The good doctor - a superficially friendly moniker, nothing more - stood outside in the forty-degree degree sun, the sidewalk and asphalt blasting her with the reflected heat like some kind of Pythagorean superweapon. The only relief was that she was wearing her usual white coat, which bounced most of the sunlight. Her little shoulder bag, where all her metal tools were, was beginning to collect a lot of heat. At least this time, she didn't have to bring any of her temperature-sensitive serums.

The large silver truck that crested over the hill and came towards the isolated gas station almost dazzled her with the light reflecting off its paint. She shielded her eyes and took a step back from the road, waiting for the metallic monster to deliver her quarry. The fumes it chugged out instantly reminded her of the lumber mill near where she had grown up, almost making her cough up what she felt was a grimy layer in the back of her throat. Out here, thousands of kilometres from the closest colony, was probably the only place left for those kinds of engines, simple and cheap and reliable. She just wished she didn’t need to breathe the discharge in.

The rumbling beast parked with irs cabin right in front of her, and the driver leaned out through the open window. He was a heavyset man absolutely bursting with musculature, his face accented by a beard and mop of hair that was right ginger. His large aviators blotted out his eyes, but she could see he wanted to be done with this as much as she did. “Need help?” he asked in a thick accent.

“Do I know you?”

“You think all leprechauns look the same, huh?”

“I…you know what, I’ll need some help. Any medical experience?”

“Helped me mum deliver a lot of lambs. That count?”

“That’ll do I guess.” She held out a pair of nitrile gloves through the window, just hoping they wouldn’t explode from the sheer size of his hands, and walked around to the back of the hitched trailer flinching as she put her hands on the metal latches and forced them apart. The door swung open, and the intense smell of old, yellowed beef tallow hit her in the face.

It was a meat truck. Dozens of half-cow masses hung from hooks from the rails near the ceiling, accompanied by a single bundle of a skinny blonde man wrapped tightly from the torso down in heavy duty plastic, his head hanging limply. The cold refrigeration of the interior washed over her, making her sigh.

The doctor unzipped her bag, allowing the folds inside to unfurl into several panels of instruments, and also removed a bottle of medical-grade alcohol spray and a small folded letter from inside. She pulled on her gloves, stepped up to the bound man, and slapped at his cheeks. Hard.

The young man jolted awake, struggling for a moment and gasping for air, until his eyes focused on her. He was completely disoriented, and as she immediately started looking at his one black eye.

“Henry Dodgson?”

In his stupor, the young man nodded on autopilot.

She unfolded the letter. “You can call me K. Confirm for me this is what you wrote: ‘Dear Lachlan, I have been trying for months to crack a particular vault underneath the Bankside Foundry Trust building on the second-lowest level of Alator, where the Marshal’s miners are quartered. From my cumulative observations over the past year, I have determined that a significant amount of otherwise unremarkable ore has been moved into the building, and has yet to be removed for disposal. This puzzled me until in June, the facility was visited by what I believed was a representative of MobiusCorp, based on their attire. I have attached photos…’ blah blah blah. So fucking formal.”

By this time the young man had come to his senses. “Oh, thanks. Where…where the hell am I? Why does it smell like wagyu?”

“Relax, you’re still on the same planet.” K stepped aside to show him the desert outside the trailer, and the absolutely jacked leprechaun staring at him. “The way I see it, this guy-”

“H,” the leprechaun said in a much lower tone than what he had used earlier.

“Yeah, see H here can either drive you back to Alator, or he can leave you in the middle of the desert with no water and no compass. Your choice whether to answer my questions.”

Dodgson smiled. “You’ll get nothing from me.”

“It’s not about what I get,” she said. “It’s about whether Mr. Lachlan is satisfied with your answers.”

The thief’s eyes widened. “Bullshit,” he spat.

“I have a copy of your letter right here.” She waved the piece of paper around. “Oh, and I don’t need to believe you. I can physically see your vitals spiking, so lying is your worst option. Do we have an understanding?”

Dodgson swallowed, and then nodded wordlessly.

She went back to the piece of paper. “‘From my investigations I have determined that the vault is guarded by a full-time specialist battlemage and secured by a Tartarus-style Escher lock, suggesting even more value to the items contained within. Do you have any suggestions as to how to bypass this level of security?’ Oh look, you even signed as…’The Penny Pincher’. Cute.”

“Look, the heist went bust okay? The guy betrayed me!”

“We gave you the means to kill a battlemage,” K said. “A cursed cylinder. Where is it?”

“It was…lost in the scuffle! He was trying to use it on me!”

K stared at him for a moment, her eyes catching the precise beating of his heart, the slightest darting of his eyes, the sweat on his forehead. She nodded at H.

The big leprechaun slapped Dodgson across the face, even harder than she had.

“Lies. The Marshal’s team never found it. Where is it?” K repeated.

“Okay, okay?” He flinched away in anticipation of H making a full fist. “I sold it, okay! To some guy with a cello! He said he was A…Aer…Aeterna Symphonia!”

“And the decoder?”

