On Friday, while Augustine dealt with patients upstairs, Esme spent a whole afternoon sorting through the keepers’ archives. In the damp, dingy basement of Augustine’s clinic, dozens of cabinets housed case files dating back hundreds of years. Esme’s job was to dispose of all the documents too damaged to decipher, while reorganising the rest into some semblance of order.
She started with the drawers pertaining to Thomas Agapios. Inside, she found reams of parchment detailing Gifts gone wrong and experimental cures for all sorts of ailments. For over an hour, she organised the papers by year and alphabetical order, then stopped short.
One file, which bore the name ‘Solister Greaves’, was completely empty.
There was no year on the folder, nor any other identifying information—just that na
