The man's hands had turned black up to his wrists.
Ellis Kade pressed her palms against the rot, felt the wrongness beneath—flesh gone cold and dense, like clay left too long in winter. The decay had spread deeper than she'd expected. Another week and the grief would eat through bone.
"Hold still." Ellis tightened her grip as the man flinched. The brownstone's late afternoon light cut sharp angles across the treatment room, illuminating every crack in the hardwood, every water stain on the ceiling plaster. Ellis had stopped seeing these flaws years ago. Now they stood out like accusations.
The man—Richard Voss, forty-seven, divorced eighteen months—watched her with the desperate hunger Ellis had learned to ignore. They all looked at her that way. As if she could save more than just their rotting skin.
"Will it hurt?" Richard's voice cracked.
"You won't feel anything." Ellis pulled the grief into herself, and Richard's memories crashed through her like a fist through glass.
The kitchen. Boxes everywhere. His wife—ex-wife—her face twisted with something beyond anger. Beyond contempt. "You were never really here," she said. "Even when you were standing right in front of me."
The memory tasted like ash and copper. Ellis felt Richard's chest constrict, felt the desperate reaching for something already gone. The wedding ring he'd worn for twenty-three years had left a pale band of skin. He'd traced it obsessively those first weeks after signing the papers. Traced it until the grief-rot started blooming beneath his fingernails.
Their bedroom. His bedroom now. The empty space where she used to sleep gaped like a wound. He'd tried sleeping on her side once, desperate for the ghost of her warmth. Found only cold sheets.
Ellis consumed the rot in measured pulls, letting Richard's anguish fill the spaces where her own emotions should have lived. For three minutes and forty-seven seconds, she felt everything—the crushing weight of loneliness, the sick terror of starting over at middle age, the small deaths of routine shattered. Dinner for one. No one to call when the car made that strange noise. No one who remembered the name of his childhood dog.
Then Ellis released the grief into whatever void lived inside her, and felt nothing.
The rot receded from Richard's hands like oil slicking off water. Pink skin emerged, new and raw. Richard stared at his fingers, flexing them, and started crying.
Ellis stood, wiped her palms on her slacks. "Maya will process your payment on the way out."
"Thank you." Richard looked up at her with naked gratitude. "I can't tell you what this means—"
"You don't need to." Ellis moved toward the door, one hand already on the brushed nickel handle. "Take care of yourself, Richard."
She left him there, still crying, still trying to thank her. The words hit her back like rain on stone.
Maya Chen sat at the reception desk in the brownstone's converted front parlor, laptop open, black hair twisted into a bun that had started listing to one side. She glanced up as Ellis emerged from the treatment room, dark eyes tracking Ellis with the precision of someone who'd learned to read silence.
"That's the last one for today." Maya saved whatever document she'd been working on. "You have tomorrow afternoon blocked for paperwork, then three sessions on Wednesday."
Ellis nodded, already moving toward the stairs that led to her private quarters on the second floor.
"Ellis." Maya's voice carried a weight that made Ellis stop, though she didn't turn around. "When's the last time you went out? Saw friends? Had fun?"
"I went to the grocery store yesterday."
"That doesn't count."
"Then I don't have an answer." Ellis resumed climbing the stairs. The wood creaked under her weight—forty-seventh step always groaned like a dying animal. She'd meant to fix it for three years.
"You can't keep living like this." Maya's voice followed Ellis up the stairwell. "This work already takes enough from you. You don't have to give it everything."
Ellis reached the second-floor landing and finally looked back. Maya stood at the base of the stairs, face tilted up, expression caught between concern and frustration. She'd been a client once, six years ago. Grief-rot from her brother's suicide had eaten through her left arm down to the muscle. Now she managed Ellis's calendar, answered phones, processed payments, and occasionally tried to save Ellis from herself.
"I'm fine, Maya."
"You're not even close to fine." Maya crossed her arms. "You're disappearing. You know that, right? Every session, you get a little more distant. A little more—" She gestured vaguely. "—not here."
"I'm standing right in front of you."
"No, you're not."
The words landed with unexpected precision. Ellis felt them ricochet off the numbness, finding nowhere to stick. She wanted to argue, wanted to feel defensive or angry or something. The wanting itself was the closest she could get.
"I have work to do." Ellis turned away.
"Ellis—"
The bathroom door closed between them, cutting off whatever Maya had been about to say. Ellis flicked on the light—harsh fluorescent that turned everything slightly green—and stared at her reflection.
Thirty-two years old. She looked forty. Gray threads wove through her dark brown hair, more this month than last. The skin beneath her eyes had gone thin and bruised, like overripe fruit. Her face had developed sharp angles where softness used to live. Even her posture had changed—shoulders perpetually curved inward, as if protecting something vital that had already been carved out.
Ellis tried to remember the last time she'd felt truly alive. Not just going through motions, not just performing the actions of existence, but actually feeling the weight and texture of being human.
The memory wouldn't come.
Fifteen years. Fifteen years since her mother's death, since the grief-rot had spread so fast the cleansers couldn't keep up with it. Fifteen years since Ellis had discovered she could do what they couldn't—consume the deepest grief, the kind that killed. She'd saved four people that first month. By the end of the year, she'd built a practice. By year three, she'd perfected the distance required to survive the work.
Now she had nothing else.
Ellis gripped the sink's porcelain edge, knuckles whitening. She wanted to feel something about that realization—sadness, regret, even resignation. The wanting echoed in an empty room.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, violent and insistent. Ellis pulled it out, saw "Mercy General Hospital" on the screen, and answered.
"Ellis Kade."
"Ellis, thank God." Dr. Yara Simmons' voice came through tight with urgency. "I need you at Mercy now. We have a critical case—grief-rot, most severe I've seen in twenty years. He's dying, Ellis. We've tried three other cleansers. None of them could even touch it."
Ellis's reflection stared back at her, hollow-eyed and waiting. "What happened to him?"
"I'll brief you when you get here. How fast can you move?"
"Twenty minutes."
"Make it fifteen." Yara's breath came sharp over the line. "Ellis, this one's bad. Really bad. I'm not sure even you can—" She stopped. "Just get here. Please."
The call ended. Ellis stood in the green-tinged bathroom light, phone still pressed to her ear, staring at the stranger in the mirror.
Somewhere in the city, someone was dying from grief so massive it had become lethal. Somewhere, a person's pain had grown teeth and started eating them alive from the inside out.
Ellis felt nothing about this. Not fear, not curiosity, not even professional interest.
But she grabbed her jacket anyway and headed for the door.