“My partner took it? I can tell you where he lives.”

“Probably moved already. Name?”

Dodgson opened his mouth, but he made a choking sound. He tried again, and again, with the same result.

H cracked his knuckles.

“Wait, wait! His name is-” He was cut off by another choking motion made my his own tongue.

K sprayed down a thin metal rod, tiny runes etched into its surface, and swabbed Dodgson’s tongue with it when he next opened his mouth. The metal turns iridescent at the tip. “Word suppression spell. How’d you meet this guy?”

“I mean, he was my neighbour. Just moved in or something.”

K used most of her willpower to not slap him herself, clenching her fist around the magical dowser instead. “You realise he probably targeted you.”

“Well now yeah! He just seemed so nice! Like I just wanted to keep talking to…” His eyes glazed over as his thoughts seemed to drift off completely…until H grabbed his throat and snapped him right back.

“Probably some kind of yokai,” K said, rubbing her temples. “You really fucked this up you know?”

“I can…I can help you find him! I think I can still describe him.”

“If it was a fox-thing it’s probably shapeshifted. But luckily for you, we did have a backup plan.” K turned to H. “Hold his mouth open.”

“Wha-” His speech turned into throaty screams of protests as H forced his teeth apart as far as they would safely go.

K took her time spraying down the heavy duty tweezers and thin scalpel, slotting in a sterile blade for the latter. “This is only gonna hurt for a couple uh, days or so.”

Tears were flowing from Dodgson’s eyes now, and he squeezed them shut. K leaned down to look in his open mouth, instantly spotted the correct molar in the back left side of his mouth. He hovered her tweezers over it, an with the scalpel blade, slowly pushed into his guns at the base. The man’s tongue writhed in pain but she kept going, watching the that one tooth suddenly begin to shimmy out of the way, forcing her to push the blade deeper, and- 

With an inhuman noise, the molar uprooted itself, pulling its white tendril legs out of the gums, spurting blood into his mouth. K lodged the crown of the “tooth” in her tweezers, removing it entirely out of his mouth in all of its screeching, writhing glory.

“What the fuck is that!?” Dodgson exclaimed as soon as H let go of his face. “What the fu-”

He slapped him back into a dazed silence, making him spit blood onto the floor of the trailer.

K dropped it into a little sample tube with a screw lid, and popped it into her case of tools. “When you got the reply mail, we gave a tooth faery follow you. This little fellow going to tell us everything you said to your ‘friend’.”

“Tooth fairies exist?”

“Yes and if you speak a word of this to anybody, they've larger cousins in the form of bone faeries. We found you hiding, we’ll find you again. Doesn't need to be on this planet.”

“I won’t!”

“One last question. What was in the vault?” 

The panic was stripped from Dodgson’s face as he furrowed his brow. “It wasn’t ore. I mean it was mineral, but…” His mouth was filling with blood, but he just let it fall from his lips. “It was moving. Like a lump of meat. Like when you skin a rabbit and it’s still moving.”

“Spit.” K prepared another tool that had a bright light at the end.

Dodgson spat the blood out and opened his mouth. She sutured the wound made by her scalpel and the exit if the tooth mite closed, the smell of cooked blood and special adhesive filling the air. He winced but said nothing.

“You did well today,” K said. “No desert trek for you.”

“T-Thank you,” he stammered.

They closed the trailer back up after K disinfected all her tools, and she leaned against the doors, remaining in the shadow the vehicle cast. “How did I do?”

H shrugged, ripping off his gloves. “Hard to say. The last one had a lot of legs and saws. You I can understand, at least.”

“Urgh. So you gonna keep an eye on him after we let him go?”

H nodded. “For a bit. Maybe he runs into his friend again.”

“You could take it out early. Magic doesn't affect pure Fae like you. I just got…” She gestured at her eyes, which she knew shone an otherworldly golden from the pupils. “Really messes up my spellcasting.”

“What did he mean about the minerals? They’re alive?”

“I…there’s a story I heard. Have you ever heard about the Empress’ children?”

“Didn’t know she had kids.”

“Apparently she does but they’re not human. Each one is assigned to a core world to protect it. Some people know about the one on Palix Four, but nobody ever found anything here.” She kicked around in the sand. “Maybe there’s a protector in the earth here.”

“What about it?”

She shook her head. “Seems like something we should leave alone. I’m sure the Marshall knows what he’s doing. Beats me about the MobiusCorp guy but it’s not really our problem.”

“I’m Harry, by the way,” H said, holding out a hand. “Welcome to the team.”

She stripped off her gloves too, and shook it. “Karina. Guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

“Only on Alator.” He climbed back into the driver’s seat.

Karina watched as the metal beast started back up, and made a turn on the barely existent road, heading back towards the faint walled city on the horizon. She watched until it crossed over a hill and vanished out of sight except for the smog that went high into the air. She looked down at the sand beneath her boots one more time, imagining an unfathomable leviathan sleeping far, far below, indistinguishable from the rock around it. Then she turned and headed back for the station.