Wyndham's Apothecary wasn't what I expected an apothecary would be. It was a cinderblock building that was three storeys high and the second storey had a stained gss window of red, yellow and blue colors, depicting angels rescuing a bunch of wretched humans from a fire of some kind. Hopper led me into an alley next to it.

  “Was it the Voice that also told you about the Wyndhams?” I asked.

  “Actually no,” he said. “It was my own investigation that led me to the Wyndhams.”

  “Investigation?” I said as we came to the back of the building.

  “About the green blood theory, the knife test and what was the connection between people who were executed for ‘being cursed’.”

  The alley behind the building was fairly cluttered with crates full of dark tinted bottles and broken ceramic basins and rge cylinders with pipes that pumped something inside the buildings.

  I paused for a second as I looked up at the building. “That reminds me, you still haven't told me who you really are,” I said. “And what you did to the real Hopper.”

  Hopper gave a thoughtful frown.

  “You've already told me enough,” I said. “What's wrong with telling me your name?”

  “I'm just wondering which name I should tell you,” he said. “They call me a lot of things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Criminal. Menace. Threat to Society. Spawn of Hell. Destroyer of Morals. Viotor of Justice.” He shrugged.

  “How about something that your friends might call you,” I said.

  “I don't remember,” he said.

  I gave him an exasperated look that I would've given a highschool edgelord who carved sad poetry on cssroom desks. “You don't remember what your friends used to call you?”

  “I don't remember if I ever had friends,” he said. “It's been a long time since I stayed in one pce long enough to make friends. Too long.”

  My look didn't change. “Dude, are you gonna tell me what your name is or–?”

  “Let's just stick with Hopper for now,” he said.

  I sighed and looked up at the building. “So, what were you pnning on doing here?” I said.

  “Steal some documents,” Hopper said. “Any kind of documents that can be used as evidence to prove Wyndhams’ hand in the green blood theory.”

  “Didn't your investigation on the matter give you any evidence?” I asked.

  “My investigation only gave me theories. Those theories are what led me here. But the whole truth must be hidden behind these walls.” He looked at the Apothecary building intently.

  “And how do you pn on getting past these walls?” I asked.

  “Oh, simple.” He fished a pistol out of his coat pocket. It was the same one he had used to blow up the prison gate.

  “Woah, woah, okay, easy there.” I waved my hands anxiously. “I think it's better to be a bit more sneaky.” I dug into my satchel and pulled out one of the bottles filled with the dark matter.

  I pulled off the lid and as if a genie was summoned, a woman's shape materialized out of the bck mist. “Is it time to do my job, master?” she said.

  “Yes, we are looking for–” I turned to Hopper and asked him what we were actually looking for.

  “Just tell her to find the keys to a filing cabinet,” Hopper said.

  “That's just vague,” I said. “How is she supposed to know which cabinet you are talking to?”

  “This is an apothecary not the town Council. How difficult would it be to find a file cabinet?”

  I groaned. If I told the Abyss to find something like the keys to a particur cabinet, she might bring the wrong keys or maybe just not find the keys at all. I was still figuring out how to command these things. And the danger here was too big to test to see if I could get them to do a complicated job just yet. I looked at the Abyss who was still hovering in front of me, her eyes were patient. “Change of pns,” I said, “Just go through this wall and unlock this door from the inside.” I pointed at the back door in front of us.

  “Yes, master.” The abyss nodded and made her way through the wall in the back of the building like a ghost.

  And in a few minutes, we heard a click of a lock turning. The back door swung open.

  I gave a mental command to the Abyss that her job was done. Then I liberated her as we walked inside.

  The back of the apothecary was some kind of storage room. There was a musty smell of unopened cardboard boxes that sat on multiple rows of metal shelves. There were more shelves by the opposite wall, filled with bottles and containers full of chemicals and whatever else these people needed to make their medicine.

  We walked towards the door at the opposite side of the room and out into a dimly lit hallway. Small pipelines ran back and forth overhead, humming monotonously as they carried whatever it is they were carrying through their veins. There were two doors at the end of the hallway.

