The main thing Luka had gathered from his brief argument with Hadley was that they had yet to officially be granted access to the case because Luka had "refused to sign the contract, and only brought it back this morning" and "had stormed out of his office, before proper procedure could be followed", which all seemed like a convenient excuse for him to avoid doing his job, and also another somewhat desperate attempt to assert dominance. It still wasn't working. The only impact it had, was on Luka’s patience, which was already hanging on by a thread. Especially with the headache continuing to pound against his skull.

None of it was unexpected, of course. He knew that working for the Council involved far too much bureaucracy. He knew that he would stumble on the politics, and that the Council would be fighting his every move. He had only expected it to take longer than an hour, and had hoped it would involve a bigger ask than basic access. When he pointed that out, Hadley told him that he "had the file", as if that was supposed to be enough. The Agents assigned to the case had done absolutely nothing, and neither, it seemed, had Dr. Garland, who was in charge of the patients. It would, at the very least, be interesting to meet the doctor and learn if they were withholding information, or if they were too scared of the infection to make the effort.

It could be either, based on the file.

The medical section had a lot of words, but nothing to indicate that they had used magic on any of the patients to see what was going on. It was a lot of external symptoms, and progression of the condition. It read like they had done an actual autopsy on patient zero, which was messy, invasive and not to mention, completely unnecessary. They failed to understand that this was targeting the magic, not the body, and descriptions of organs was not helpful in the least. The conclusion of the report seemed to suggest that despite being dead, he was perfectly healthy. There appeared to have been some strain on his system, before he died, but that was like saying he had died from exhaustion. It wasn't particularly helpful, medically or magically.

The elevator swished smoothly to a stop, and the doors opened to an anonymously white hallway. He followed Alice and the receptionist down the hall, past doors with warnings like "isolation" and "do not enter" attached in bright red letters. The receptionist didn't slow, so neither did he. Alice hesitated, but didn't stop. He might have felt better if she did.

When they found Dr. Garland, she was coming out of one of the patient rooms. She was wearing a white coat, gloves and a mask that obscured her features. Her eyes widened when she saw them, then narrowed when she pulled off the mask.

"What's this?" She had a sharp face, probably made sharper by her stern expression.

The receptionist introduced them as "Luka Lavrin and apprentice", and Luka glanced at Alice, wondering how much of the sudden cooperation had come from namedropping him. Even if it had occurred to him that it might be that easy, he wouldn't have used his own name to get access. He knew it would be inevitable, that his presence wouldn't go by unnoticed, but he would prefer if word didn't spread too fast or too far.

Dr. Garland and the receptionist were quietly discussing the mistake in bringing them here.

"I need to examine the patients," Luka cut in, "in order to figure out what is going on here."

Dr. Garland shifted her focus to him. "On whose authority?" she asked, and at the same time, her phone buzzed in her pocket. She picked it up and frowned at it.

"Answer it," Luka said, "I'll wait."

She listened for a while, to what Luka really hoped was Hadley explaining the situation. She waved away the receptionist, who seemed relieved when she retreated back towards the elevators. She seemed a lot less relieved, when Luka said, “Wait.”

She stopped in her tracks, and regarded him with caution.

“Could you bring me some iron dextran and a syringe?”

She nodded, then disappeared.

"I understand that," the doctor was saying, "but I can't let him examine the patients... I'll give him all the information he needs, but... fine. Okay." She hung up, and gestured for Luka and Alice to follow her. She handed them gloves and masks, and told them to put them on.

"We don't know how it spreads, so we have to cover all of our bases," she said.

Luka regarded the gloves and mask in his hand, but he had no intention of putting them on. This wasn't a disease, and none of it would make any difference. This thing was sophisticated, and however it spread, chances were it was more unusual than usual. "It's a spell," he said, "it spreads through magic."

He tossed the items into the trash, and earned an indifferent shrug from the doctor.

"I can only warn you," she said, "I can't force you to listen."

