The clinic annex sat in the palace's shadow like an apology no one meant.
It wasn't the grand infirmary with its embroidered curtains and polite incense. This was where overflow went. Where servants came with crushed fingers and guards came with bites they swore were "training accidents." Where the air smelled like boiled linen and bitter tinctures instead of perfume.
Jina liked it anyway.
It was the closest thing the palace had to honest work.
She slipped inside under escort that pretended not to be escort. Two guards waited at the door. A Diaconal attendant lingered in the corridor. Far enough to claim privacy, close enough to claim surveillance.
Lysander stood at the doorway line—three paces back, still barred from entering like the room itself was a doctrine.
Jina didn't look at him long.
If she did, she'd start relying on the sight.
And reliance was a lever.
A thin-faced apothecary looked up from a cluttered counter, eyes widening at the sight of her. "Y-Your Highness."
"Call me—" Jina started, then stopped. Names were politics. Even "Princess" was safer than honesty.
She tucked her hands into her sleeves. "I need your reagents list. The restricted cabinet. And a mortar that isn't cracked."
The apothecary blinked, then scurried into motion. "Yes. Yes, of course."
Jina moved to the work table in the center and laid out what she'd smuggled in her lining: her folded notes, a small vial of dark lattice suspended in fat and soulglass dust, and a near-empty dropper of clear stabilizer she'd been rationing like it was time itself.
Her throat tightened as she set the stabilizer down.
So little left.
So many trials left to fail.
The apothecary returned with a tray: bundles of dried leaves, stoppered bottles, a scale that looked like it had been built by someone who hated decimals.
Jina stared at it.
Two brass pans. A stack of tiny weights shaped like grains.
No markings she recognized.
No precision.
Her mouth tightened.
For half a heartbeat, exhaustion tried to turn into laughter.
Medieval medicine really said "vibes and pebbles," huh.
She picked up the smallest weight and squinted at it, then muttered under her breath, "If I survive this, I'm inventing milligrams."
The apothecary heard only the tone, not the joke, and flinched anyway.
Jina exhaled, pushed the humor back into its box, and set to work.
She uncorked a bottle and sniffed. Bitter root. Too astringent. Another—sharp, camphor bite. Another—sweet, cloying, masking rot.
She scanned labels in ornate script and translated them through Aurelia's memories: court names, trade names, religious names for the same basic chemical families.
She didn't need poetry.
She needed function.
"Where is your stabilizer stock," she asked, voice even.
The apothecary hesitated. "Stabilizer?"
"Any binding stabilizer used for soulglass compounds," Jina clarified. "Anything that prevents aggressive clotting and tissue burn when a catalyst hits blood."
The apothecary's eyes darted to the guards at the door, then to the corridor where the Diaconal attendant waited like a shadow with paperwork.
He swallowed. "Those are… controlled. By the Diaconal Office."
Jina's stomach sank.
"List what you do have," she said.
He slid a ledger across the table with trembling fingers.
Jina read quickly.
Her vet brain did the math in the background while her fingers sorted bottles.
Fat medium, check. Soulglass dust, check. Catalyst… partially. Neutralizers… too weak. Carrier—maybe.
But the stabilizer she needed wasn't here.
Not even a substitute.
Jina tapped the ledger with her nail. "This isn't complete."
The apothecary's voice dropped. "It's what we're allowed."
Allowed.
Another polite cage.
Jina pulled her notes closer and flipped to the page she'd avoided staring at since last night: ratios, reaction curves, time to crash. She compared them to the ledger and felt the conclusion settle in like ice.
The lattice compound wasn't the cure.
It was the blade.
Without the stabilizer, every trial she ran was basically this:
Inject. Burn. Force Heal. Worsen poison strain. Repeat.
Each time she tried, she wasn't "progressing."
She was shaving time off her own life.
Jina's jaw tightened.
She reached for the cracked mortar the apothecary had brought and tested it with her thumb. The stone felt gritty, uneven, like it would shed particles into anything she ground.
