Book One – Chapter 19

                                           The had put it there,
                                just as the distillers put in the areole
                                 to drive the spirit into change.
                     But she had not let it rest in him quietly,
                            to drift and dissolve and integrate in its own time.
                                No. She unsettled him.
                          Her presence and her gaze and her voice and her touch shook the wanting
                                                          until it tore and seeped through the rest of him.

                      It had taken over, just like that. It had broken through the mask.
                        It had spoken to the shaman. It had offered itself to her.
                      There had been no going back for the wanting self.
                        The only reason Yu had made it back
                      and out of the sick bay was that she had let go of him.
                       She had released him before the wanting tore open entirely.

                               But it was torn. The rupture was there,
                          like the broken areole before him.
                        Even through the darkened glass,
                      Yu saw the purple threads
                            bleeding their colour into the whole.
                          He saw it and he felt it;
                      the rising anticipation for the Witching Hour.
                        With every second, more of it spread.
                                                It would poison the spirit,
                                 and whatever remained of him.

Yu slammed his wings against the workbench and pushed himself back. His first instinct was to run in circles again. He did, opening the first workbench cupboard as he walked, then checking the second — and then stopped short at the hearth, before he would pass the bottle again, and before he would reach the third leg, the one with all the bowls.

He did not know where to go from there, so he climbed the stool in front of the surgery window. Just to see that … Bubs was still there.

He was.

They were still working on the leg. Because Deltington stood between Bubs and the door, Yu had a poor angle, but enough to see Bubs bent low over the cage, doing something delicate around the pins. Every so often, he picked up another one of many thin slivers from a tray — no, not cloth, but tissue. With his tiny instruments, he guided string after string into the leg, pushing them through the narrow cuts between the pins, and then drove his forceps deeper along the major wound to pull, thread, and tighten the lengths through the meat. Yu could only guess he was fastening what had been torn. He could not tell whether the scraps on the tray belonged to the human or were something that Bubs had prepared, like the new bone.