Percy looked down at the cartridge, muttering, “I don’t think that’s the worst he can do,” but then gave her a bright smile, wincing as the expression squished the swollen flesh around his black eye. “I’d better get in there. Thanks, Silvia!” With a wave of his hand, he stepped past her, taking a fortifying breath before knocking on the door to Oliver’s office.

Siobhan shook her head, a little bemused, then made for the apothecary tucked away on the other side of the building, the hallway guarded by yet another Verdant Stag enforcer.

Within, she found the main purpose of her trip, and the reason she had risked coming to the Verdant Stag—a triangular vial of what looked rather like slug poop. The substance within was a grey-brown, porous sludge, nothing like some of the more interesting-looking potions that came in bright colors, glowed, or roiled within their containers. Still, Siobhan had to suppress a huge grin as she picked it up, despite the three-gold price tag.

Katerin’s assistant, Alice, was running the shop, and fixed Siobhan with a gimlet eye when she tried to buy it. “I need a prescription from a healer to sell this to you,” she said.

Siobhan suppressed a frustrated groan. “I don’t have a healer’s note, but I’m an alchemist, and well aware of the tincture’s usage and requirements.”

“Beamshell tincture is addictive, and leaves an energy debt. People who abuse it will keep pushing until they collapse, malnourished and dehydrated, and for thaumaturges, with a significantly increased chance of Will-strain. If you have narcolepsy, or insomnia, or some other legitimate reason to need this, I’m happy to sell it to you once you bring me proof.”

Briefly, Siobhan considered asking Oliver or Katerin to come down and vouch for her, or even coming back the next day with a forged healer’s prescription—but no, that was ridiculous. She leaned forward and said in a low voice, “I encountered an Aberrant that caused a severe sedative effect. You probably heard about the incident.” Aberrants were the kind of thing that was hard to argue against and likely to engender an emotional response. In this case, hopefully sympathy, and a hesitance to ask too many questions. “I don’t have narcolepsy, I just need a little help staying sharp when I’m awake. I assure you, I have no plans to abuse the concoction. I brew a good number of the potions you stock here,” she added.

What Siobhan said was more or less true, except for her fatigue being caused directly by lingering anomalous effects of the Aberrant. She just needed something a little stronger than coffee to give her energy while she was awake. She couldn’t continue to drag her way through her days, barely scraping by. She wasn’t stupid enough to abuse the beamshell tincture until she got herself addicted.

Alice still hesitated, drawing a weary sigh from Siobhan. “I can get Katerin to vouch for me, if she’s here.” Bringing in Oliver would be a little too much, probably.

Alice finally conceded. “If you need a second vial, I’ll require that healer’s note.” She rattled off a series of dosage and use instructions that Siobhan had already memorized, and Siobhan walked out three gold lighter, with a vial of bottled energy burning a hole in one of her inner jacket pockets.

The excitement of potential relief got her all the way to the Silk Door without feeling the nip of the cold.

Within her closet-sized backroom, she changed into her male form, then picked up Sebastien’s clothes, which she’d left there the night of the incident before everything went so wrong.

She’d also brought back the Raven Queen’s dress, which she would stash there until she had a chance to take it to a used clothing shop for sale. There was a small chance the outfit might be recognized or otherwise used to connect her to the scene of the crime.

She picked up the pile of red and black fabric, intending to cast the shedding-destroyer spell on it, but her finger brushed up against what felt like a metal wire.

She jerked back, tossing the clothes to the floor as if she’d been burned. Her skin rippled with goosebumps as her hindbrain seemed to realize what she’d touched before her conscious mind made the connection. “Oh…” she whispered.

Siobhan stepped forward cautiously, pinching one corner of the fabric and lifting until the wire revealed itself.

Only it wasn’t a wire. It was a piece of the flesh-and-bone string that Newton’s Aberrant had been formed from, and which had infected and subsumed anyone it touched, woven through the fabric. The sharp edge suggested that a slicing spell had severed it at some point.

It didn’t move, even when she clicked her tongue experimentally to see if it reacted to the noise.

There was also no smell or evidence of decay. ‘It might not actually be made out of flesh, come to think of it. Just because it’s the same color means nothing. This is a piece of an Aberrant. How did the Red Guard not notice this?’

That they hadn’t perversely reassured her. ‘If the string was dangerous, surely they would have found it with one of their scanning artifacts?’

Horrified and fascinated, Siobhan used the edge of her cloak to protect her skin as she pulled the string out from where it had woven itself into the hem, almost invisibly. It was a couple of inches long, as thin as a hair, and rigid. She stared at it for a long time, watching for any signs of life.

When she finally got back to the dorms, any excitement regarding the beamshell tincture was long forgotten.

She closed the curtains around her cubicle, then pulled a glass vial from her pocket, checking on the single Aberrant string she’d placed within. She assured herself that it was still unmoving, definitely dead, and safe. Even so, she melted some wax around the thread-screw top of the vial, put the whole thing in a leather pouch, and hid it safe at the bottom of her school trunk.

Sebastien rifled through her encrypted grimoire until she found the notes she’d made about the blood-print vow, then reviewed the information about the warding aspect that would incinerate the blood if someone tried to access it or use it for sympathetic magic. The principle could be repurposed to secure other things that she would rather destroy than lose or have used against her.

Using the paper spell array for stone disintegration—one of the spells she had learned in Practical Casting—Sebastien carved the lines of the warding spell deep into the stone floor where the trunk at the foot of her bed usually sat. She blew gently to clear out the lines and collected the dust in a small pile, then cast the ward spell, pouring power into what was technically a simple artifact with only two parameters. It would store the energy until it needed to be used against an attack, or when the trickle of natural loss ran it dry.

Then, she used another paper spell array to cast the stone-forming spell on the saved dust, but slightly modified the output to create a flat section of stone rather than a sphere. She formed a thin façade of stone over the warding spell, which was still active but now almost undetectable.

Finally, she moved the school trunk, with the Aberrant string at the bottom, back into its normal spot over the ward.

She lay down on the thin bed, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. Imagining the thread secretly growing in the dark, she shuddered, wondering if she’d just made a mistake. She could have given it to the Red Guard, or Professor Lacer, or even simply tried to burn it up with a fire.

But she wanted it. Perhaps it was irrational, but she wanted to keep it, this last piece of Newton. The Red Guard had taken the rest of him, along with the others who had died, and probably destroyed it all. Since she certainly wasn’t going to place the vial on her bedside table or the windowsill, like some kind of paperweight bauble, this was the compromise.

The string would stay hidden, and she would check on it periodically, to make sure it wasn’t growing.

Question: Any speculation on how the Aberrant string could come into play in the future?