with a look. “Bullshit.”

A roll of eyes. “I am sorry my condition is not to your liking, Burakh, but alas—”

Artemy interrupts before he gets properly going: “You need sleep, oynon. Twyre’s in bloom.”

“And you’ve brought said twyre in here,” Daniil points out. “I could smell it on you. How do you like that, tables turned?”

“I can take it back out with me as I leave.”

“No—no, goddamn it. Stay put. Rest.” Dankovsky huffs an impatient breath. “God knows we do not need you keeling over, too.”

“Then—” Pointedly, Artemy jerks his head towards the bed.

At that, Dankovsky finally pauses, and regards him with some sobriety. “… What?” he asks warily.

And Artemy is not sure what’s possessing him to push—what’s possessed him to as much as suggest it in the first place. Perhaps the nicotine has really gone to his head. That, or the ever-opening rift between the here-and-now and that which lies beyond of that thin veneer of reality they have stretched and bundled between them; a malady for which Artemy has failed to find a cure save for ignoring it.

“You got this luxurious bed up there,” he begins. “And I’d hate to deprive you of it.”

“It’s Miss Yan’s—”

“… My point is, there’s space.”

And lo and behold; the Bachelor Dankovsky seems well and truly out of words. 

Well done, Artemy thinks, accomplished despite himself.

“I —”

Accomplished or no, Artemy’s patience is nonetheless far from infinite. He bristles. “What do you think I’ll do?” he asks. “Harvest your organs while you sleep?”

Daniil wears a weird, rigid expression on his face. 

“No,” he admits, eventually.

“As in, no you won’t share a bed with me? Or, no—”

“No—as in: I do trust you not to harvest my organs, as you’ve so lyrically put it.”

By all means, an absurd statement. 

… Somewhat disarming. The timelines converge again, for a moment: an echo of a foreign conversation rings in Artemy’s head, underscored with Cathedral bells and the narrowly-missed scent of noose-rope: Thanks for not turning me into a bogeyman, emshen. You’d be the only one.

Dankovsky snuffs out his cigarette, a little abruptly. 

“Oh, what the hell,” he says. “Very well then.”

Feeling somewhat unmoored—perhaps the nicotine rush is fading, or exhaustion trickling in again—Artemy nods and steers himself back to the bed alcove almost on autopilot. 

Sits down, heavily. It occurs to him, briefly and rather suddenly, that he has just effectively bullied Bachelor Dankovsky into sharing the sort of bed that is only sizeable in comparison to the wretched wood plank cot Artemy sleeps on in the lair or the Punishing Torture Device that is Lara’s guest couch.

Alas, Artemy has no means of undoing time: Dankovsky seems to be already undressing. With a quick roll of the shoulders, he shrugs off his vest and unties his ascot with seemingly stiff fingers. He’s slight but not thin, his arms oddly wiry. It’s strange to see his neck unwrapped of the peculiar scarf; it looks almost perverse, as though particularly vulnerable to damage. 

Evidently sensing the scrutiny, the Bachelor ceases disrobing at an undershirt and throws Artemy a sour look in response.

“Are you enjoying the show?” he asks, acerbically.

Artemy bypasses the question: “You sleep in gloves, oynon?”

“I—sometimes.”

“Isn’t that unhygienic?”

Dankovsky pauses mid-step, hovering at the foot of the bed. “No,” he says, “these are my indoor gloves.”

“Your indoor gloves.”

“Yes, my indoor gloves,” Daniil snaps.

“Okay.”

Clenching his jaw, Dankovsky steps up to the bed, arms folded in front of himself. “Oh, say it, then. Whatever you meant to say.”

Artemy suppresses a smile. “Is it so that our rough air does not—er, irritate your tender skin?”

Dankovsky’s rictus expression is almost enough to belie the insincerity of the question: “Is it too late now to throw you out in the street?”

“Yes,” Artemy admits, grinning. 

The Bachelor only huffs in response, and leans over the bedside table to turn the lamp down.

Its pooling, warm light dims. The Stillwater sinks into the night, becoming somehow stranger.  Somewhere in the distance, the piano keeps ruefully playing: seeming to come neither from the inside nor the outside, but the air above them, somehow. 