  One led out to the business end of the building where the workers were probably attending to their customers. Another opened on a stairway leading upstairs. We went through the tter door.

  We climbed the metal staircase to the second floor and peered through the keyhole of the door at the top. Of course, I didn't get to see everything that was inside but I did see people moving back and forth.

  “There might be at least ten of them,” I said.

  Hopper nodded and set his hold-all on the floor and dug into it. He pulled out some kind of syringe and a vial. He loaded the cylinder of the syringe with a crimson red liquid. And handed it to me. “Hold this for a second, please.”

  I obliged. He took off his coat and id it down by the door, covering the crack below it with the cloth and making sure he didn't leave any visible space. Then he took the syringe from me and pushed the needle through the keyhole in the door. He pressed down on the plunger, emptying the red liquid onto the other side of the door.

  Then he put the syringe away and grabbed onto the door handle tightly and started muttering something under his breath. A few seconds passed and I heard something from the other side. Coughing.

  And it sounded like a lot of people were coughing at once. The door tch started to rattle as if someone was frantically trying to unlock it. Hopper held onto the tch, restricting any and all movement.

  “Hey, open the door! Open the damn door!” the man on the other side rapped at the door, coughing helplessly.

  Hopper didn't let it distract him from his muttering. It took me a moment to notice that he was actually counting seconds.

  The coughing and the sounds of struggle to get out got louder on the other side of the door. Hopper kept counting. “Five…four…three…two–”

  There was a sound of a muffled thump from the other side and then the coughing stopped. Hopper waited a few more moments before letting go of the handle and the tch. He took his coat off the floor, dusted it and put it on. Next he held the door open for me and said, “After you.”

  A little hesitantly, I walked in, only to find that the room was some kind of b. On one end was a long desk where two people must've sat and put all the bottles of medicines in their respective boxes. The rest of the room was where they produced the said medicine at the desks where all the burners and fsks and pipettes and all the other science equipment was set up.

  But there was one more thing--all of these people were now unconscious. And there was a hint of a thin red haze in the air.

  “Extract of the somnia pnt root. It evaporates rapidly when exposed to the air,” he said. “And its effect…well you can see it for yourself.” He waved his hand over the unconscious people as we made our way through the b and onto the door on the other side of the room.

  Past the door was another stairway that led us up to another corridor. And at the end of this corridor was another door. It was locked so I had to use the dismantling ritual to open it.

  We walked inside. Hopper didn't waste any time and got right down to ransacking the pce. He went through the drawers in the desk across the room and through the files and notebooks that were on top of it.

  I was about to join him when a map on the wall grabbed my attention. Copperwall province. The very province in which we lived. Certain cities on the map were marked with a ‘W’. It didn't take a Sherlock to figure out the W stood for Wyndham.

  “Do the Wyndham's own any other business?” I asked Hopper as I scanned the map.

  “As far as I know they have been running this apothecary for generations,” he said.

  “How many generations?”

  “At least the past three ones,” he said.

  “Business must be good since they are…opening franchises across Copperwall,” I said as I kept looking at the map.

  “Oh, their business has been magnificent,” he said.

  I searched through Elsa's memories, trying to remember if there was any other business that had a chain of offices and manufacturing lines across the country. But I couldn't find anything. Also not to mention, the Wyndhams only ran an apothecary. This wasn't a proper pharmaceutical company from my world. And corporate companies were probably a century away in the future of Ravenwind, if they were going to be a thing at all.

  But it seemed like the Wyndhams had already put together the bare-bones of capitalism in this world. To open franchises they needed some investment to mass produce and move their product across several vendors so they could reach new buyers.

  So they probably had agreements with other apothecaries in the neighboring cities. The question was, what kind of product were they selling to get multiple businesses on board?

  It certainly had to be something very much in demand to convince other businesses and potential customers to want to buy the product. I looked at Hopper. “Under the bridge you said that Hammer's father is working with the Wyndhams. What does Hammer's family actually do?”

  “They run a fertilizer business,” he said.

  Then the door at the end of the hallway outside was thrown open and there was a sound of storming footsteps. The Wyndhams had discovered the intruders.

  Sharp102