She stared at it a second too long, then muttered, "This is the worst blender I've ever met."
The apothecary blinked. "B-blender…?"
"Nothing," Jina said, and the ghost of her irritation almost softened into a smile before she strangled it.
Short breath. Relief beat. Gone.
She set the mortar aside and turned back to the problem that mattered.
The stabilizer.
If the Diaconal Office controlled it, that meant Severin controlled it. Oversight controlled it. The same people trying to force her into tyranny controlled the one thing that could keep her from dying.
Of course.
Jina closed her eyes for one heartbeat and breathed.
In.
Out.
Her bond gates held quietly under her sternum—four threads present, but not flooding.
A small mercy she'd built herself.
Jina opened her eyes and looked at the apothecary.
"Tell me the name," she said.
The apothecary swallowed. "Of what."
"The stabilizer," Jina said. "The rare one. The one you don't have."
His lips parted, then closed again. Fear flickered.
Jina kept her voice calm. "You can whisper. You can write it. You can point at it in the ledger if you're afraid of saying it."
A beat.
Then the apothecary leaned in, shaking, and whispered a word like it was a sin.
"Aether-salt."
Jina's stomach dropped.
Aether-salt.
Aurelia's memories supplied the rest: mined from deep vein pockets, refined through soulglass filtration, used for high-grade ward work and binding stabilization. Expensive. Rare. Controlled by Diaconal doctrine because it touched "soul law."
And if she tried to run the lattice cure without it—
Jina stared at her notes again, at the crash curves.
She didn't need another trial to confirm it.
She already had.
The cold burn in her veins last night had told her the truth.
Jina set the notes down carefully, like paper could shatter.
Then she looked at the apothecary and asked, very quietly, "What happens when someone uses lattice catalyst without aether-salt."
The apothecary's face went pale. "Tissue necrosis. Seizure. Heart—" He stopped himself, throat working. "Death. Fast."
Faster than the poison.
Jina's chest tightened until she couldn't breathe for a second.
There it was.
The missing drop.
Not just a reagent—an ultimatum.
If she attempted an antidote without aether-salt, she wouldn't "fail."
She would accelerate her own execution.
Jina's fingers curled into her sleeves.
Her nails bit skin.
She forced her voice steady. "Who holds it."
The apothecary looked toward the corridor again, eyes wide.
"Diaconal vault," he whispered. "Signed out only with High Examiner authority… or Severin's seal."
Severin.
The name landed like a hook.
Jina felt the poison scrape in satisfaction, as if it loved that every answer led back to the same man.
She swallowed hard.
"Can it be purchased," she asked.
The apothecary gave a tiny, hysterical laugh that died immediately when he remembered who he was speaking to. "Not legally."
Jina nodded once.
Her mind started moving—paths, risks, options.
Steal it. Bargain for it. Force it.
All roads were ugly.
And the palace wanted her to choose the ugliest one, because ugly was easy to label and control.
Jina gathered her notes slowly, keeping her hands from shaking.
"Thank you," she said to the apothecary.
He flinched at the gratitude like it was unfamiliar. "Y-Your Highness…"
Jina paused at the table edge and added, voice low, "If anyone asks, I was here for routine inventory."
The apothecary nodded quickly, relief flooding his face.
Jina turned toward the door.
Lysander's eyes met hers from the threshold line—sharp, questioning.
Jina didn't give him everything.
Not in front of the corridor's watchers.
But she gave him enough.
Her voice stayed quiet, controlled.
"Aether-salt," she said.
Lysander's gaze tightened instantly, understanding the word as leverage.
Jina's mouth went dry.
She slipped her vial back into her sleeve seam like contraband, like a confession, like a deadline ticking against her skin.
Because now she knew the truth in clean, clinical terms:
The "antidote" was not a cure yet.
It was a weapon with a missing safety.
And without the stabilizer, it would kill her faster than the poison ever could.
[Deadline]