And, in the murk, Artemy feels that strange creep of another sound vibrating in the air again, like twyre-in-reverse. Whispers, he’d call them, if the were not so choked; if they were not so lost in one another and so desperate. Unnerving. 

Before he can ask, Dankovsky swings himself into the bed with a long huff of breath.

The space is sufficient; with Artemy pressed to the wall, there’s a fair sliver of space left between them. Dankovsky lies stiff as a plank, flat on his back, and stares at the ceiling. Artemy can see the movement of his eyelashes as he blinks his morse-code messages towards it.

Still to the ceiling, Dankovsky says, “Well, goodnight then, Haruspex.”

Mindful of his dressings, Artemy heaves himself onto his left side, turning away.

He mumbles, “Night.”

The strange non-whispering does not quite fade, but recedes somewhat, giving way only to the menacing ticking of the clock. Has it restarted? Somehow, Artemy can’t shake the conviction that the grandfather clock is still stuck. But then, where’s the noise from?

For a measure of time, nothing happens; nothing goes on between the two of them anymore other than hearing the ghost of each other’s uneven breathing. And still, despite his unspeakable tiredness, Artemy finds himself unable to sleep. 

He is heavy with exhaustion, yes, heavy with—something else. Something worse. He tries to swallow through it, but the feeling is well lodged in his throat. 

He tries to think around it. When was the last time he’d shared a bed with someone? Perhaps in the army, with Kostya or that other guy, when it was too fucking cold to do anything but. Aside from that, in childhood, in summer, when they would sleep out by the Apple Basket in a tent, squished between Lara and Grief, with Stakh’s annoyed voice coming from the—

It’s almost a physical pain to flinch from.

And he almost startles at Dankovsky’s urgent hiss: “What is it? Are you in pain?”

“No … no.”

“Are you certain? The early stages of infection often—”

“No, oynon.” And then, “I just … thought about my father.”

He didn’t really—he thought around him, too, because touching the rotten, still living core of it is unimaginable. And yet he is not lying.

“… Oh.”

After an awkward while, Dankovsky goes on: “I know I’d tried to say it and made a mess of it many times, but you … You have my sincere condolences. Your father was a remarkable man, it is clear to me. I am very sorry for your loss.”

Artemy barely hears any of it. 

He swallows. 

“If I hadn’t left,” he mumbles, barely aware he is speaking. The images are dancing in front of his eyes: the four of them by the fire, at the Apple Basket; shoving Stakh upstairs as they were sneaking past Father with a stash of old twyrine, not the foul stuff the Stamatins have but the real thing; camping out in the Warehouses to play train-summoning at dawn; all of it a horrible, horrible bright sequence, almost too bright to look at. 

“All of them—Grief, Lara, Stakh—you’ve heard us yelling at the hospital, didn’t you. You’ve heard what he had to say about me. And that’s not even—I left, and it all went to—”

He blinks, something wet gathering in corner of his eye and trickling down the temple. Lara’s cold, distant eyes at the Shelter. Fuck it. Fuck it all. He swallows. Shuts his eyes. 

At length, Dankovsky speaks again, “Burakh, I—I am—”

“Artemy. Fucking call me Artemy, if we are—”

“… I am sorry. Artemy.”

A hesitant leather-clad hand falls clumsily and jerkily onto his upper arm, bizarrely mindful of the dressings, as though having somehow charted a reliable map of unbroken skin in the daylight. It’s a small thing, but somehow grounding. 

Artemy keeps his eyes shut, breathing heavily. At length, he manages, “It’s fine. Forget it. Goodnight, erdem.”

“—I lost someone, too. Recently. Very recently.”

Artemy stays silent.

Dankovsky inhales sharply, before speaking, rather quickly, “… but it’s a very long story and it would help neither of us sleep.” He sounds half-ashamed and half-haunted. It’s a deflection, Artemy can tell, while at the same time being some … bid, perhaps. For connection.

Stiffly, Dankovsky goes on, “I only meant to say that I would not judge you. I do not know what I … what I would have done in your shoes.”

Artemy swallows. His exhaustion is slowly winning over, filling him poison-slow and blissfully clearing the mind. Hoarsely, he grunts, “Perhaps you’ll tell me some other time.”

Dankovsky huffs a breath. “… Yes. Perhaps, in a few days—if we are still alive.” He falls silent for a moment. “You should try to sleep.”

