Cor backed away, his hands raised. Strang’s normally sallow complexion was ruddy and his bloodshot eyes were wide with fury.
‘Easy, Strang,’ said Cor.
The boy coughed and spat a wad of dark phlegm into the pool.
‘Help… me,’ said the wounded man, holding a wasted and burned arm out towards them. His hairless scalp was coated in vivid red blood, and fragments of broken glass were embedded in his skin. ‘Now…’
Zara stepped between Cor and Strang.
‘Enough, you two,’ she said, pushing them apart with a confidence Cor wished he possessed. ‘We have to help this man.’
‘Why?’ said Strang. ‘Don’t look like he’s gonna live, even if’n we could drag him out. You seen the size of him?’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Zara, fixing Strang with a stare that had seen kids much older do what she wanted. ‘That eagle tattoo tells me he’s a fella as needs our helping. And anyhow, where’d you be if Sister Caitriona hadn’t taken you in, Orson Strang? You’d be dead or worse in the forge-mines of the Mechanicus, that’s where. So I’ll hear no more from you on this. We’re helping this poor man and that’s that. Am I clear?’
‘As up-spire air,’ replied Strang.
Cor hid his grin as Strang nodded like a broken servitor and moved his hand away from the bolt-shiv.
The man was heavier than he looked, and it took their combined efforts to lift him from the pool. They hoisted him between their shoulders, groaning under his weight.
The man winced as his leg banged into a jutting piece of exposed pipework, and he turned pain-filled eyes on Cor.
Dark and depthless like a pool of clean oil, they were set in an impossibly wrinkled skull, rheumy with age and gunky cataracts. His breath reeked and his skin smelled like the vents around the crematoria.
Strang was right; this fella likely wasn’t long for this world.
‘Hey, what do they call you, old man?’ he asked.
The man slumped between them, blinking in confusion, as if trying to dredge a memory up from an impossibly dark abyss.
‘I don’t… I don’t remember,’ he said.
When the Departmento Munitorum first built the Saint Karesine schola progenium in the lower reaches of Agri-Hive Osleon, they envisioned an institution dedicated to crafting new generations of officers for the Astra Militarum. Filled with orphans made in the First Equatorial Rebellion, it had been a magisterial edifice of ironwork columns, mosaic-frescoes depicting the heroes of the early Imperial crusades, and wide steps leading to its grand portico.
More than two hundred orphans of that war had been raised within its walls, many of whom had gone on to lead traitor regiments in the Second Equatorial Rebellion, forever poisoning its reputation and tainting the heroism of its later progena.
In the three centuries since then, the institution’s fortunes had further waned as sector-adjacent crusades shifted vectors and that ill reputation had settled upon its walls like a curse. Uphive nobility and the commissars of the Officio Prefectus eventually decided they’d wasted enough time and effort on its upkeep, and that the sons and daughters of the Astra Militarum would be better served in other Imperial institutions.
As the hive grew and the influx of orphans dwindled, the Saint Karesine schola progenium became something of a joke among Osleon’s sump-dwellers and juve-gangs. Its once-mighty roof leaked, the basement dormitories were partially flooded with noxious runoff, and the pipes supposed to pump warm air around its many rooms now spread fumes that smelled like an ogryn’s crotch.
At last headcount, a mere thirty-three progena slept with any regularity at Saint Karesine’s.
Cor and the others barged through Saint Karesine’s front door, scattering a bunch of the younger kids prying nails out of the warped floorboards. The old man hadn’t said much that made sense since they’d struggled to drag him from the pool, just some gibberish about someone named Nesh. Cor didn’t know the name.
Maybe it was whoever had jumped him.
‘Sister Caitriona!’ shouted Zara. ‘We need your help!’
The door to the prayer rooms swung open on rusty hinges and the mistress of Saint Karesine’s emerged, wiping one hand on her grimy robes. The other hand gripped the leather-wound hilt of a long-bladed chainsword that hadn’t housed a powercell in decades.
‘What’s all the noise?’ she demanded. ‘I’ll have no shouting here!’
Sister Caitriona towered over the children in her care. Dressed in the flowing robes of the Orders Hospitaller, she was a dark-skinned woman with an augmetic arm she alternately claimed was the result of an ork cleaver or a tyrannic monster.
Her hair was shorn close to her scalp, and despite her severe appearance, Cor thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Apart from Zara, of course.
Sister Caitriona had stayed on even when the coffers ran dry and every other member of staff had left in search of more fulfilling roles. She took one look at the injured man and said, ‘Strang and Pasco, you boys take him to the back dormitory.’
Cor shucked the old man from his shoulder, relieved to be rid of his weight and his smell. He went to follow after the others, but Sister Caitriona stopped him with a gentle hand on his shoulder.
‘Corvus,’ she said. ‘Wait here, there’s something I need to tell you.’
She knelt beside him with a wince and creak of popping joints.
‘It’s about your brother,’ said Sister Caitriona, and Cor felt a cold hand make a fist over his heart.
‘Nicodemus? He…’
‘I’m sorry, Cor, but the blight–’
‘Stop,’ said Cor. ‘Your voice only goes like that when someone dies.’
The back dormitory was quiet, its occupants mostly asleep.
Ever since the roof of the actual infirmary had collapsed, Sister Caitriona used this long, high-ceilinged room as an ad-hoc infirmary, and a dozen beds were occupied by children with rasping coughs or any number of the sicknesses that stalked the lower reaches of the hive.
Cor sat on a stool next to Nicodemus’ bed with his head hung low over his chest. Tears and snot coated his lips in a greasy film, and he wiped them away with his sleeve. Cor held his older brother’s hand, still finding it impossible to imagine he was gone.
