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The boarding house was a ten-minute walk from the bakery, on a street that smelled like coal smoke and yesterday's cooking. Ren knew the route without thinking about it. Elias had walked it so many times the path was part of his body now.
On the way he passed a street vendor with a steamer cart. Pork buns, three rows of them, sitting in the white cloud coming off the rack. The vendor was turned away, arguing price with a customer on the other side.
Two tentacles came out beneath the coat. Quiet, fast. Three buns lifted cleanly from the back row. Gone before the steam closed the gap.
You were going to steal bread, Ren thought. We're honoring the spirit of the original plan.
He tucked them inside the coat and kept walking.
.
.
.
The boarding house door opened onto a narrow staircase that smelled like damp wood. Second floor, last room on the left. Ren had the key in his pocket. He let himself in.
The room was small. A bed, a chair, a cold hearth, a window with a curtain that had been washed until it was nearly translucent. The light coming through it was grey and thin.
Sera was in the bed.
She was lying on her back, almost perfectly still, the blanket pulled up to her collarbone. Her face was turned slightly toward the window. She didn't move when the door opened.
Shit, Ren thought. Is she already gone.
He crossed the room in three steps and put two fingers to her throat. A pulse, faint and uneven, but there. He let out a breath.
He knelt beside the bed and pressed his palm flat against the side of her neck, just below the ear. The needle-thin tongue extended from his palm, too small to feel, sliding beneath the skin.
He read what was in her blood.
It took about thirty seconds.
Okay. He sat back on his heels. Syphilis, confirmed, late stage. Genital herpes. Chlamydia. One other thing that doesn't have a name he knows yet. He ran through it again. All of it sexually transmitted, all of it chronic, all of it untreated for years. The syphilis is the one that's killing her. It's in her nervous system now. That's the tremors. That's why she can't stand for long.
He looked at her face.
She was thirty-two years old. He knew that from Elias's memories, though she looked older. Her skin had gone the color of old paper, thin over the cheekbones, too pale at the lips. Her hands on the blanket were thin, the knuckles too prominent.
From the memories: she had been sold to a brothel while she was three months pregnant. Her husband had run up debts he couldn't pay, so he sold her to cover them. The brothel had considered a pregnant woman a selling point. Some customers paid extra for it.
She had walked out when Elias was two weeks old. Gone east. Stopped here because she ran out of strength to go further.
Ren looked at her for a moment.
He'd operated on a lot of people. He didn't usually think about their histories while he worked. It wasn't useful. Right now it was hard to put down.
He pulled out the Awakened Anesthesia from inventory and held the vial for a second.
Then he stopped.
Wait.
He looked at the body he was currently using. Small hands. A child's face. A child's voice.
He looked like Elias. That wasn't the problem. The problem was ten red tentacles coming out of a six-year-old's back in a room with no explanation for them. If Sera opened her eyes mid-surgery and saw that, her heart would do something he couldn't fix.
He looked around the room. The curtain on the window. He crossed to it, tore a strip from the bottom edge, and folded it into a long blindfold. Then he went back to the bed.
He tied it gently around her eyes, over the bridge of her nose. She stirred at the touch, a low sound in her throat, not quite waking.
"It's okay," Ren said. "It's okay. Don't move yet."
He reached into inventory and uncapped the Awakened Anesthesia.
The injection was a single point below the jaw. Sera's eyes opened immediately, wide and sharp, fully conscious in an instant. Her mouth opened too.
Her body didn't move. At all.
"Elias." Her voice was steady but tight, the voice of someone keeping themselves together by focusing on the one thing they know. "Elias, I can't move. I can't move my body. What did you do."
"It's okay," Ren said. "It's a medicine. It keeps you still so the treatment works. You can talk, you just can't move. It wears off after."
A pause. He could hear her breathing, controlled, deliberate.
"Who is in this room," she said.
"A doctor. A wandering doctor I found in the market district. He's been around for a few weeks. He's mute, so I talked to him for you. I asked if he could help and he said yes."
"How much."
"I saved up. I had enough."
"You saved up money and didn't tell me."
"You would have told me to spend it on something else."
She was quiet for a moment. Behind the blindfold she had nothing to look at, no way to check the room, no way to read faces. Just his voice.
"Why can't I see," she said.
