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The cracks in the pavement blurred together, and Daniil could feel his ankles wobbling with every step. The clacking of his shoes was faint, as if coming to him from a great distance, but the air was as close and suffocating as it ever had been; the scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose was soaked through with sweat and fluttered as he breathed into it open-mouthed, and the atmosphere was thick with twyre, with smoke, with the cloying scent of death and disease. He struggled to keep his eyes focused on the path in front of him, but he could feel himself slipping. His chest was tight, and his breath rattled. He had taken immunity boosters, he had worn gloves, he had taken every possible precaution, but the shadow of the plague had overtaken him nonetheless; he could no longer deny it. He had caught it two days ago – he knew the exact moment it had happened. It could not have been real, the haze that he had seen, the distant moaning and the feeling like a noose tightening around his throat, it could not possibly have been real, because one could not feel oneself catching a disease, and Dankovsky knew this. But his memory of the moment was vivid, so he had either to doubt his knowledge or his sanity, and he was quite confident in his knowledge. His sanity, though, wavered. He was not even certain what path he was on, anymore.
A whine escaped someone, somewhere, and it might have been Daniil but he was not sure. Where was he meant to be going, again? Where was he coming from? The Capital, he was coming from the Capital, his home, safety. What was it like, being safe? He had a goal, didn't he? He had a goal, a dream, an ambition, he was going to cure death, he was going to- he was going to- where was he going, again?
Something thudded in front of him with a harsh bang, and he was suddenly no longer in the street, but in some dark and foul-smelling place. His ears rang with the sound, but only his heart could jump in surprise, leaving the rest of his body behind. The floor was spongy, but not like moss – more like meat, the strips of flesh that were sold in the butcheries and smelled so like the cadavers Daniil had dissected in school that they never failed to turn his stomach. He could barely make out the walls through the darkness, but he could see that they were slick, and pulsated like organs, like the still-beating heart of the young woman he had knowingly allowed Burakh to kill, the little heart that might have fluttered, birdlike, in his hands, still dripping and warm with lost life. At his feet was a wooden casket, poorly-made, painted black, and at once there was a broad hand on his back. Get in, Dankovsky, the voice hissed, go on, climb inside. The walls thrummed agitatedly at him, echoing the request. What else was there to do? Where else was there to go? Numbly, Daniil lifted a foot to step in.
"-Dankovsky? Doctor Dankovsky?"
There was, indeed, a hand on Daniil's back, shaking him, and his face was pressed into the pavement, his hand trapped beneath him and aching terribly. Daniil groaned and pushed himself up halfway, trying to clear his head. He thought he could hear a baby crying. Had he done something wrong? His vision was fogged, but it felt like more than just twyre. Was it because of the coffin? Had he stepped the wrong place? The hand on his back shifted, and then there were two hands, one on each of his shoulders. Daniil squinted.
"Eva?" he murmured confusedly.
"No, Doctor, it's me, it's Lara. What happened? Were you attacked?"
Daniil stared a moment longer, but his vision didn't want to focus. He was sweating, he could tell, but he shivered. He could not tell whether he was far too hot or far too cold. It didn't matter; he did not have time for such things. He had to keep moving, he had to find- he had to- something. It was important, vitally important, it clawed at him, tore at his lungs, made it difficult to breathe. He brushed the hands from his shoulders clumsily and pushed himself to his feet. The figure in front of him rose, too.
"Dankovsky? Where are you going?" Eva's voice was strange, today. Didn't she call him Daniil, usually? Perhaps she was tired. Perhaps he had done something wrong. Oh, yes, he had wronged her, hadn't he? Maybe she blamed him for what he had done to her, whatever it had been. He felt as though it was something awful, the crime he had committed, something unforgiveable, but he could not remember what it was.
He couldn't see the road, but he could hear the echoes of his failures in the moans of the dying. He could follow that, even if he could not see. The plague, for God's sake, that's what he was doing, what was wrong with him, he was curing the plague.
"I'm curing the plague," he relayed to Eva, or he thought he did, but his own voice sounded distant and raspy, and the sky was tilting. He heard the voice of a child, but he didn't know whether they were laughing or crying. There were no walls, and yet the boundaries of the world closed in on him. When he reached out to push them back into place, he felt himself falling.
Eva caught him hastily, hands latching around his shoulders. "Oh, no, oh, no, you have a fever, don't you," she was saying in that strange voice. "Please tell me you haven't caught it, please tell me you just ate something spoiled, or something."
