In Libby’s absence, the five remaining members were offered initiation. When asked whether there would be magical consequences for not fulfilling the traditional ritual, Dalton was unflappable as usual.
“Something,” he evasively explained, “has come up.”
They had taken a week to look for Libby with no results. Parisa had been among the first to give up, as she could no longer feel or sense Libby’s thoughts and therefore did not want to know what had happened to her. Whatever it was, it was enough to effectively kill her, and that was all Parisa needed to know. If the Society had enemies who could wipe a person’s consciousness from the face of the earth, clearly it was worth it to lay claim to whatever else it had to show them.
The five remaining candidates had settled uncomfortably into the painted room for the introduction of their next subject, leaving Libby’s chair empty out of habit. Not that they sat in any particular order, but disorder was hardly preferred. Libby usually sat near Nico, on his left. Nico refused to look at the empty seat beside him, and Parisa could hear the same buzzing from his mind that she heard from everyone else’s. The acknowledgement of a missing piece, like a dismembered limb.
She wondered if it would have been the same if it was Callum’s seat that had emptied.
“This,” Dalton said, “is Viviana Absalon.”
The others tensed as he waved in a cadaver, neatly preserved, the facial expression limp and non-committal, as if death had been something she’d preferred not to do but had gone ahead with anyway. Nothing gory had been done to the body, aside from a gaping incision that had been tastefully resewn. Obviously an autopsy had been performed somewhat recently, but outside of that, in death Viviana Absalon lay as still and tranquil as if she’d fallen asleep.
Briefly, Parisa’s stomach churned with the memory of Libby’s animation; the way Libby had been broken and contorted, her eyes vacant and wide. That, unlike this, had been gruesome, Parisa’s hands sweltering with the blood her mind had refused to grasp was actually nothing. The idea that it was all magic, none of it real, had unnerved her deeply, reminding her what was at stake in the world.
Mortality was one thing; power was another. It was a lesson she would have to remember not to forget.
“Viviana is a forty-five-year-old female of French and Italian descent. She was misclassified as a mortal,” said Dalton, “in more ways than one.”
He pulled up a projection of pictures. Not unlike the preservation of the body, there was a clinical nature to the slides. Handwritten notes were scribbled unobtrusively next to arrows, annotative observations from the cadaver’s incisions.
“By the age of eighteen, which is when most medeians have already shown signs of magical prowess, Viviana had revealed nothing out of the ordinary. She lacked any conceivable talent for witchcraft, and by age twenty-one, the alarms she had begun to set off were formally dismissed. 99% of medeians are identified correctly,” Dalton reminded them, “but when it comes to a population of nearly ten billion people, there is a lot of room for error in the remaining 1%.”
He waved a hand to move to the next slide. “At the time of her death, Viviana was in excellent physical health. She had already given birth to four children by the time she was thirty, while many in her village of Uzès still regarded her as the town beauty, even more lovely than the young women seeking husbands in their twenties. Unfortunately,” Dalton said, “Viviana was hit by an automobile a matter of weeks ago. She died instantly.”
Another wave, another slide, this one showing the accident before moving onto the details of Viviana’s peculiarities. “As you can see,” Dalton said, pulling up a side by side comparison with two sets of similar cadavers, “Viviana’s internal organs stopped aging around twenty-one.”
He swept through quickly, comparing incomprehensible (to Parisa) portions of her body first to those of a twenty-one-year-old, then a comparable forty-five-year-old.
“Her skin had not lost any elasticity. The features of her face were unchanged. Her hair did not turn grey. Most of her village simply believed she had exercised and eaten well, and perhaps dyed her hair. As for whether Viviana herself noticed anything suspicious, it appears not. She seems to have merely considered herself lucky—inordinately so, but not extraordinarily.”
The slides concluded as Dalton turned to face them.
“As far as we can surmise, Viviana would not have died of natural causes if not for her accident,” Dalton said, clarifying what had already been heavily implied. “Her death was not the result of any form of degeneration. What we do not know,” he emphasized, “is how long she would have lived had she not met an untimely end, nor how frequently this occurs in other undiagnosed medeians.”
“Did she show any signs of regeneration?” Tristan asked.
“Damage that repaired itself magically, you mean? No,” Dalton said. “She simply didn’t degenerate as a mortal should.”
“Would she have been more or less susceptible to disease?” (Reina.)
“Unclear. Her village was particularly homogenous.”
