Yorl smooths my hair away from my eyes because I can’t—a kind gesture, in his own way.

“If this was my project, I could ask them to forego the restraints,” he sighs. “But the high-running valkerax fears have been one of the only things from the mainland to take root here. The bastion won’t hear of it.”

“The bastion being your boss, I imagine,” I say.

“Something like that.” He nods, his vermillion-shot mane bobbing on the ends. It looks silkier than when I saw it last.

“You look better, at least,” I press. “It’s almost as if you don’t have anything to desperately prove anymore and can focus on the little things like eating and sleeping and keeping your body functioning.”

“It hasn’t even been a quarter-half,” Yorl grumbles. “And you’re already patronizing me.”

“Lovingly,” I assure him. “So what are you going to actually do to me? Flay me alive? A bit out of style, but I’m game. Hmm…draw and quarter me? That’s always fun.”

“Nothing that extreme.” He shakes his mane. “They’re going to take the ten biological samples required for a full analysis. Blood, bile, liver, saliva, brain—”

“Brain?” I hiss. “How exactly do you plan to—”

A polymath walks up to Yorl bearing a full leather canvas packed to the brim with wicked hooked needles, and all the blood in my body curdles away from it.

“Yes, well,” Yorl sighs. “Because you’re technically a ‘dead’ specimen, they voted against the far kinder live-gathering methods.”

“But you voted for them, right?” My voice goes high as the polymath pulls out a hooked needle and wipes it clean with alcohol. Yorl snatches it from the human’s hand almost too quickly, and they look utterly shocked. Yorl’s green feline eyes widen, too, like he’s alarmed at what he just did, but his voice remains smooth.

“Please, scholar. This is technically messy, menial corpse work. Let an adjutant like myself ensure your hands remain clean.”

He’s good at covering, but the scholar doesn’t buy it, snorting as his thick eyebrows wrinkle under his hood.

“‘Menial corpse work’? You must be joking. If our suspicions are accurate, she’s the first nonhuman Heartless specimen in Arathess history. Surely even an adjutant like yourself can see how important she truly is.”

“Not important enough to spare her pain, though,” I mutter, perhaps a bit too loudly. The scholar’s dark eyes snap to me, a flicker of familiar Fione-like curiosity in them.

“Can you hear the song, Heartless?” he demands suddenly.

“I’m from the Vetrisian court, where a quartet accompanies every breath,” I chime. “I’ve heard a lot of songs—none of them particularly noteworthy.”

“No,” he presses, leaning in. “The song. The one all valkerax hear.”

he means us.