Daniil felt a cough building in his chest, and his throat constricted. He tried to push her away again, but his strength failed him. "Let go of me, Eva," he said harshly. "It's catching, you- you'll catch it. I can't let you die, you're on- you're on the list, you can't die-" A thought was niggling at his consciousness, but he couldn't quite grasp it.
Eva faltered, and then her hands tightened again, and she began to pull him forward. "All right, Dankovsky," she said placatingly, "I think... I think we should find somewhere for you to lie down, and then I can run and find Cub. We really can't afford to lose you."
There was a little flicker somewhere in Daniil's consciousness, something about the word lose, and he choked on his own breath. "I'm not going to die," he gasped. "I- I'm not dying. I'm not going to die." He turned his face away to cough, and, yes, he tasted blood, but he had tasted blood for days, now, it wasn't as though that meant anything.
"Peace, Dankovsky, peace, we're not going to let you die. Grief's place is just over there, okay? Just come with me." She pulled on his arm, and he stumbled forward. His vision was almost entirely obscured, now, by a drifting darkness, and he felt as though his skull was leaking, like all of the blood in his body was sinking down to his shoes, filling them up until he was wading knee-deep through unsightly liquid just a little bit too viscous to be water. The only thing to interrupt his fading vision was the beak of an Executor (a Talon, it hissed at him), which moved so sharply towards him that he stumbled back, making Eva yank him forward with uncharacteristic certainty. The Executor's gaze followed him closely, and then Daniil saw its awful beak peel back to reveal a glistening claw, from which a metallic voice emanated: Get in, Dankovsky, it said. Climb inside.
"Did you hear that?" Daniil said, twitching his head towards Eva.
"Hm?" Eva seemed distracted by something. "Hear what?"
"The beak; the Talon. It's-" he slipped on the blood running in rivulets down the road, and had to stop speaking and remember to breathe. He could feel every lost second passing through his fingers like sand. He had things to do, and he was not doing any of them.
Eva let out a sigh of relief beside him, and Daniil heard the metallic clatter of a warehouse door opening. He lifted his gaze. There was a cluster of life-size marionettes inside the warehouse, and the interior was arranged like a theater. In the shadows at the back was a tall man in a military uniform, holding a shovel, and in the center of the room was the casket from before. Daniil's breathing grew shallow. One of the marionettes turned its head towards him, and the others stood up and left, all in different directions.
"Grief," Eva called into the warehouse, "it's me, can you give me a hand?"
Daniil heard a sound like wooden blocks on metal rapidly approaching, and then the lone remaining marionette spoke.
"Gravel! What's happened? It's dangerous in this district, what are you doing here?" The marionette's limbs squeaked as it gestured animatedly. "And what the hell happened to him?"
"He's sick," Eva said. "I found him passed out on the road. Could you keep an eye on him while I go and find Cub?"
"Shit." The marionette raised a hand towards Daniil, and Daniil flinched, but it either didn't notice or didn't care. "Okay, Bachelor, let's get you on a cot or something. Come on, now, carefully, doctors don't grow on trees."
Daniil felt his weight shift, although he didn't think that he had moved on his own, and suddenly the marionette was dragging him in the direction of the casket.
"No," Daniil gasped out, trying to wrench his way out of the creature's grasp. "Don't put me in there- not yet. Not yet."
"Fuck, you're even less fun when you're sick."
"Try to be nice, Grief," Eva's voice filtered to him, warbly, like she was speaking from underwater. "He's pretty out of it."
The coffin yawned in front of him, and wooden fingers pushed him towards it. Get in, climb in, come in, come in, the black void in the casket taunted him. He thought he could see an arm reaching from it, a pale face rising, Eva's dead face emerging, saying, "I'm going for Cub, don't go anywhere," then vanishing. Daniil choked, the marionette shoved at the back of his neck, and he fell.
Daniil fell for a very long time, then thudded into a room much like the one he had been in earlier, crimson and quivering and loud. The lid of the coffin slammed shut above him, and all the light in the room vanished except for a very dim, unhealthy orange glow, the source of which Daniil could not identify. There were rats clawing their way up his legs, and before he could stop it, one ran up and climbed into his mouth and lodged itself in his throat, its fur tickling at his uvula, its helpless feet wriggling, its teeth scraping and claws tearing in its panic. Daniil coughed violently, desperately, until he was certain there were pieces of himself coming out, blood spilling from his lips, but the rat remained resolutely stuck. There was a wooden hand patting his back firmly, like you would do for a person choking, but it made no difference, and he swatted at it as soon as he was finished gasping.
