Three nurses had developed sympathy rot just from standing too close.
Ellis Kade stared at Dr. Yara Simmons across the hospital's third-floor corridor, the fluorescent lights turning everything the color of old bruises. Three AM at Mercy General meant skeleton crews and the particular silence of people trying not to die loudly.
"That's not possible." Ellis shifted her bag higher on her shoulder. The leather strap had worn a permanent groove there over the years.
"I watched it happen." Yara pulled up the sleeve of her white coat, revealing a small patch of darkness spreading across her inner forearm. No bigger than a quarter, but unmistakable. "Started about an hour ago. I've been in the room with John Doe for less than ten minutes total."
Ellis stepped closer, examining the rot without touching. The skin had gone slack and discolored, like fruit left too long in the sun. Sympathy rot. Grief so virulent it infected bystanders.
"Twenty years," Yara said. "Twenty years of counseling grief patients, I've never seen anything like this. Whatever the John Doe is carrying, it's alive."
"Grief isn't alive."
"This one is." Yara met Ellis's eyes, and Ellis saw something she'd never seen in the older woman before—fear. "You need to see him. Now."
The quarantine room sat at the end of the corridor, isolated behind double doors marked with biohazard warnings. Unnecessary for grief-rot. Usually. Ellis pushed through, and the stench hit like a wall.
Spoiled flowers. Organic decay. Something chemical underneath that made Ellis's sinuses burn. The smell coated her throat, thick and wrong.
The John Doe thrashed against the restraints, weak movements of a body eating itself. Black and purple rot had consumed most of the man's torso, creeping up his neck toward his jaw. Ellis had seen severe cases before. This exceeded them.
"Blood." The word came out garbled, wet. "Her eyes. I didn't—didn't mean—"
Ellis moved to the bedside, professional instinct overriding revulsion. The John Doe's face was still mostly clear, and Ellis registered the details: mid-thirties, dark hair matted with sweat, angular features twisted with anguish. Even half-consumed by rot, the man was striking.
"What's his status?" Ellis pulled on latex gloves, though they'd offer no real protection.
"Catatonic when they brought him in six hours ago." Yara hung back near the door. "No ID, no one's reported him missing. He's been muttering since midnight, but nothing coherent."
Ellis placed her palms against the John Doe's chest, felt the unnatural heat of accelerated decay. The rot pulsed beneath her hands like a second heartbeat.
Then Ellis pulled, and the world shattered.
A woman with red hair catching sunlight, head thrown back in laughter. The curve of her throat. The way her eyes crinkled at the corners. Joy so pure it hurt.
The memory slammed into Ellis with physical force. Real grief felt like weight, like drowning in dark water. This felt like drowning in dark water while something with teeth pulled Ellis deeper.
The same woman screaming. Not pain—terror. Pure, animal terror. Her hands raised, defensive, useless.
Ellis gasped but couldn't break contact. The grief had hooks. The grief wanted her to see.
Blood on white bathroom tile, spreading in patterns that made no sense. Too much blood. How did one person hold that much blood?
The John Doe's memories weren't fragments. They were visceral, immediate, as if Ellis lived them herself. Ellis tasted copper. Smelled iron and something floral. Felt hands—the John Doe's hands—shaking violently.
"What did I do? Oh god, what did I do?"
The voice echoed through Ellis's skull. Not a memory. Present tense. Happening now, always happening, a loop of horror feeding itself.
Then Ellis felt the presence.
Something else moved in the grief. Not a memory, not an echo. A consciousness separate from the John Doe, watching through the sorrow like a voyeur behind glass. It brushed against Ellis's awareness, and her skin went cold despite the fever-heat radiating from the John Doe's body.
Ellis pulled harder, dragging the rot into herself. The grief came in torrents, flooding the empty spaces inside Ellis where emotions used to live. But instead of dissipating like normal grief, this grief bloomed. Grew. Fed on itself and multiplied.
Ellis's veins darkened, visible through her skin—black lines spreading up her forearms like roots seeking purchase. The rot traveled through Ellis's circulatory system, seeking somewhere to anchor. Ellis's heart stuttered, adapting to the foreign substance.
"Ellis!" Yara's voice came from very far away. "Ellis, stop! You're taking too much!"
But Ellis couldn't stop. The grief had Ellis now, pulling her deeper into the John Doe's fractured psyche. The red-haired woman's face flickered through Ellis's mind—laughing, screaming, going still. The sequence repeated, faster each time, until the images blurred together.