“Yes. You too.”

“I told you, I can’t. No more than I can leave, I—”

Artemy turns to him.

“Bullshit. Lay back.”

A blink of dark eyes. “… What?”

Artemy rearranges himself again, turning to face him fully. With a menkhu’s precision, he extends a hand, placing two fingers on Dankovsky’s sternum, where the Lines converge.

He huffs a somewhat strangled breath, “This is not going to help.”

“It’ll help,” Artemy hushes him, pressing him down; palm to the chest. “Now shut up.”

A huffed, strained breath; giving in.

In mere minutes, Dankovsky is asleep.

 ***

“One more time, then.”

“Fine—but isn’t this a waste of—”

“Hush.” A raised gloved hand. Cleared throat. “There it is … Or perhaps I am going mad. As per usual.”

“You haven’t gone mad.”

Pause.

Unsubtle nudge. “Well?”

He sighs. “I’ve seen … some of them. The pantomimes.”

Stage direction: there’s a new pantomime being rehearsed at the Theatre, something whispers. One you are missing …

A jerky nod. “Not madness, then … nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu—a scientist ought to know to test a hypotheses … But I must stay away. It … disturbs me, I confess. Perhaps that’s odd to admit, given everything. All the horror around. Like I said, to watch one would likely give me direction. And yet I can’t stop this childish fear of … mirrors.”

“We should go to one. Together. See if we both see the same thing. Perhaps in a few days, if … if things quieten.”

“Ah, yes—that’s scientific method. Yes, perhaps. In a few days … I’d like that. Let’s—mmh—”

Pushing away Dankovsky’s hand still holding the prop of a cigarette, Artemy presses him to the wall, mouth to mouth, body to body.

He bites the sentence out of him, kisses him roughly, with several iterations’ worth of loosened restraint. He’s running out of patience for all this. Hands bunched in Dankovsky’s vest, bodies flush, as though to get inside him through sheer proximity and will; subsume one into another. 

It’s heady, a little intoxicating. Artemy tilts his head for better access, teeth catching on his lower—

“Wait, wait—” suddenly, abruptly, Dankovsky shoves him away. 

His eyes are wide open, pupils blown, mouth bitten red. He’s panting for breath. Artemy’s knee has nudged between his legs, pinning him to the wall.

“Hm?” Artemy grunts in thinly patient acknowledgement.

“This—it’s not—” Dankovsky looks wildly about. “It’s not how it goes. Is it? The line is—”

Artemy exhales heavily. “Oh, come on.”

The Bachelor tenses under his hands. “What?”

“Not how it goes?” Artemy parrots him. “Are you serious?”

“But this isn’t—we can’t—”

Dankovsky’s eyes dart to the side. A faint light spills under the divide, from the stage. It’s a strange hush backstage, in the alcove that leads to the stage. Artemy had braced himself against the very wall he’s now pushed Dankovsky against, that very day outside of whatever dream-not-dream they’re having, having administered the wrong antibiotic and trying to stop himself from shaking and catch a breath from the wailing of the sick outside. But that does not matter now and that reality is no more substantial than the shadow of a tragedian walking onstage. An old dream, already faded …

Dankovsky is very close, and his breath comes out of him ragged. Artemy lets himself lean into him as he had done to the wall, sinkingly, seeking leverage. Just as he thinks the effort futile, eyes falling closed, half-aiming to drag himself away, Dankovsky’s hand moves, as though chasing his defeat. He grasps Artemy’s arm, holding him fast in place. Their eyes meet again.

“Alright,” Daniil whispers, even quieter than before. “Alright. For God’s sake—wasn’t it you who said—not to wake up in here, not to do anything; that it only steals time from the real thing, steals sleep, that we shouldn’t dream if we can—”

“Yeah,” Artemy said, letting his forehead bend forward, falling against his. “I did. I’m getting tired of it.”

“… Oh, damn it to hell, fine,” Dankovsky capitulates, and drags him back down to him; reeling him in. Hungry, Artemy goes. 

 ***

He wakes up to a rising, disorienting dawn.

His eyes, sore from interrupted sleep, take in the window first: a circle of light, almost inviting; a treachery concealing the horrors beyond. Still, a good sign: no flakes of plague crowd the air, no moaning filters through. Good, Artemy thinks idly, pleased, the chalk crosses worked.

