Back at the dispensary she discovered her work had only just begun.

  “Girl, I hope you have your wits about you and haven’t lost your propensity to draw. I want every detail.”

  They were upstairs on the second floor, in a laboratory Kaddie hadn’t seen before. Under normal circumstances she would have reveled at the sight of it. Back home, her grandmother had kept a similar space. It was sacrosanct, full to the brim with books, bags, bottles, jars, cauldrons and scales. All manner of testing, brewing and developing went on in there. “Welcome to my poisoner’s tool shed,” she used to say. She and Kaddie had spent hours within its confines.

  But now, sitting on a stool inside a room three times as big, containing ten times the bottles, books, jars and equipment, she was rendered blind to all but the piece of skin lying before her on the table, stretched and tacked to a wooden board like a small piece of cured leather.

  Its attachment to death rang like a loud, grisly bell, a mournful toll she quickly silenced. Instead, she tuned in to its whispers as it enticed her closer, until it became nothing more than a strange, macabre book, waiting for her to read.

  One of its edges was torn, so she focused on its ragged inlets and tiny peninsulas as her pencil got to work. The circumference, a few notes, a little shading here and there, before she began on the interior.

  Robles had done a succinct job of cutting the circular tattoo from the skin of the dead person. Within the finely inked circumference lay the image of a bird. A plains vulture, going off the shape of the beak, which was interesting, because a number of those very same birds had been circling over the burned house on Bryler Street that very morning.

  Ultimately, however, it was the person’s skin color that garnered most of her attention. It was the color of gray slate, particularly at its lower edge, nearest the foot, where that section of the body had somehow escaped the flames. She knew of three communities on the high plains who purposefully drank a decoction of mellowbell in order to change their skin color.

  A visitor, then—from the Shale, the Crescent, or the Mesa. She couldn’t imagine any of the high plains people living permanently in the place like this.

  On finishing the drawing, the skin color and possible origin went into her notes at the bottom of the page. Pencil, inks, and notes took her beyond lunch and into the afternoon.

  ##

  “Would you say a man, or a woman?” They were gathered in the upstairs sitting room and Robles was in the midst of stuffing a long, thin pipe with lunghorn. Kaddie’s illustration was lying on a cleared section of an oak table.

  “A young man,” Torrell said. “Going off the corpse and skin color.”

  “Is—is this what we do?” Kaddie interrupted. “Investigate deaths?”

  Robles lit his pipe while Torrell stood blinking. “Sometimes,” their employer said. Smoke curled from his nostrils. “If it were simply a case of dispensing tonics to the weak and weary, then anyone could do it. Even Torrell, here.” The pipe’s bitter scent hit the back of Kaddie’s throat. “Tell me about the body,” he continued.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  She and Torrell shared a glance. “The skin is stained. They’ve been ingesting mellowbell for a number of years,” she said. “The color goes deep.”

  Torrell snorted. “Crescent, or Shale? They wouldn’t be seen dead here.”

  “Well, they’re dead, now,” Robles observed. “Very well, that’s enough excitement for today. Torrell, chores, and young lady I’m sure your presence will be required in the kitchen.” He took another long draw from his pipe and blew a large quantity of smoke into the room. As for Kaddie’s last view of him, before she slipped out of the door and into cleaner air, he had picked up her illustration and was studying it with a frown.

  ##

  As she had already surmised, the rest of the day was spent tending to the bark, decanting portions of the decoction, and laying out the remaining strips to dry. Nothing was wasted. The bark from a strifefire tree was a strong narcotic, and even the spent strips retained enough to chew on for a toothache.

  When the task was done, Marla took her on a brief tour of the house, starting with the storeroom, which was filled to the brim with sacks and chests of the mundane and the extraordinary. Bags of onions and flour were piled alongside bundles of capsthorn root. Jars of rare, fragrant oils shared space on heaving shelves containing boxes of dried leaves and bottles of alcohol. She assumed there was an order to it, and one she would have to learn.

  In the dispensary, she was introduced to Mr. Feesh, the dispenser, a wiry, older man, and his two younger assistants, Coglan and Pick. There was a long line of customers, and as she caught snippets of evaluations and advice given by the three men, she found nothing she could contradict. Robles’ dispensers knew exactly what they were doing and she reveled in its familiarity.

  The entire second floor belonged to Robles, and while the dispensers returned to their own homes every night, the third floor bore Marla’s, Elseph’s, and Torrell’s quarters. She also discovered that she shared her poky attic bedroom on the fourth floor with a lengthy storage space full of disused furniture covered in thin canvas sheets, and while her room was relatively tiny, it proved to be the warmest, due to rising heat from the hearths below.

  At first glimpse, and with the exception of Robles’ chaotic study, everything appeared clean, orderly, and it wasn’t until she had climbed the stairs to her room a few times that she noticed the oddities. A door attached to the outside wall at the end of the storage space on the fourth floor. Kaddie imagined sleepwalking, becoming lost and stepping beyond it, only to discover a sharp drop waiting at its other side.

  There was also a table in a shady corner on the second floor landing, covered with a cloth trimmed with lace the color of vermillion. At its center sat a strange clock that ticked with such an irregular beat she thought it might be broken. And yet, the time on its face appeared to move resolutely along with the day, meticulously counting out the eighths.

  The house’s exterior walls were equally odd when compared to their neighbors. Black as charcoal, they sucked in the daylight until straight lines became distorted and the entire building appeared on the verge of collapse. As for the laundry and outhouse in the cellar at the rear—

  “Don’t worry about the noise, it’s the breeze from below,” Marla said, as a faint, nonetheless dreadful moaning drifted from the direction of the floor. “You’ll see steam rising occasionally, too. It happens when the grates are closed and there’s a build up. It’s why the floors down here are always wet.”

  About to retire for her second night, Robles handed her a heavy stack of books. “I didn’t see anything like this in your journals, so your studies begin now.”

  They towered malevolently on her nightstand, their contents full of plants, oils, and secretions she had never seen or heard of before, and so she read into the night, only stopping when her lantern began to sputter. Her mind exhausted, she spent only minutes staring out of the window, into the dark.

  There was no rain, the grates in the street were open, and pale light shone from within. She couldn’t hear anything, but occasionally light flickered, as if overtaken by the occasional shadow. There was obviously movement down there, and little by little, the underground second city was beginning to show itself, and before she fell asleep she vowed to persuade Torrell into offering her a tour.