Chapter 4
I knew. Every medical trainee had seen the slides: *Argyria of the vascular walls.* It turned the tissue brittle as spun glass.
"I am ready, Sister," I whispered.
Martha pressed the cold pneumatic muzzle against the crook of my elbow. Her thumb hovered over the trigger switch.
"You have been an exemplary girl for twenty years," she murmured, her eyes flicking up to meet mine through the thick lenses of her spectacles. There was something buried beneath her dull eyes—a flicker of nervous tension, like a clerk who knew an audit was coming. "Do not complicate your records now. Your twenty-first year is when the spirit settles. If you survive the next fortnight with clean blood, they will assign you permanently to the central infirmary. You will never have to look at the perimeter wall again."
"I only wish to serve," I lied. The words were automatic, grease on the gears of survival.
*Hiss-SLAM.*
The pneumatic driver kicked like a handgun.
The double dose hit my median cubital vein not as fluid, but as a slurry of crushed glass and liquid nitrogen. A high, ringing whine exploded behind my ears. My jaw snapped shut so violently my molars cracked against each other.
The cold didn't stop in my arm. It ripped upward into my neck, my chest, my ribcage, seizing my diaphragm in an iron fist. My lungs forgot how to expand. Black spots blossomed across the linoleum floor, blooming into jagged fractals.
"Deep breaths," Martha commanded, her hand pressing my collarbone down onto the steel table with clinical indifference. "Do not vomit. Vomiting evacuates the compound before the system absorbs the density. Swallow, Sylvia."
I swallowed. It was like forcing down a mouthful of sewing needles.
My heart stumbled, missing three beats, then kicked back into a ragged, limping gallop that sounded like wet leather slapping against stone. The phantom pain from the morning—the scorching tear between my shoulder blades where the dark Alpha had taken Ross’s silver bullet—did not vanish under the chemical flood.
Instead, the two forces collided. The silver attempted to freeze what the wound had burned open. My chest felt like an anvil caught between a frost storm and a furnace.
"Dock her card," Martha told the orderly at the counter. "Double measure logged. She is cleared for the night shift in Trauma Three."
They didn't give me time to recover. In Havenwood, rest was considered a breeding ground for erratic thoughts.
***
By midnight, the toxicity had taken root.
Trauma Ward Three was a concrete basement smelling of damp lint, iodine, and the coppery stench of militia blood. Three soldiers from the morning raid lay on gurneys, their burns wrapped in yellow paraffin gauze. I moved between them like a ghost, changing IV bags and adjusting pressure cuffs, but my hands were shaking so hard the glass tubing rattled against the stands.
My reflection in the mirrored medicine cabinet horrified me.
My skin had taken on a terrifying, translucent slate tint. The skin under my fingernails was dark, bruised violet. Every joint in my fingers felt swollen with lead, and when I blinked, ribbons of static trailed across my vision.
*Silver poisoning.*
I had read the suppressed toxicological manuals in the library annex during my third year of training. The symptoms were unmistakable: severe neurological depression, peripheral neuropathy, necrotic tissue cooling. The Council called it "sanctification."
It wasn't sanctification. It was a slow, chemical strangulation. Ross wasn't trying to calm my nerves. He was trying to extinguish whatever had flickered to life inside me before my twenty-first birthday.
*Why my twenty-first birthday?*
The question pulsed in rhythm with the second, forbidden ache behind my ribs.
"Nurse Sylvia."
I spun around, nearly dropping a vial of liquid morphine.
Commander Ross stood in the arched doorway of the ward. He had removed his heavy tactical coat, wearing only his olive-drab uniform shirt, the silver badges on his collar catching the glare of the ceiling strip. His right hand rested casually on the leather holster at his hip.
His eyes, gray and flat as wet slate, raked over me from my trembling hands to the blue tinge along my jawline.
"Commander," I managed, keeping my voice level, though my throat felt shredded. "The wounded are stabilized. Corporal Higgins has a low-grade fever, but the burns are clean."
Ross didn't look at Corporal Higgins. He walked toward me, his combat boots thudding heavy and measured on the linoleum. He stopped two feet away. He was tall, thick-shouldered, radiating the hard, chemical smell of gun oil and synthetic soap.
"You look unsteady on your feet, Sister," he said softly.
"The double dose is... potent, sir," I whispered, keeping my gaze respectfully lowered to his breast pocket. "Sister Martha warned me the systemic integration takes several hours."
He reached out. His leather-gloved index finger hooked under my chin, lifting my face toward the white light. The leather was freezing cold, smelling faintly of gunpowder.
He stared into my pupils. For a long, suffocating moment, he said nothing. I could hear his slow, measured breathing. I could hear the drip of the saline bags across the room.
"Your irises are cloudy," he observed. His tone was almost conversational, but his thumb pressed slightly harder against my jaw, testing the density of the bone. "That is good. The silver is coating the optic nerve. By the end of the week, the world will look precisely as it should: uniform, orderly, and dead."
"Yes, Commander."
"Do you know why we double the measure for orphans at your age, Sylvia?"
A cold sweat broke out across my hairline. "To ensure the bloodline remains untainted by the wild."
"To kill what does not belong to us," he corrected bluntly. His eyes narrowed, a flash of pure, venomous calculation passing through them. "The beasts outside do not merely attack our walls with claws. They exude a foul, psychicrot. An infection of the blood that seeks out resonance in those whose constitutions are fragile. If an impure vessel is allowed to reach twenty-one without total saturation, the rot blooms. And when it blooms, it spreads."
He dropped his hand. The absence of his touch felt like an escape from a guillotine.
"Martha will administer the morning dose at zero-six-hundred," Ross said, turning toward the doorway. "Three milliliters. If your pulse remains above forty beats per minute, we will proceed to four."
Four milliliters.
Four milliliters would turn my blood into sludge. It would stop my heart in my chest. He wasn't stabilizing me; he was performing an execution under medical protocol. He had seen the way I collapsed on the catwalk. He had seen that I was tied to the beast with the golden eyes, and he had decided to drown me before I could figure out the knot.
"Thank you, Commander," I said, my voice barely a thread. "For safeguarding my soul."
Ross paused at the threshold, not looking back. "We do not safeguard souls here, Sylvia. We safeguard the fence."
***
The morning rotation bell chimed at dawn, but I did not line up at Station Three.
The tremor in my limbs had progressed from a shudder to violent, intermittent spasms. My kidneys burned with a hot, sickening pressure, processing the heavy metal salts that my liver couldn't break down. If I took another dose—if three milliliters of that milky frost entered my veins—I would be dead on the floor of the trauma unit before noon.
