Dr. Curex still did her rounds every morning at six, and she had never once let anyone talk her out of it.
She was sixty-one years old and ran the largest medical guild in the Slatemark Empire. Sixty percent of the continent's medicines passed through laboratories her grandmother had founded. Her name was on four hundred hospitals, eleven thousand pharmacies, and the white tower of Nexarion Central, whose top floor she could have used as an office if she had ever wanted one. She did not want one. She wanted the paediatric ward on the ninth floor, at six in the morning, with a tablet under her arm and her reading glasses pushed up into her grey hair.
"Good morning, Pip," she said to the boy in bed fourteen.
Pip was seven and had a disorder of the mana channels so rare that there were only two hundred known cases in the Empire. He was alive because of a single compound, Veridane, which took eleven months to synthesise and could only be produced in one laboratory in the world. Hers.
