Krahe explained the Sorcerer’s Hand and the reagents she required for its creation. Once she was done, she added: “If it is permissible, I intend to use the hand from one of Aldritch’s accomplices for the base material. If not, I would simply purchase a donated hand for the purpose.”

  With a brow furrowed in mild bemusement, he stared at her, contemplating. After a few moments of silence, he finally settled on an answer.

  “What you request is a somewhat grey area. However, the circumstances tilt the needle in your favour. They’re already condemned to execution, and you are not only an apostle, you are the apostle who brought them in. There’s no reason why you should not be able to take a hand from one of their corpses. This “Sorcerer’s Hand” doesn’t desecrate the corpse part used, so it’s not heretical per se, only unorthodox due to its intentional use of impurity. It employs certain ancient grafting principles in reverse.”

  “Good. That works out neatly, then. Speaking of, how is she?”

  Krahe didn’t know how to broach the topic of Juno in a seamless manner, so she just openly twisted the conversation into a hard left turn. With a heavy sigh, Firminus sat down on one of the shelf-access ladders that stood along the graft-vault’s walls.

  “Better than I’d expected, for the reason I had feared. That girl, she just takes up whatever graft material I give her like her body is a starving man being offered grilled mutton. I’ve fixed her face, and she’s walking with non-graft prosthetics. I just don’t like it, I don’t like it one bit,” he shook his head. The cigarette became a stub and then became nothing, and a second took its place. He glanced sideways at Krahe, “That arm; the one you chopped off of Aldritch. She asked for it. Wouldn’t take anything else. Fidelia gave it a provisional go-ahead. I barely had to do anything, just some proportion adjustments. It melded to the stump like it was hers to begin with, I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s been cutting up her meals with the hidden blade tendril, thinks it’s the best thing ever.”

  “She can see, then?”

  “Oh yes, she can see. Through a quasi-graft visor, one of those things that you just hook up to the optical nerve, but she can see. Well enough to function at least.”

  “Haven’t found eyes that fit yet?”

  “Six pairs ready for implantation with minimal adjustments. Just in my collection. She doesn’t want them, I can’t force it.”

  Krahe dragged down half her cigarette, and, after letting the words stew, she said, “Let’s move up the execution, then, get it over with. There’s no point to delaying it. Unless the inquisitor wants to keep the shitbags for a few days longer?”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Firminus let out a bitter laugh, taking a long draw of his own cigarette. “No, no. Yazata sent word a few days ago that it can go ahead any day, just waiting on my say-so that the girl is ready to go ahead with it. I’ve just been putting it off. Like a coward.”

  “You at least teach her how to use ocular extraction tools?” Krahe asked, half-jokingly.

  A chuckle. As bitter as the previous one.

  “I did, in fact. She said she was bored of my hand-dexterity toys and wanted to try an eye extractor. I requisitioned a few vat-heads, you saw the results yourself,” he said.

  “Can I see her?” she asked.

  “Not yet. She won’t be awake for a few more hours,” he uttered, drawing down another half-cigarette.

  “I’ll come back in a few hours, then,” Krahe shrugged. She stood from her seat, looking back to Firminus as she approached the vault door. The grafter, realizing that she couldn’t leave without him to open the door, snapped out of his stupor. “Can she eat normal food, or only surgery recovery fare?”

  “Sure. Digestive tract is fine, more or less, and as I said, her body doesn’t need the usual recovery process. She hates my cooking, so I’ve been bringing the stuff they serve at the temple eatery.”

  Krahe grimaced. It was good food, and she wouldn’t describe it as bland either, but it was… Monastic, outside of the occasional desserts once or twice a week, and even these had a distinct sense of austerity to them.

  “Any fruit she likes that you know of?” Krahe asked. “Thinking of baking something, can’t have a seventeen-something girl eating like a monk.”

  This was important. Krahe placed importance on the fact Juno was, first and foremost, a seventeen-year-old girl. What had befallen her and what she had become as a result was secondary to that identity, it had to be secondary, not to dismiss the severity of it, but for the sake of preserving as much of her humanity as possible.

  “No citrus. That’s all I know,” he shrugged.

  “Ekarone pie it is, then.”

  Several hours passed. Krahe baked not one, but two ekarone pies — one to see if the recipe was any good and eat herself, and the other to bring to Juno. She went so far as to time the second one’s baking so it would be just the right temperature by the time she got to Firminus’ clinic. As the sun rose into the cloudless sky the increasing heat of day made itself known, and this in combination with the heat of the oven led Krahe to make use of the clothes she had had made for this very purpose. She also redistributed her Firminus-pattern Recultured Biogel to her legs to best make use of its body heat regulation, forming it into, effectively, biosuit thigh-highs. It was then, as she was changing, that she remembered the long list of custom clothing she intended to have made, and the most glaring gap within that list, a gap that would need to be filled before the hunt. That self-repair-capable jacket. More than ever, she would need another layer of armor, but she couldn’t see herself wearing anything like a hardsuit, so an armored jacket would be the best. Obviously, using Zirhayna’s parts would be best, but she felt that she needed the jacket to hunt Zirhayna to begin with. Having two jackets wouldn’t exactly be a problem, so she decided to visit Garvesh later that day. She already had a handful of candidates for the commission, but it never hurt to ask someone in the know just in case.

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