The afternoon sun had moved past its peak, throwing long shadows from the chimney stacks across the cobblestone.

He watched her walk ahead of him.

The commoner dress — practical, thick-woven, the dark fabric of a woman who moves through working spaces — had settled back around her with the unconscious, total comfort of clothes that have been worn to the point of being a second skin. It sank into the cleft of her ass with the particular, frank honesty of fabric that has stopped trying to pretend the body inside it isn’t shaped the way it is.

Her hips.

The full, unhurried swing of them. The dress pulling with each step, releasing, pulling again. The soft, comprehensive movement of a body that has no performance in it whatsoever — that walks the way it walks because that’s how it walks.

Viktor’s eyes spent three seconds on it.

Then he looked at the chimney stacks.

The door was old wood, well-maintained. She put her key in and turned it with the practiced ease of a woman who has done this ten thousand times and turned once to say, over her shoulder:

"I live here with my son. My husband used to patrol this quarter."

Her hand on the door.

"He’s been missing."

The words came out even. Controlled. The voice of a woman who has been keeping this specific sentence level for days and is nearly managing it.

Her hand, on the door, stilled.

Just for a moment.

The knuckles white. The slight, involuntary tightening of a body receiving a thought it had been trying not to receive. She pressed her lips together. Let the breath out.

Pushed the door open. 𝗳𝚛𝚎𝚎𝘄𝕖𝕓𝕟𝕠𝚟𝚎𝕝.𝗰𝕠𝐦

"Please come in."

"Mother!"

The voice hit them before the light did — bright, high, cracking slightly at the upper register with the specific, unstable pitch of a boy somewhere between eleven and fourteen who had been alone and waiting and is now very not alone.

She crossed the room in four strides.

The boy was on the couch — a wide, low piece of furniture that had clearly been arranged to accommodate him, the cushions stacked at angles that suggested careful prior thought. He was thin in the way that specific illnesses make people thin, his legs arranged with the particular stillness that told Viktor, in one glance, what the condition was more or less.

His face, though.

His face was all mother.

She was on her knees in front of him, both hands on his cheeks, her torn dress forgotten, the full warmth of her maternal attention turned on him with the complete, undivided force of a woman who has been worried all afternoon and is now accounting for every inch of him.

"Are you alright? Did you eat? I left the bread on the—"

"Mother," he said, with the specific, patient exasperation of a child who is loved very much and finds it occasionally a lot, "I need to go."

"Go."

"To the toilet."

"Oh."

She was already up.

"I couldn’t get there myself," he said. The matter-of-fact delivery of a boy who has been saying this long enough to have removed the grief from it. Just information. Just the state of things.

"Of course, of course, come—"

She lifted him — the practiced ease of it, the specific way her arms knew his weight and distribution — and looked over her shoulder at Viktor as she moved toward the back of the house.

"Please sit. I will only be a moment."

"Take your time," Viktor said.

The door closed.

He stood in the front room.

Small. Clean in the way that small spaces are kept clean when someone cares about them and has limited resources — every object justified, every surface used intentionally, the specific economy of a household running on discipline rather than abundance.

A flower pot on the windowsill.

He looked at it.

The plant was alive — barely, the leaves at the edges browning, the stem doing what it could — and the flower itself was unremarkable. Common. A weed, essentially, that someone had put in a pot and kept because it had bloomed once or twice and had been worth the water.

He pulled it out.

Not by the roots. Just — took the stem, turned it in his fingers, feeling the cellular structure of it with the herbalist ability he’d spent the last week not thinking about and which lived in his hands now like a language he couldn’t stop speaking.

He sat.

His eyes closed.

The herb mastery opened in his hands the way a system opens — not by choice so much as by contact, the herb and the ability finding each other with the automatic interest of things that belong to the same conversation.

He felt it.

The plant’s architecture. The root structure — specifically, the secondary compounds concentrated there, the ones that did not exist in any pharmacopoeia he’d read because they required this specific method of reading to locate. He found them. Pulled the aura blade — thin, precise, the craftsman edge sharp at the atomic level — and began to work.

Cut. Separate. Not by gross material but by structure. Pulling the useful compounds from the useless ones, the active from the inert, the specific molecular configuration that the condition in the boy’s legs was waiting for.

It took time.

His hands moved over the herb — the visible manifestation of it was minimal, just a faint green glow gathering in his palms, the compressed matter cycling through his fingers in slow, dense spirals — but the ’cost’ was immediate.

Stamina. Pouring out. The ability at this level was not free, had never been free, and his body — which had been well-fed on milk and seed-exchange all morning but had also been doing city cleanup for three hours — was accounting for this expenditure with growing precision.

Sweat at his temple.

Then his jaw.

"It’s too much," he said, quietly, to the room. "Taking too much."

The green matter compressed. Smaller. Denser. The color deepening toward something that glowed from inside rather than from surface.

’Smaller.’

’Smaller.’

Until it sat in his palm, complete — a pill the size of his thumbnail, warm, faintly luminescent, carrying six hours of compound-separation in a form a child could swallow.

He set it on the table.

Sat back.

The room tipped slightly.

The door opened.

She came back in, the boy held in one arm, the practiced return of a woman who has done this circuit many times — the bathroom, the couch, the adjustment of cushions, all of it muscle memory.

She looked at Viktor.

At the sweat.

"What happened?" The boy was set down. She was already crossing to him. "Is it too warm? The fire isn’t even—are you alright?"

"Fine." He smiled. Thin. The smile of a man who is managing and would like not to discuss it. "I used an ability. It—" He gestured, vaguely. "Required more than I estimated."

"An ability."

"The herb on your sill."

She looked at the pot.

At the pulled stem. At the empty dirt.

At the pill on the table.

Her mouth opened.

He pointed at her son.

"Feed it to him," he said. "The condition in his legs. The compound will take three days to complete. The second day he’ll be uncomfortable — that’s expected. The third day—"