The old man shoved himself forward, lurching along the dimly lit corridor like a heavy puppet suspended by a thin string, stopping occasionally to grapple the smooth walls for support. One hand outstretched, fingers sliding along the slick stone, trailing a little dark wetness. There was a breathless cough that sounded empty and hungry in the silence.

He reached the door and fumbled with the knob. He had been half-asleep, in a world where such a thing as simple and ordinary as a doorknob was a ludicrous and whimsical notion. It was stubborn under his hand until he found the good sense to turn it, falling forward with the door.

The infirmary was low-lit at night for the patients' respite, and the foyer was empty. Professor Devlin shuffled forward and kept his hand tightly on his side and tried not to cough again. Someone had to be here, working late, not dozing off in the spare beds like the nurses he remembered courting in his early twenties. Colorful lights danced in his vision and he slumped down against the appointment counter, wheezing and spinning as though drunk.

Abeline was standing in the hall outside of her closet-sized office, trying to remember why she had gotten up. In her hand, she felt the weight of a teacup. Tea leaves and white rose petals huddled forlornly at the bottom of her cup, with no charlatan fortunteller to read them. Abe couldn't help but wonder what nonsense a witch would 'discover' about her life. A tall, dark stranger with a pickaxe for a hand? Doubtful.

There was one constant desire she had for the future, one hope that tinted her every waking moment: More Tea.

She turned to find a kettle when there was a worrying thud behind her. A late customer? The sound had come from the foyer... where a man was slumped over the front desk.

Abe bolted to the man's side with an unladylike efficiency. "Sir? What's the.. uh.." Setting down her teacup, she bent to inspect his eyes. Still open, if barely.

"Oh! Professor Devlin!" She smiled brightly. "I'm Healer Ixbridge-- Moore's new assistant. I"m so glad to finally meet y-you.. you're bleeding."

For a millisecond, her eyes were stuck on the dark liquid seeping into the paper of the appointment calendar. Someone would have to write all that out again.. but not her. Thankfully, she didn't have the time.

"I'll take a look at that, sir," she promised hastily, gingerly tapping his shoulder in hopes he'd roll himself over. She needed to find the source of the blood before she could do anything about it.

Devlin's voice was terse and quiet and wasted nothing; he did not meet her eyes. "I have been stabbed," he said. "I mended it myself, badly, and I believe I did myself further harm. It has opened twice more since the incident...urgh."

He doubled over, then turned around, revealing a shirt-front caked in dark brown blood. His clothes were odd, she thought - ragged and threadbare, hardly befitting a professor at Brunnhold. His field ached as though he had been through some sort of trying experience, though without the time to inspect it she was not immediately aware of the extent of the damage.

The injury was strange, a puncture wound by the look of it, deep, red and bruised. He had attempted to heal it, by the appearance of the strained skin, the thin webbing of forced tissue regrowth and the over-extended veins. Healing never worked as well on one's own body, and Abeline could see that Professor Devlin was inexperienced in the medical arts. No small amount of blood was oozing from the wound. It was clear that it had re-opened recently.

All hints of joviality left her features as she silently examined the wound. Pupils dilated, her ocular instruments absorbed the gory details, and her academic brow registered no emotion save concentration. She afforded the man the same learned, appreciative attention a clocksmith would to a damaged, but excellently engineered, pocket watch.

"Not the worst I've seen," she finally said. Among the galdori, that award belonged to one Master Siordanti, a fascinating case of severe backlash. Among the passives, it would go to Pascaul, the lacerated carotid artery, if only she'd had the chance to personally view the body.

"But you are near the top of the list, sir." The healer shook her head, seeming to say - why didn't you come earlier? - but she kept the thought to herself. She could scold him later; the poor thing was in enough pain as it was.

"Now, ah, well, I'll just get on with it." Abeline suppressed her innate tendency to ask for permission before casting. Professors didn't hobble their bleeding selves to the infirmary only to take personal offense when healed by the staff.

Monite phrases had, by then, already arranged a pair of spells in her head. First, she requested that the mona temporarily suppress the pain receptors in and around his wound with a localized variant of anesthetic, then she spoke a politely-worded heal tissue.

She could feel the tense resistance of a web of spell-work, the unnatural arrangement of skin cells pushing back on her spell like a dense fog. It took several tries to apply itself, and by then the Anesthetic had done its work, but the pain of the healing spell itself cut through, as it always did. It entered his tissue, his veins and arteries and ribs, and pulled. He had never quite gotted used to the feeling, but suppressed a grimace.

"Thank you," he gasped when it had finally finished; he felt the sore redness of the place where the wound had been, the new skin overripe and tender. He was dehydrated, exhausted; the ride had taken all night. His clothing gave away more than the wound had, and he glanced up sharply. He knew about medical confidentiality; it was why he had come here, and not to a back-alley doctor in Old Rose who might have killed him trying to extract the pin. But this nurse was young and excitable, and might not keep her mouth shut...

"Moore," he grunted, "you mentioned you knew Harper Moore?"

Her mind wavered on the subject of his injury, a vague misgiving about the resistance her spell had received. She put it down to the botched healing attempts, but the feeling refused to leave her entirely.

"Yes, I know him." She turned away, facing the hall to her office. It wouldn't do to let Devlin see her diffident, unprofessional smile. "I've been helping Professor Moore with his research, and he has been helping me with mine..."

After tightening her bun (although it hadn't gotten loose), she glanced back. Her reedy voice croaked a little when she asked, "W-would you care for some water?"