She led them into a room that held a couple of patients. "We have divided them into stages, these are the ones who are farthest along."

"Tell me what you have done to examine them. I read your report, and it mentions physical conditions, but not magical."

"We don't know how it spreads," she repeated, as if that was an answer to his question.

"So, you haven't examined them?"

"We have—" she stumbled over the words. "We have observed them," she said. "We have worked to slow it down."

Luka stepped up to one of the beds. "But you have not actually taken steps to figure out what this is, or how to stop it?"

"We have been trying to figure out how to safely—"

"Yes," Luka interrupted. "I got that. Thank you."

The girl lying in front of him was young, her dark hair fanned out on the pillow, and for a second he thought of his sister. They had similar features, at least asleep. He shook it off, since it was both an unwanted and unhelpful impulse, to think of them as people at this stage.

Stolen novel; please report.

"Medically induced coma?" He asked, looking back at Dr. Garland, who nodded. He didn't comment further, since it was now obvious, that they were reluctant to use magic on them. So, he didn't point out that suspended animation would have been a better option, or that none of it was really guaranteed to slow this thing down. They were guessing, and guessing was a lot like assuming. Maybe this thing was actually incredible simple to fix, but no one had bothered to check. He sighed. "You may want to step outside," he told Dr. Garland.

He heard the intake of breath as she was about to protest, the pause when she didn't, and then her footsteps retreating.

"Wait," Alice said, "You're not thinking of..."

"Using magic on them? Of course I am."

She had stepped closer, but was keeping her distance from the bed.

"You can't. If you get infected..."

"If I get infected, we have at least a couple of days to solve this before I die. These people were admitted when they started showing symptoms, and none of them were as far along as patient zero was, when he died."

"But—"

"Alice," he said, nearly gently, trying to be comforting. "It's fine. Trust me."

Because of the coma, their magic was practically dormant, and he didn't think it would spread to him. To be safe, he was going to cast a warding spell on himself. "You can step out too, if you want."

Alice shook her head. "No. I'm here to learn."

He could admire her determination, even though it wasn't actually very helpful to him. She wasn't a Healer, and she couldn't do basic spells, so all she could do was observe. He would have preferred working in peace.

There was a quiet knock on the door, and Luka looked over, expecting Dr. Garland, but it was the receptionist. She handed over the requested items, and retreated.

“Thank you,” he said, and she nodded once, before stepping back out of the room.

Alice watched him with suspicion, as he filled the syringe.

"Iron," he explained, even though she must have caught that when he made the request, and might even have made the connection. "Give me your arm."

Still, she was hesitant, when she inched her arm forward. “You really don’t have to—”

“Yes,” Luka said, and jammed the needle into her arm, “I do.”

He might not have much use for an apprentice, but he had even less use of an apprentice, who might faint on him. Magic couldn’t create something from nothing, but with the iron infusion, he had the materials he needed to speed up the production of hemoglobin. He called his magic, and got her levels closer to normal, then lifted some of her exhaustion while he was at it.

When he took his hand away, she rubbed the injection site, but of course there wasn’t a mark left on her.

Now that the state of his apprentice was no longer grating on him, he returned his attention to the comatose girl.

The warding spell would have been a lot more simple if not for the lingering headache, but he did the calculations in his head, hoping it did what it was meant to. The aim was to make sure no outside magic would be able to touch him, and as much as that could have been a very useful spell for magical combat, he could already tell that it would be a bitch to maintain. He muttered the words out loud, unable to focus on activating it inside his head. It sat at the back of his mind, as a thing he would need to keep monitoring, in case it weakened or he lost focus. He called up his magic, the red light swirling across his skin, and touched the forehead of the girl.

He did a basic check first, just to assess her overall health. It indicated that, medically induced coma aside, she was fine. Although, he did note something around her heart that didn't quite belong, a trace of magic that had no good reason to be there. He didn't know what it did yet, but he could follow the signature to the contamination in her magic. Even though his abilities as a Healer were limited whenever he moved away from the body and into the magic, he was still able to see the connections. It immediately felt wrong. She was a forger, but there was something else too. Something that was growing stronger and suppressing her own magic. It felt like... It felt like untethered magic, the wild magic of the city, the very soul of it.