"He said to keep the cloth on. He said the light can get in the way of the treatment."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Is he treating me right now," she said.
"Not yet. He's preparing."
"Can he hear me."
"Yes. He just can't answer."
She turned her face slightly, toward nowhere in particular. "I don't know who you are," she said, to the room. "But thank you. Whatever you're going to do. Thank you."
Ren said nothing. He was the doctor she was thanking. He was also her son. He was neither of those things. He wasn't sure which answer was worse.
"Okay," he said. "He's starting now. Just stay still."
"I don't have much choice," Sera said.
It wasn't a complaint. Just a fact. She closed her eyes behind the blindfold and waited.
.
.
.
The surgery took forty minutes.
He pulled the Outer God Surgical Set from inventory, the instruments settling into the tentacles that gripped them: scalpel, forceps, retractor, each one black and slightly wrong-looking, the kind of tools that appeared ordinary until they moved through tissue like it wasn't there. The Spirit Thread came last, coiled and waiting.
The tentacles worked at a scale fingers couldn't manage, the scalpel finding the infected tissue in her nervous system with the precision of something that had never once slipped. The spirochetes came out layer by layer. The myelin repaired behind each pass. The other infections, the herpes, the chlamydia, the unnamed fourth thing, were simpler, more superficial. The Spirit Thread closed each site as he went, sutures finer than any needle could place.
He didn't think about the fact that this was the first time he'd operated as a six-year-old. He thought about the work.
He withdrew, checked his work, checked it again.
Clean.
He pulled his tools back and stood up. Stretched. The body was six years old and had been kneeling on a wooden floor for forty minutes and his knees were telling him about it.
He returned the Outer God Surgical Set to inventory.
"The doctor will be leaving now," he said, loud enough for her to hear, still in Elias's voice. "His work is finished."
He walked to the door. Opened it. Closed it hard, let his footsteps go down three stairs, then stopped.
Then he stood very still in the room and waited.
After a moment, he reached over and untied the strip of curtain from her eyes. Folded it. Set it on the chair.
He sat on the edge of the bed.
Sera's eyes opened slowly.
She looked at the ceiling first, then at the window, like she was checking that the world was still where she left it. Color was coming back into her face. Not the grey-paper pallor from before. Actual color, the warmth that lives under skin when the blood underneath it is working the way it should. Her eyes, when they found focus, were dark brown, clear, fully present. She looked like a woman who had just woken from a very long sleep and found herself on the other side of it.
She was beautiful. He hadn't been able to see it before, under everything the disease had done. She was thirty-two years old and looked it now.
She tried to sit up and stopped. "I can't move," she said. Her voice was thin with alarm.
"The doctor said that would happen," Ren said. "He said it wears off in a few seconds. It's from the medicine."
She lay still. Her eyes moved to him.
"Elias," she said. Just his name.
"Hi," Ren said.
"What happened. How did you" She stopped. Took a breath. Her fingers moved, testing.
"I saved up," Ren said. "For a long time. There was a wandering doctor in the market district. He was mute, so I talked for him. He said he could cure you. I gave him everything I had."
She looked at him for a long time.
"You saved up," she said.
"Yes."
"How long have you been saving."
"A while."
She was quiet. Her fingers were moving more now, the feeling coming back. She pressed her palm flat against the mattress and pushed herself up, slowly, all the way to sitting, and stayed there. She looked at her own hands, turning them over once.
"I can feel my hands," she said. "I couldn't feel my hands yesterday."
Ren said nothing.
Sera looked at him. Her eyes were wet. She reached out, and he let her pull him in, and she held him the way she had held him every night for two years when he was frightened or cold or had gone too long without eating, her arms around his small shoulders, her face pressed to the top of his head.
"Elias," she said. Her voice broke on it.
Ren sat with his arms around her and didn't say anything. He wasn't sure what to say. Elias would have said something. He had the memories of every hug she had ever given the boy, and the boy had always said something small.
Welcome back, Ren thought. Someone should say it.
"Welcome back," he said, very quietly. "I'm really glad."
Sera made a sound against the top of his head that was not a word. She held on.
Outside, the grey-white sky had started to clear. Light came through the thin curtain, warmer than it had been all morning.
Ren stayed still and let her have it.