Repeatedly stabbing kittens is a job that would make anyone ask for vacations or some sick days after only a few hours. It’s messy, smelly, morally questionable —children in poor countries could eat those kitties— and scares the ladies away, which, to be fair, can be seen as an upside when one wants to be alone and the entourage of fans oneself has cultivated through carefully being awesome to the extreme becomes a tad too asphyxiating. Not that I would know.

  And another thing was how they screamed and hissed. After the first jab of the scalpel, the survivor knew what would come. The luckiest kittens were probably the ones who got handled by me— and therefore were transferred to under heaven’s jurisdiction— because Hoffal would cut them up and then heal the wound in mere seconds, intending for me to learn through osmosis or something. “Observe carefully how I do it and try to do it yourself. You have to close the wound from the inside out. Visualize each tissue healing.”

  “Yes, the problem is that I cannot fathom how most of these tissues look. Do you imagine the cellular types they include to their tiniest detail whenever you close a wound?”

  He regarded me with a tilted head, like one would an alien or a cryptid. “I will be the first to admit I am not versed in the pedagogic arts. I am a mere medic. But raise your concerns with respect as you just did, my pupil, and we may reach precious understanding.”

  “How often do they have you training new healers?”

  “People don’t get into the Retrievers to heal. People who last in the Retrievers, at least. I was tasked to kill a rookie not long ago…” He began mumbling something unintelligible. This wasn’t the kind of man that minded killing. He was the kind that minded being told who to kill.

  “Nerines? He was part of my team. Thanks for leaving his wallet unattended.” I grabbed the bloodied scalpel and held the poor creature pressed against the smeared table. “Do I stab this one too?”

  He hummed, gauging my reaction to the death of my coworker, I think. “Maybe we could try another approach. You are making no reasonable progress.”

  The cat mewled meekly and I released a bit of the pressure. “please, the smell of cat guts almost makes me throw up. I have no quarrel with the murder of innocent creatures, but they could be full of cuter things, Hoffal.”

  “Vertebrates are messy and stinky, but your comment about tissues made me think about starting with a simpler model. Aquatic invertebrates would be ideal, but medusas and free-living flatworms present other challenges regarding their handling.” He scratched his angled chin. The chin of a supervillain, some would say. “Well, nobody says we should heal animals to start with. You are dismissed for today, I will figure out a training regime using plants and get my hands on some textbooks about vegetal histology. “ he fiddled with his long fingers an awful lot, as if his hands weren’t stained with the proof of the abundant animal cruelty we had just engaged in. “Do you like empanadas?” He asked all of a sudden, his expression radically changed. He was trying to seem friendly, and it turned my spine into a shiver highway.

  “Not made with cat, no,” I let the kitten free to crawl away, pained and deformed as it was, and disposed of my gloves on the plastic trashcan conveniently situated in a corner of the room. So small, so weak, so trashy. I wouldn’t want to be her. “Beef , though? Count me in. Or them in me.”

  “Picky eater, like a child ought to be. It’s all in the spices, fellow Retriever. If you let the cat meat simmer in its own juices, with a little bit of oregano, garlic, a smidge of parsley, and a deft dash of thyme… And copious amounts of onion, I should add…” His raised index trembled as he spoke. “…you can do some culinary magic, and it requires torturing no soul at all.”

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “I wonder now, professor: is your sacromotor’s base made out of cats? You sound like you did this many times before.”

  “I have run over felines in the field before, and it was a shame for the fresh meat to go to waste. Wild or domestic, cat is cat once it is in the pot. As for my sacromotor’s base: I am a reformed gang member. Healer from the start, but without a formal education until the Retrievers showed me the way. Books on anatomy and histology proved invaluable early on, but without a teacher to guide me, I could only get so far.” He stared at his gloved hands like they were some tool, something alien to his body and yet dear to him. “That’s why even if you don’t intend to follow this noble path, I want to pass on a bit of my art to you. Were it my prerogative, every child under the dome and beyond would get healing magic classes, at least some theory for the ones who cannot consolidate a sacromotor.” He shot me an unreadable glance. “What is yours made of, pupil? Your base.”

  “I raised eleven crows, I killed eleven crows. No. I lie. I raised a few more but they died before my graduation.” I disembarrassed myself form the disposable gown and honored said adjective. “Am I dismissed?”

  “Yes, yes.” He threw his hands in the air with a dramatic flair. “I have to get somebody to clean this place and wash myself. Patients don’t like the smelly doctors. And it’s ironic, but as a Retriever is not my job to beat those people into compliance. The job of you grunts sounds like vacations. Have they assigned you any yet? A mission off the repressive sort?”

  “No. I am not exactly excited to beat some innocents up. It’s miserable. My arms will hurt afterwards. I’ll garner the hate of families that I haven’t even properly slighted.” My complaints continued a I sidestepped an overstabbed, tumorized kitten corpse. “I like bothering people, Hoffal, not bashing their skulls in. The fun comes to an abrupt end when you bash their skull in.”

  The doctor was checking his uniform for new stains as he fiddled with his keyring to unlock the door and set me finally free. “Quite the peculiar young man, you are. You don’t mind killing animals nor people, seemingly. You mind it being a messy business. The higher ups will love and hate you in equal parts: you have a bright future in this organization.”

  “I just want to be able to keep a comfortable lifestyle with the minimal effort spent, man. My sacromotor is focused on eluding problems rather than solving them. Removing the ‘my’ part from the equation. Life on easy mode is all I wish for, and all I have had so far.”

  “Quite the peculiar young man.” He repeated, releasing us from confinement. “Any more classes today?”

  “No. Just office work. Simple, repetitive, and effortless paper pushing.”

  I stared at a little blood stain that had found its way to the sleeve of my uniform. I called for the triplets to feed modules different from the ones that they had been feeding so far. Three crows of energy for three crows who cawed lies. A misfire in the hospital could spell trouble, but it was a bit of practice I couldn’t miss. I had invested heavily into illusion because it was a sort of get out of jail free card. Offensive magic often created more troubles when you used it to solve one. Kill a man, become enemy of his fans. Burn your own house down, the Home Owners Association hunts you down. Not like I was in good terms with most of them, as having a Saon Ladius anywhere near your property gradually incurred a descent of said property’s market value: I am a walking anti-gentrification measure. Furthermore, burn your house down the wrong way, and the guild of pyromancers will come knocking at the ashes of your door and tell you you are insulting their sacred art.

  Illusions could be subtle; illusionists knew how to remain silent and not mess with their peers. Honor existed among liars, and if someone went goofing around with illusions, well, at best he would force others to make theirs more convincing so they could be used undetected in public. Other arts were harder to make work without people noticing.

  And willing the stain to become blue I eventually managed to hide it under a flickering cape of illusion. I moved and it stayed in their place in space. Fixing it to move alongside my clothes would be a challenge I was happy to undertake, so I sat on a nearby plastic chair, one of those that use the waiting rooms as their grazing grounds, and kept trying and trying. Generate the energy, pump it carefully into the modules, ignore the gnome on my shoulder born of a minor misfire, fail. Rinse, repeat.

  Several minutes late for returning to work, I managed to conceal the little stain and keep it so as I walked down the halls of the hospital and towards the bathroom. I had to rinse my face and hands for real before leaving, and my odds of finding soap in that hellish place were disheartening. Eh, silver lining: I was already acquainted with the cardiology wing.