Borrowed time

Kael laid rigid on Mira's examination table, the leather straps digging into his wrists as she leaned over him, her breath fogging the lens of her shard-eye monocle. The needle pierced his chest, an agonizing pain afflicted his mind, it siphoned venom into a vial that pulsed with sentient malice. Six months of this. Six months of her clinical precision, her cold curiosity.

Kael didn't trust her, not that he trusted anyone after the incident with Jarek, but she was different. Kael could see a faint obsession and madness in her eyes, and being at the mercy of a mad person wasn't something anyone would like to be at.

"Fascinating,"

Mira murmured, tilting the vial to watch the venom writhe and glow strangely.

"The spores in the serum i injected you with are forcing your Shard to metastasize."

She smiled and gazed back at him only to look back a the sample of venom.

"See these fractal patterns? It's adapting to survive."

Kael turned his head, he didn't really understand his powers, and so he just wasn't interested in the ravings of Mira.

He looked up and started staring at the photo pinned above her desk—the girl with Mira's sharp cheekbones and hollow eyes, standing beside a corpse consumed by Oblivion crystal. Her sister. Another ghost in Mira's graveyard of failures.

"You said the tinctures would stabilize me."

"And they have."

She labeled the vial Subject V-K and slotted it into a steel case.

"Your corruption would've reached your heart by now. Instead, it's… negotiating."

He sat up, rolling down his sleeve to cover the black veins spidering up his arm. The numbness had receded since she'd started the treatments, but the price was carved into his body—his sweat left salt-white trails on his skin, he was drinking less and less but most of all he started hallucinating.

...

The lab was a collection of strange items and thins, she kept different animals to experimant on. The one Kael noticed the most were rats.

Mira kept them in glass cages along the clinic's back wall—twisted, squirming things injected with diluted venom. Kael watched her one night as she force-fed a spore tincture to a hairless rodent. Its spine arched violently, bone spires erupting from its flesh before it liquefied into black slurry.

Kael did not feel disgusted, in fact not many things disgusted him anymore. In his life living in the dregs he had eaten many times rats or synt slush, he had seen adults fight and die for a piece of bread, he saw street girls that were no more than slaves, he had also seen many children died for speaking to loud, he was lucky to have survived.

"What's the point?"

he asked, his voice graveled by sleeplessness.

"Control."

She scribbled notes without looking up.

"Your Shard's venom is chaos. I'm learning to direct it."

"To cure your sister?"

Her pen stilled. A hint of anger and regret appeared on her beautiful but apathetic face. The clinic's single bulb flickered, casting her in jagged shadows.

"My sister is dead. This is about understanding."

Kael passed his days in the lab, sometimes he would sneak out to steal a loaf of bread or some painkillers, Mira only got more ruthless with time, the third day she said.

"The antidote has become to expensive, i'll have to take two pints from now onward."

Kael responded back with clear anger in his eyes. 

"My venom has become more valuable."

Mira answered with impancience.

"Then you'll have to start paying rent, or you can leave at any time."

Two more days passed but on a dawn Kael saw Mira sleping slumped over her desk, her cheek pressed to a blueprint of a Shard-grafting device. The steel case glinted in the weak light, six months' worth of doses nestled in foam. His hands shook as he lifted it, venom roiling in his veins like a cornered animal.

He hesitated, the lab was a horrible place, yes but always better than the dregs.

But staying meant rotting in her cage, feeding her research until the Blight—or Jarek—finished him. He slipped into an abandoned factory, he esplored it fining a nice hall where he could relax.

The groan of rusted metal was costant. Kael climbed the skeletal remains of an assembly line to his old hideout—a hollowed-out boiler where he'd slept before Mira's false salvation. He injected the first dose himself, the liquid burning worse without her stabilizers. The black veins retreated. For now.

Six months.

Enough time to disappear. To train for Jarek's arrival. To forget the way Mira's breath hitched when she spoke of her sister.