Dr.Cahn Unfiltered.

It was one of those crisp London mornings where the fog hung over Harley Street like a damp wool blanket, but inside the Royal Neuroscience Center, the climate was controlled entirely by the force of my Aunt’s will.

Dr. Victoria Cahn—spelled with a C, mind you, and never, on pain of death, mistaken for the common-or-garden Khan—did not so much walk down a corridor as inspect it for lingering insubordination. To the uninitiated, she was the undisputed titan of British psychiatry, a woman whose mere glance across a mahogany desk could cure a man of chronic fidgeting or induce a sudden, overwhelming urge to confess to crimes he hadn’t even thought of committing yet.

To me, however, she was simply Aunt Victoria. And being the niece to a female Glossop is a bit like being a field mouse residing in the same hedge as a particularly thoughtful hawk.

“You’re staring,” she observed, not looking up from a file that doubtless contained the fragile psychological remnants of a cabinet minister.

“Just admiring the efficiency, Aunt Victoria,” I said, adjusting my lapels and trying to look like the sort of young intern who had a firm grip on her life’s trajectory.

“If you applied half as much effort to your clinical rotations as you do to admiring things,” she said, her voice dropping into that smooth, low, hypnotherapeutic register that usually preceded a complete overhaul of one’s subconscious, “you might one day distinguish between a mild neurosis and a total absence of backbone. How is that friend of yours? The one with the unpronounceable name?”

“Siddaramaiah Bellad?” I offered. “Known to the medical brotherhood as Sid.”

“A light-minded boy,” she pronounced, dipping her pen in ink with the precision of a surgeon making an incision. “I hear he and that little wife of his—the one who insists on being called Sarah, as if ‘Saraswathi’ were a species of tropical plant—have secured internships with Sir Roderick Glossop.”

“They have indeed,” I said. “Sid’s quite chuffed about it.”

Aunt Victoria paused, her over-the-glasses stare pinning me to the carpet like a rare beetle.

“Roderick Glossop,” she mused softly, “is a man who believes every third person he meets belongs in a padded cell, and he is usually right about the third person. But his methods lack… finesse. He browbeats the subconscious. I prefer to invite it to surrender.” She closed the file with a soft, decisive thud. “Tell your friend Sid that if Glossop decides he is an alienist’s nightmare and tries to have him certified, I shall not step in to save him. It would establish a dangerous precedent for family influence.”

At that moment, Uncle Ananthapadmanabha—who went by Anthony around the Center purely to save the nursing staff from collective linguistic paralysis—peeked his head into the office. Uncle Anthony was a gentle soul whose primary role in life appeared to be acting as the shock absorber between Aunt Victoria and the rest of humanity.

“Victoria, my dear,” Anthony ventured, casting a brief, sympathetic look in my direction. “The board is ready for the presentation on sub-cortical suggestion.”

“I am aware, Anthony,” she said, rising with the formidable grace of a battlecruiser slipping its moorings. “And do try to keep your shoulders straight today. You look as though you’re carrying the weight of the Commonwealth.”

“Yes, my dragon—er, my dear,” Anthony murmured submissively, stepping back to let her pass.

As she swept past me into the corridor, Aunt Victoria halted for a fraction of a second. “And niece?”

“Yes, Aunt Victoria?”

“If I catch you sliding down the banisters of the south wing again, I shall perform a brief age-regression session on you, and you will spend the rest of the term believing you are seven years old and deeply afraid of porridge. Am I understood?”

“Crystal, Aunt Victoria.”

“Good,” she said, and marched off to subjugate the board.

I looked at Uncle Anthony. Uncle Anthony looked at me. We both let out a quiet, synchronized breath of survival, and I mentally resolved to send a telegram to Sid Bellad at Glossop’s clinic, warning him that whatever horrors Sir Roderick was throwing at him, he was still, strictly speaking, the luckier intern.