Yet something dark still gets in the lights way—incongruous strands—and muffles also the intake of air. As Artemy inhales, it tickles his nose.

He blinks: It’s Dankovsky’s hair. The crown of Dankovsky’s head bumps into his chin.

He is a warm, wiry length all the way down Artemy’s front: they’re lying twined in the bed together as though they had gone to sleep embracing, with scarcely an inch of space left. His nose is buried firmly in Artemy’s neck. His eyes are screwed shut. 

It’s strangely familiar, Artemy notes—in a physical sense, in terms of a registered sensation—given how fucking absurd it is.

Dazed, he moves his head, looking over at the clock. It moves normally now. 7:15.

Dankovsky stirs with a sharp inhale, jerking back. His eyes fly open. For a moment, they stare at each other, spooked.

This should be stranger, Artemy thinks. Between—strangers. 

Daniil blinks. Jerkily, he traces the extends a hand, tips of his fingers past the frown-line on Artemy’s forehead, as though remembering it. He leans closer.

“I had the strangest dream, you know,” he murmurs.

Somewhere outside of the bed: footsteps on wood. A soft knock on the door. 

Artemy’s mouth is inches from Daniil’s half-open mouth. Dankovsky does not stop looking at him; a little as though he’s unable to. “… that damned Theatre.”

Artemy blinks. 

Another timid knock. “… Daniil?”

Something breaks. An illusion.

“A—minute,” Dankovsky says hoarsely, before somewhat clumsily untangling himself from Artemy’s arms. 

The strange concentrated warmth dissipates in a flash, leaving behind only the slither of the Stillwater’s stagnant air. 

Artemy lies still, dazed and inert as though he’d downed a shot of morphine.

Have I?

He raises himself up on his elbows, reality trickling back in with each twinge and ache of every pulled muscle. In bits and pieces, the directives and unfinished tasks the day flood the back of his mind in scolding whispers. 

From the doorway below the alcove, there comes muffled voice of Eva Yan.

“… earlier than you usually wake … something led me upstairs. Has something happened?”

Dankovsky responds, mediating, “… fine. Don’t worry.” Then, “Yes, I’m sure. Thank you, Eva.”

The sound of a shutting door. Footstep. 

Dankovsky hovers in the middle of the room in his unbuttoned shirt, scanning a letter with a frown. There is something intensely eerie, Artemy thinks, about the sight of him, again; something that repeatedly fails to be unfamiliar, even with a voice in his head insistently telling him: 

This is not how it goes.

Is it?

Unable to stand the silence, he breaks it: “Let me guess. Good news?”

For a moment, Daniil says nothing. Then, finally:

“… Missive from Kain. I hear you’ve protected the Bridge Square from infection yesterday. That’s … commendable.” And, at length. “I didn’t know … that was happening.”

Artemy blinks; he’s somehow managed to forget he has done that. “It’s nothing. Some idiot was trying to—never mind.”

Dankovsky’s dark eyes fly up to meet his. “No, do tell.”

 Artemy sighs, and attempts to summarise the worrying proceedings of a butcher. Dankovsky’s eyebrows climb higher on his forehead as he listens. 

“How did you even learn of this?”

Artemy makes a dismissive gesture. “Sticky wanted to peddle corpses.”

“Oh, naturally,” Dankovsky scoffs, folding Kain’s letter, “that explains everything.”

But he is smiling—lightly, somewhat sardonically. 

Sticky, Artemy thinks; the thought a bucket of cold water. Almost on cue, the clock strikes 7:30—that strange hour the town has a proclivity of observing like a rite.  

“… I need to go,” he says, sitting up rapidly. A thing of the army: once his mind is made-up, he is quick to wakefulness. Wincing, he swings his legs off the bed and rolls his shoulders. “Thanks for letting me crash here, oynon.”

“Daniil.”

Artemy pauses mid-step. “… Huh?”

Somewhat stiffly, Dankovsky reiterates, “Daniil. Remember?”

It stops fully Artemy in his tracks. He did not. “… Really?” he asks. “Outside of here, too?”

Something in Daniil’s jaw twitches. “Well. Not in front of Yakov Little.”