This didn't make any sense.

He realized now what the connection to the heart did. With every slow beat, the balance shifted, just slightly. The spell was tied to her heart, counting down until the moment the untethered magic would take over her own. It would resent being trapped, it would resent the constrictions, and when it grew powerful enough, it would kill the mage, trying to escape the cage of their body.

"What did you do?" Luka muttered, aimed at the insane genius responsible for this spell.

"What?" Alice asked. Luka shook his head, still not able to fully understand the repercussions of this. "What is it?" Alice asked again.

"It's untethered magic," Luka said. "This spell is trapping it inside the mage, trying to control it. It's like being handed a fucking tiger on a chain, and waiting for it to eat you."

"I don't understand," Alice said.

"I don't even understand." Luka took his hand off the girl's forehead. He dropped his magic, and the protection spell. "It's fucking brilliant. Fuck."

"What— Are you complimenting the bad guy?" Alice raised her eyebrows, trying to play it off, but there was genuine concern behind it.

“They’re good,” Luka acknowledged. “Better than I expected. After seeing Dr. Garland's reluctance to get anywhere near these kids, I was hoping they were counting on that, and that it might actually be relatively simple to fix, but it's not."

How nice it would have been, if this had turned out to be five minute job. Getting a challenge instead, could be a welcome change from the routine he had settled into, if not for the Council and the lives at stake.

"So, what now?"

"I don't know," Luka said. "I don't know." He wasn't done. He hadn't even looked at the spell yet, but this was… "You know what's going to happen if we go poking the angry tiger?"

"It eats us?" Alice suggested.

"Yes. Or the mage. Or maybe we'll get a brand new monster on our hands. That's the thing. We don't know. There's a reason we call it wild magic. There's a reason so many Agents are monitoring it. There's a reason this place is warded against it. It's unpredictable, and it's dangerous."

If you wanted control, you used spells; if you wanted chaos, you used untethered magic. Of course, most Agents preferred neither and only used their own magic. They could control untethered magic, and it was even in their job descriptions whenever they encountered Strays. But that was a smothering of magic, suppressing its wild nature. This was... something else.

"So we can do nothing?" She was hugging herself, and her eyes weren't meeting his. She was afraid of the answer. There was no way of knowing if it was contained to the people who had been admitted to the hospital, and she had exposed herself to it now.

"That's not what I said." He softened his voice again. He didn't know if it helped, but at least he tried. "Do you understand what actually happened ten years ago? Do you know?"

Now she looked at him, but it wasn't with the level of excitement he may have anticipated. It wasn't enough of a distraction from the fear of death, but that was a good thing. She had her priorities in order.

"No," Alice said. "I barely know anything."

He hesitated. He didn't have to tell her. It was perhaps a useful comparison to bring some comfort, to assure her that he might be able to do something, but he still hated talking about it. "Okay, well. The short version is that a Soul Eater was deployed to kill all the mages within the Academy. We trapped it, and redirected the magic, basically dissipating it. It became too scattered, too weak to complete its objective. Now, obviously this is not the same thing. That wasn't wild magic, and this is. But there's a chance, a small chance, that we could do something similar to those not too badly affected. But her?" He nodded at the girl. "Probably all these people, are too far gone. We can't do anything about this without the right spell, and to create that spell, we need to know exactly what we're doing. Which we won't."

She shook her head, and he could see her starting to lose hope. "So, what are you saying?"

"What am I saying?" Luka echoed. "I'm saying I need to take a look at that spell, but we have to prepare ourselves for the possibility that without the person who created this thing, there's very little we can do."

"Okay," Alice said, her voice nothing more than a whisper. "Okay."

Luka put his ward back up, and then constructed the spell that would allow him to gather some data about the elements of this thing.