Blood her eyes didn't mean to blood her eyes didn't mean—
Ellis tore her hands away and staggered backward, colliding with the medical cart. Instruments clattered to the floor. Ellis's hands wouldn't stop shaking. Sweat soaked through her shirt, cold against her skin.
The John Doe's eyes opened.
Green. Startling, vivid green against skin that had cleared by several shades. The rot had receded from the John Doe's torso, pulling back toward the deeper corruption near the man's heart. The John Doe stared at Ellis like Ellis had done something miraculous or unforgivable.
"Who are you?" The words came out hoarse, scraped raw.
Ellis backed toward the door, pulse hammering in her throat. "Someone trying to help."
The answer felt inadequate. Wrong. Ellis had consumed some of the John Doe's grief, but the rot remained alive inside the man, waiting to spread again. Worse—Ellis could still taste it. Sweet and bitter, coating Ellis's tongue like burnt sugar. The flavor wouldn't fade.
Yara caught Ellis's elbow as Ellis stumbled into the corridor. "You okay?"
"Fine." Ellis wasn't fine. Ellis's veins still showed dark beneath the skin, slowly fading but not gone. "How much improvement?"
Yara glanced back through the observation window. "Forty percent reduction. Maybe more. It's remarkable, but—"
"It'll come back." Ellis knew with sudden, absolute certainty. "Forty-eight hours. Maybe less."
"You'll need to return." Yara studied Ellis's face. "Multiple sessions. This kind of rot doesn't respond to single treatments."
Every professional instinct Ellis possessed screamed refusal. This case was wrong. Dangerous. The grief had awareness, had intention, had something predatory living in its center. Ellis should walk away, maintain her boundaries, protect herself from contamination.
"I'll come back." The words left Ellis's mouth before Ellis's conscious mind approved them.
Yara's expression shifted to something like relief mixed with concern. "Wednesday morning. Eight AM. I'll keep him sedated until then."
Ellis nodded and walked toward the exit, legs unsteady. Behind the quarantine room's sealed door, the John Doe watched Ellis through the observation window. Those green eyes tracked Ellis's movement with unsettling intensity.
The taste of the John Doe's grief grew stronger.
Ellis's bedroom ceiling had forty-seven water stains. Ellis had counted them hundreds of times during various bouts of insomnia. Now Ellis counted again: one through forty-seven, then backward, then starting over.
The taste wouldn't leave.
Sweet and bitter, burnt sugar and copper, floral notes underneath something chemical. The John Doe's grief sat on Ellis's tongue like a living thing, pulsing in time with Ellis's heartbeat.
Four-seventeen AM. Ellis had been home for over an hour, lying in bed fully clothed, staring at water stain number thirty-two. Sleep felt impossible. Sleep felt dangerous, like the grief might take root deeper if Ellis lowered her guard.
Ellis's hands still trembled. The veins had returned to normal color, but Ellis felt the foreign substance moving through the bloodstream—grief Ellis had consumed but not fully metabolized. The rot wanted to stay.
Ellis wanted it to stay.
The realization hit like vertigo. For the first time in years—maybe a decade—Ellis felt something. Not the distant, clinical experience of consuming clients' memories. Not the hollow going-through-motions of daily existence. Real feeling. Sharp and terrible and intoxicating.
Ellis craved more.
The craving terrified Ellis more than the presence in the grief, more than the John Doe's muttered confessions, more than the blood on white tile. Ellis had built a life around numbness, around distance, around the safety of feeling nothing. Now something had breached the walls.
Ellis rolled onto one side, pressing a palm against the empty space where emotion should live. Found the grief there instead, coiled and waiting. It tasted like the John Doe—like violence and regret and something darker underneath.
What did I do? Oh god, what did I do?
The words echoed through Ellis's memory. The red-haired woman's face flickered behind Ellis's closed eyelids—laughing, screaming, still.
Ellis opened her eyes, focused on water stain number twelve, and tried to remember why maintaining distance mattered. The reason felt less important than the craving. The craving felt less important than the taste of grief on Ellis's tongue.
Wednesday morning. Forty-eight hours.
Ellis would go back. Would touch the John Doe again. Would consume more of that alive, evolving sorrow.
Ellis wanted to. That was the terrifying part.
Outside, the city moved toward dawn. Inside, Ellis lay awake, tasting someone else's grief, and craved more of it.