"Stop," he managed.
"Oh, sure, excuse the hell out of me," said the stilted voice of the marionette. "I'll just fuck right off, then."
Daniil could feel his hands trembling. He was not dying, he wasn't, he wasn't, he wasn't. "Where's the exit?"
"Same way you came in, Bachelor. Door's not locked, but you don't look up for much of a walk, so I don't suggest you jump up and try it."
"Don't- don't play dumb." Daniil felt his elbow pressed into some surface, maybe the floor, but he could not remember lying down. "The casket. How do you leave? Is it- is it just for puppets like you? Do they pull on the strings to get you out?" He was a scientist, for heaven's sake, he could find a solution. He swatted at the rats clambering on him, but there were so many, so very many.
"Damn, she wasn't kidding when she said you were out of it."
For a moment, the only sounds were the heavy pulsing of the walls and Daniil's own uneven breathing. "I'm not dying," Daniil whispered. "I'm not."
"...Right. Of course you're not." The marionette's dark eyes revealed nothing, no substance, no depth, no emotion. "Just hang on until Cub gets here. You'll be fine."
Daniil could have sworn that only a moment passed after that, but the next thing he knew, his eyes were closed, and there was a new voice.
"Grief. Thank you for watching him."
"It's not like he was much trouble. He just sort of rambled for a bit and then passed out. Think he'll make it?"
There was a soft sigh. "I certainly hope so. He has his... issues, but we need him. Lara, you can go home, now. Get some rest."
"You don't want me to stay?"
"I want you to rest, Lara."
"Well, all right, as long as you're sure. So long, you two."
"I'll talk to you later, Lara."
"So long, Gravel."
There was a brief silence, and then heavy footsteps approached Daniil. He tried to lift his head, to open his eyes, to do anything at all, but found himself unable to, paralyzed, every part of his body impossibly heavy. How was he meant to accomplish anything like this? A cold hand pressed against his forehead, and his breathing hitched.
"Dankovsky? Oynon?" After a moment, he placed the voice. It was Artemy, of course, the other doctor. Was that right? Was Artemy here? Was he here to help him? But, hadn't the Haruspex fallen into a pit and perished? Or had that been a dream?
Daniil heard the scraping of metal, and, suddenly, he understood. He was to be carved open like the hunchback's daughter, torn apart and harvested while he lay here alive and conscious and feeling. Terror gripped him, and, desperately, he tried to move. The cold edge of a blade touched the base of his throat, he could feel it, he could tell just what was going to happen next, he had performed enough autopsies to know precisely the path the blade would take.
At last, with a massive effort, Daniil opened his mouth, and his eyelids fluttered. "Don't," he managed to force out, his voice barely a whisper, "I'm n- don't take my heart."
There was a long silence. "I'm not... I'm not going to take your heart, Dankovsky."
The marionette scoffed. "For fuck's sake. I know your public image isn't what it's going to be when all this is over, but this dandy should know better."
"He's delirious, Grief, it's not his fault."
Artemy's denial did nothing to soothe Daniil. Artemy thought he had an infected heart, the ideal specimen, and suddenly he could see with perfect clarity the scalpel sliding through his flesh, Artemy peeling back the muscle and sorting through his ruined organs, he could see Artemy digging through his chest for a heart and coming up empty. That's right- that's right, it would be impractical, that was the problem, there was nothing there, no heart to take at all, he would die and it would be for nothing. Daniil opened his mouth to tell Burakh that he would be better off with his liver, or his lungs, or the rat inside his esophagus, but then there was glass between his teeth and he was choking on metallic-tasting liquid.
"Was that it?" the marionette asked softly. "Panacea?"
"I hope." Artemy had, at some point, slid a hand behind Daniil's head and held him up to give him... whatever that had been. "I only had one dose, and I had no chance to test it. Boddho willing, it will work, and I will have more soon."
Daniil wondered distantly what dose he was talking about. He felt as though his breath was evening out, and the ache that had kept all of his muscles tensed for the past two days was fading at last. Poison – had it been poison? Was he dying? Perhaps the Haruspex had killed him, after all, and Daniil had not even fought him, and the wood of the coffin dug into his legs, and the darkness that surrounded him would never lift. Artemy put a hand on his chest.
"Please, oynon," he said. "Relax. You will be all right."
He would not. Of course, he would not.
Deep down, Daniil suspected he may never be all right again.
He slept anyway.