Abe wasn't normally one to think much about clothes, and, if she had noticed Devlin's unusual attire at all, she didn't seem to be dwelling on it. She was far more curious about the events that led up to the injury, and she now allowed her cognitive powers to examine that puzzle.

A stabbing that caused a puncture. Not a blade, but possibly a stiletto. Or a hatpin. One never knows-- he might've angered the wrong milliner.

"Yes, thank you," he replied, relieved; she was distracted. That she had known him immediately was some concern. He was hardly distinctive-looking, something that worked to his advantage, but perhaps she had seen him before at a function...

There was no good in lying. She might know immediately - she might be one of those nurses, the ones that could sniff out any insincerity like a rancid wound, the ones for whom a lie would only create interest that was not there previously. Better to say nothing, act as though the injury were a mere accidental inconvenience...but she knew, she had projected inside his ribs and seen the extent of the damage with her spell. Better to make her think it was a crisis averted instead of one waiting to happen.

"And thank you for helping me," he added. "I am relieved someone was here at this late hour. You said your name was...Ixbridge?"

By the time Devlin had asked his question, she had wandered off to the cupboard, collected a glass, and filled it.

Offering the water to him, the young woman said, "Healer Abeline Ixbridge, at your service."

She held his gaze briefly, inquisitively, then ended the stare with a sideways glance-- not downward like a genteel lady ought to. Clearly thinking, she made a final sort of noise through her nose.

If he wasn't going to be effusive with answers, she wasn't going to pry. After all, her patients' confidentiality was best kept when she didn't know a thing. It couldn't be read, wheedled, or ripped from her mind if it wasn't there in the first place.

Though disappointed, she consoled herself by presuming the man's life was an utterly uninteresting tangle of affairs with boring women, some of whom enjoyed the occasional costume-and-stabbing party.

"I've been meaning to meet you for some time," she said. "Er, since we both work for the same project, that is. I've had a hatcher of a time finding you, though." She smiled the thin smile that dwelled somewhere between apology and accusation.

While she didn't want to think of her colleague as an irresponsible lout, she was aware of Professor Devlin's dismissal. The event stood out in her memory primarily due to the odd choice for his replacement. Calling in Professor Lux, a magnificent geomancer, to teach Advanced Perceptive magic was, to put it gently, a poor allocation of resources. As much respect as Abeline had for Headmistress Servalis-- quite a bit, in fact-- one had to admit the choice didn't make much sense, at least from the little information she had.

"Has Professor Moore spoken to you at all about our progress?" She asked lightly, head tilted like a small, curious bird's.

"He has not," admitted Devlin, propping his back against the counter's edge. The bloodstain on his shirt made him self-conscious; he drew his coat together. "You said you were...eh...working together? He brought you onto the project? That's..." His brow creased. "Well, he didn't tell me. But I've been away, and Harper and I have not been in contact for some time."

Odd that Harper would have brought in a nurse; perhaps she was helping with the MAT machine. He was an overly cautious and excitable man, and Devlin did not begrudge him the assistance; it must be lonesome down in the Cave. But a nurse?

"Well, I am sure we will encounter each other again, then, in the laboratory. If you don't mind me asking, Healer, before I leave you..." He frowned, thinking of Maggie, of all the subsequent hand-wringing by concerned members of the Society and how little genuine care they held for the passives. "Were you assigned to the project? As an overseer? I've been expecting something of the sort for some time."

If Abeline was working with Harper, if she was truly as nosy as some of the other nurses he had encountered, this was going to be more difficult than he had imagined.

"Assigned? Ha!" Abe barked out a clumsy excuse for a laugh, quite loudly. Lest the slumbering patients be disturbed, she stifled further mirth with a tight, sly smirk. "No, no. I only report to myself."

Then, her expression settled onto something more serious. "And a good thing, too--"

She peered down the hall, then back to Devlin. How well could she trust him? Harper seemed to, but then Harper had trusted her, and that was never a wise idea. She'd even told him so, several times, yet he persisted in treating her to glimpses of his mind. Like his moving picture box, his inner workings were a jumble of disparate parts that somehow, bafflingly, came together to form a uniquely enthralling potentiality.

Ah, dearest Harper...

What a radiant being-- and she'd had the perfidy to touch his earnest hand! Worse, she had the blasted impertinence to fall on him! Twice!

A bright red shame flushed her cheeks, and her field curled inward with a secretive tautness.

Right. Enough of that. Where were we?

Ah, yes. Trust.

These were shaky times, to say the least. So little news came out of Vienda-- where had Devlin been? What had he been doing? Was he some kind of government spy, or an interloper from the SPE? Why was a specialist in perceptive magic even on the project? What could he possibly know that was relevant? ..or did he join for the same reasons she had?

Even if he had, Devlin was not necessarily an ally. True allies were vanishingly rare in Abeline's experience. She habitually reserved a kernel of doubt, though not out of active suspicion. Doubt was simply an extension of her nature, just an echo of the question she'd asked with her first breath.

"... But I'll let Har- Moore. Moore will fill you in." She spoke softly, apparently very interested in an unremarkable whorl on the wooden desk. "After you've gotten some rest, of course, um, sir."

Devlin, being the Perceptive sort, raised his eyebrows ever so slightly at her tone of voice.

"Very well," he said stiffly. "You'll forgive me, Healer, if I don't bow..." He patted the sore spot where his wound had been and grinned a grin that was nearly a grimace. "Good night, and thank you again."

Tipping his hat, he steadied himself and headed nonchalantly for the door.