There was a pause. Cora realised they were expected to say something. “But that’s no problem, right? You’re a genius, and you do magic. The sea is magic. That’s fine.” Marie had crossed the line from hope into delusion.
“I’m…I’m an alchemist. A cheap one, at that. I make sleeping draughts and tinctures. The greatest minds of our generation have gone mad or died trying to get a glimpse of the Sea.” The investigation was over.

“Tosh.” Marie used upper-class slang when it suited her. “Don’t pretend those window-displays are all you make. You couldn’t afford university, that doesn’t make you stupid. You’re brilliant. If anyone can fight the Sea, it’s you.” There wasn’t a hint of mockery in Marie’s voice. There was something far worse; trust. Misplaced trust. It terrified Cora.

“I can’t. I don’t even know where I’d start.”
“Please, Cora? I’ll find you books, ingredients, I’ll kill someone if I have to- won’t you at least try?” Cora stared into their lap, something prickling at the back of their throat. They wondered if they were about to cry for the first time in decades.
“Goddamnit Cora, Lily is dead! She’s lying in an unmarked grave if she’s lucky, or she’s sitting in the medical school about to be- do you even care?” Marie gripped Cora by the shoulders, her tears dripping onto their collarbone. Cora had always found descriptions of ‘broken hearts’ to be overdramatic, but in that moment theirs felt in real danger of splitting. 

“I can’t, you don’t understand, if I could I’d do-” anything for you- “but it’s not possible.” Marie sank into a chair. “I’ll try, I’ll do everything I can. But you have to know…it won’t be enough. If the Sea is trying to destroy our city, the city’s already destroyed.”

Cora knew it was impossible. Which was why they spent a sleepless night hunched over their notes, searching for a diamond in an unfathomably large haystack. All they got was a concoction that could waterproof clothes. It would have been funny, if not for Marie’s slumped form in the chair opposite.

All Cora came out with was the understanding that no one understood the sea. It was the clue between worlds, what began when the senses slipped away. It reduced the driest of academics to something bordering on poetry. Books dedicated most of their space to warnings. Stay away, it is more dangerous than you can imagine. It was inhabited, that much was known. The people who knew what it was inhabited with were in no fit state to hold a pen. 

Cora’s eyes burnt. All the ingredients they relied upon were working against them. The problem with alchemy was the inclusion of magic. Magic was stubborn. Magic would betray you. Magic would tell you to abandon an impossible task. Everything they made was useless. Most of what they made smelled vile.

Marie pushed herself to her feet, and faced Cora with the air of someone who desperately wanted to be angry. Cora pushed their work off the desk, not wanting Marie to see they had failed. “Have you been here all night?”
“It’s not possible.” Marie used her remarkable talent for not hearing things she didn’t like, and moved on with the conversation.
“I’m going to find that woman. The fortune teller.” That did not narrow it down. Drallum attracted fortune tellers. “The one on Bride’s Avenue. She ate a pigeon, remember?” Cora was glad that they were getting information from reliable sources.

“I know of her.” The pigeon thing had been the talk of the whole street, for a month in which not much happened. Cora felt a sharp pang of longing for a month in which not much happened.
“She’ll know something,” said Marie with beautiful, foolish hope.

Cora let the flame die and poured the concoction down the sink. It wasn’t going to work, and their head was spinning. They weren’t convinced the Sea existed, let alone that it went around killing prostitutes. They had a working theory that it was a name people gave to the terrifying randomness of magic. They weren’t planning on sharing that theory with Marie. They sat staring at the wall. Abandoning the task felt like betrayal. Instead, they did nothing. 

Marie came in without knocking. On her trip, she had accumulated a pink scarf and some miscellaneous shiny things. “Sixpence, for a madwoman to rant about the future! Daylight robbery.” At a less fraught moment, Cora would have commented on the provenance of the shiny things, if Marie was so up in arms over theft. “It was nonsense. All ranting about mist and mirrors. A cheap ghost-story for a jacked-up price.” Marie’s flippant tone didn’t hide her disappointment. “Oh, and doves. She would not shut up about doves.” Her words set off something buried in a corner of Cora’s mine. A child’s nursery rhyme. A madwoman eating a pigeon raw. The scribbled diaries of a scientist. Feathers. Doves. 

They pulled on a coat and left without saying goodbye. Giving words to their fledgling idea would crush it. They knew where they were going. Regulating the city’s commerce was a mammoth and punishing task. Centuries of successive governments had either ignored it or ignored it while skimming off the top. Anything could be bought in the city if you knew where to look. Cora knew where to look, namely in a cramped little gin-palace.

The place was years of human misery condensed into one sticky-floored building. It heaved with people at all hours of the day, and hadn’t been cleaned since it opened. Cora stepped over the puddles of vomit to find the man they were looking for, slumped in a corner. He had shown up to the place a year ago and never left. He was dressed in nobleman’s finery, torn and filthy. He carried a sack and spoke with the traces of a public school education in his accent. 

Pigeons were a bottle of gin, doves were two bottles and sixpence. Extra for a fresh corpse. He was probably overcharging, but Cora had no desire to haggle. They slammed down the bottle and coins, waking the man up. He reached into the bag and passed them a bloodied cloth. Cora held it out the way; there was no telling what people desperate enough to frequent this establishment might steal.

“What you using that for?” Of course this was the time he chose to be chatty. Cursing their luck, Cora decided that walking away would raise eyebrows.
“Sleeping potion. New recipe.” That pacified him, and he turned his attention to the gin bottle. Cora had never been more grateful to take deep gulps of polluted city air. They walked home with the dove in their inside pocket. Its wings, splayed at unnatural angles, pressed into their chest.

Alchemists could not afford to be squeamish. Cora laid the sad little body on their desk, and whispered a prayer in case someone was listening. They sterilised the scalpel and cut out its heart with a surgeon’s precision. The worst stage was over. The heart could be crushed with salt, acid, a few drops of bottled moonlight. They mixed it all with a very concentrated liquor. It wouldn’t taste good, but they had to be able to keep it down. They got lost enough in their craft to forget that their plan was useless at best, suicidal at worst.

They wasted some good fabric to wrap up the dove. They wasted good time walking to an overgrown garden, a favourite haunt of urchins. They buried it under a rosebush, in a quick ceremony. It had given its life for a useless plan; it deserved a moment of solemnity. 

Marie was back in the shop, rearranging things in a way that made Cora’s skin crawl.
“What did you run off for?”
“Those papers were in order.”
“No, they were in a pile on the floor.” Cora didn’t press the matter.
“I’ve-” Found something? They didn’t want to be the bringer of false hope. “Made a potion.”
“That’s good.”
“I’ll try it.” There was so much more to say, but they had never been the eloquent one. 

Many people mistakenly believed that the city was at its quietest at night. They were wrong. Cora knew that privacy should be sought in the early hours of the morning, when the drunks had passed out in the gutters but the lamplighters were still in bed. When it was dark and cold and the streets were empty. They left the warmth of their room, carrying nothing but a small, stoppered vial of liquid. They knew that if they took so much as a cab fare they would lose their nerve. They didn’t tell Marie where they were going.