Beneath the harbor silt

At midnight in Saint Jude's Charity Dead-House, Cassian Locke boils bones for five shillings a skeleton and keeps a three-legged stray terrier warm beside the furnace. When two watchmen slide a waterlogged bell diver down the coal-chute with ten silver shillings to burn the body before dawn, Cassian cuts the chest open and finds a silver-black organ still pulling steel sideways across the zinc table.

Keeping the specimen alive takes brine, fresh blood, and a cold hammered silver collar. Before sunrise, every dockside fixer and Ward Four surgeon in Rook-Water is looking for what washed up from the trench.