Slowly, Artemy begins to smile, bending down to lace up his boots. “Right. For him it’s Danya, I assume.”

Dankovsky’s mouth tightens. “Don’t push it, Burakh.”

There is a pause.

“… Would you care for some coffee?” he then asks, a little discordantly. “We could head to the hospital together, afterwards.”

“Nah,” Artemy says. Silence falls.

He catches himself. 

“I mean,” he says. “No, oy—Daniil. Sorry. I really have to rush.”

Dankovsky is frowning, but otherwise his face is unreadable. He’s leaning on his desk now, hip flush against it. “Where to, if I may ask?”

Artemy half-shrugs, lacing up his second boot. “I need to check on someone. In the factory—by the Warehouses—I’ll take a boat.”

And make the trip to Shekhen. 

And test something. 

“Of course,” Dankovsky says, still somewhat clipped. “Will you make it to the hospital at all?”

“Yes. I will.”

No response.

Artemy gets up from the bed, picks up his balled-up jumper and pulls it on, before moving on to the long ordeal of buckling his smock. Without turning, he finishes dressing and picks up the cloak and satchel stowed behind the folding screen.

When his head emerges out of its hood, he becomes aware of the strange atmosphere at last.

Dankovsky is facing away as he inspects something on his desk.

Suddenly awkward, Artemy says: “Right. Well. Thanks again.” 

Dankovsky waves him away. He has seemingly dressed himself in some of his usual layers—ascot and vest. He is buttoning his shirtsleeves as he reads over Kain’s report again and glances at the Decree Board.

“… I’m off then.”

At last, Daniil turns in place. In the slowly brightening light he looks sullen and sleep-deprived, twin dark circles homing under his eyes.

A sudden flash of a memory slams into Artemy: licking the shadow under Dankovsky’s eye as he presses him to the backstage wall.

… What?

“What is it?” Dankovsky asks, stiffly. His jaw is tight.

Artemy stares at him dumbly, before dropping his satchel to the floor. “… Wait.”

“For what?” 

Fumbling with his front pocket, Artemy manages to fish out a glinting small bottle of the enhanced Medrel tincture. He dusts some scrunched-up brown twyre off it, and thrusts it out at Dankovsky. 

Dankovsky goes almost cross-eyed attempting to inspect it. “You … want me to study this, too?” he asks, dubiously. “What is this?”

“No,” Artemy says. “You will drink it. Actually—drink it now, and give me the bottle back.”

Dankovsky’s eyes drift back up to his face. His earlier standoffishness is replaced with a slightly incredulous frown.

Disregarding Artemy’s input, he says: “Explain.”

Artemy sighs; feeling like newly loud soft ticking of the Stillwater’s clock has grown legs and is now crawling up his neck. “It’s an immunity booster. It’s safe, I promise. I made it myself. You’re at the hospital a lot, and I’ve seen the state of the supplies. Your immunity is probably shot.”

Daniil sighs. “Truly, I’m honoured, but—”

“Don’t be before you taste it.”

“You made it—

“Yes. I’ll make more.”

“I’d like you to tell me how you made it—”

Unable to justify wasting anymore time on conversation, Artemy puts a hand to Dankovsky’s mouth, shushing him, “—yes, yes I will,” he says. “In—soon, okay? Oynon, I really need to go, now. There’s a couple of kids … I shouldn’t have left them for so long. But I’ll be back. Promise.”

He lets go of Dankovsky, who looks half-dubious and half-intrigued, clutching at the Medrel with a frown, mouth in a mutinous twist.

“See you at the hospital,” Artemy says, refusing to fall back into awkwardness now that the sequence of his own actions is beginning to dawn on him. Instead, he rallies against it and winks. “… Daniil.”

Without waiting for the surely indignant response, he turns on his heel and leaves.

As he steps out into the still-dewy grasses surrounding the Stillwater and clambers into a boat, fingernail in hand, he almost forgets the Stillwater, the hushed dreamed-up space backstage. He purges his mind of all dreams, good and bad ones: he sits back in the boat, instead, thoughts running ahead of him to the Lair and to the sun scattered over the fog still suffusing the steppe as he will walk towards Shekhen.

If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can't help it, the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I'll make the most of it, I'm an extraordinary machine