“Did she contract any significant illnesses?” (Tristan again.)
“No, but she was regularly vaccinated, so that would not be out of the ordinary.”
“The common cold,” Callum suggested drily, and Dalton shrugged.
“Most people do not take note of commonalities,” he said, “hence the inadequacy of our existing research.”
“What exactly are we supposed to do with this?” Nico asked, his fingers tapping impatiently at his sides. “Her magical specialty was… life?”
“Somewhere in her genetics is the ability to not decay,” Dalton replied, which appeared to be confirmation. “We have no way of knowing how common this ability is, which is part of the purpose for research. Is Viviana the only one?” he posed to the group. “Have there been, historically, others? If none have lived long enough to become remarkable, then do people blessed with longevity typically attract fatalities? Is it possible they habitually die young, and if so, is this a result of magic?”
“Or,” Dalton asked after a moment of silence, “is it somehow proof of fate?”
Parisa felt her eyes narrow, at odds with Dalton’s offhanded remark. Magic the way they typically studied it was narrow, predictable, scientific in its results. Fate was inherently not. The magnetic quality of being drawn to a particular end was to remove the option of choice, which was so displeasing as to prick her slightly. Parisa did not care for the sensation of not being in control; it filled her mouth with bitterness, like excess salivation.
“You said something had come up,” Reina said in her low voice. “Is this not what was planned for our next subject?”
Dalton tilted his head, reconciling with what appeared to be his own thoughts. “Yes and no. The unit of study following the initiation rites is always death,” he said. “Most often we perform the traditional rituals on the eliminated member.”
Tristan twitched with discomfort. Callum, solemnly, did not move.
“This particular case is, contrary to its appearance, fortuitous timing,” Dalton flippantly remarked. “The Society’s work remains uninterrupted, in a sense.”
“Does it?” said Nico blisteringly, and Dalton slid a glance to him.
“For all intents and purposes, yes,” he said. “Initiation will move forward as scheduled. You will also find that the units on life and death will allow you to access far more of the library’s resources.”
“And in exchange?” Parisa prompted.
Dalton’s shoulders gave his customary indication of tension at the sound of her voice. It was a reflex born from a need to not look so quickly, fighting eagerness, which ultimately manifested like a tic of hesitation.
“You are beholden to the Society as it is beholden to you,” he said without expression, before returning his attention to the details of Viviana’s undiagnosed medeian status.
Parisa left the remainder of her questions for when they were alone. When she found him, Dalton was sitting in the reading room over a single book, toying with something out of her sight; invisible. Whatever it was he was doing, it was causing him intense strain. She watched the fight go out of him at the realization of her presence and stepped forward to reach him, smoothing a bead of sweat from his brow.
“What is it?” she murmured.
He glanced blearily up at her from a distance, traversing miles of thought.
“Do you know why he wants you?” he asked.
It was a question that had been plaguing Parisa since Libby’s disappearance, if not earlier.
“No,” she said.
“I do.” He leaned his cheek against her hand, closing his eyes. “It’s because you know how to starve.”
They sat in silence as Parisa considered the implications of this. After all, was there a way to starve properly?
Yes. Conservation done well was to survive when others would perish.
Longevity, she thought in silence.
Then she stroked the back of Dalton’s neck, smoothing the tension from his vertebrae.
“You saw something,” she said. “In Libby’s… in that thing.”
It had been haunting her a bit from night to night. First the image of Libby on the floor, bleeding out, contorted. Then what Dalton had done, launching the corpse upright, making it dance.
An animation, he said. For which he was briefly the puppeteer.
“What is it?” she asked him again, and in the moment Dalton’s eyes met hers, she thought she caught a glimpse of the familiar. Not the man in her bed from time to time, but the one she sought like firelight, drawn to him like a flame.
“Only one person could have made that animation,” Dalton said.
“Who?”
She knew the answer before he said it.
“Me.”
There was no point asking what he remembered. If that animation had ever been his creation, he clearly didn’t know. Whether Dalton was indeed some god descending from machines was outside his existing mind’s jurisdiction, and now he was pleading with her in silence. Begging for her to take away the guilt unearned.
Parisa slid the contents of the desk aside, replacing them with herself, and Dalton leaned forward to breathe her in, a wrench from his throat like a silent sob to bury in the fabric of her dress.
This was the difference between life and longevity; somewhere between a car crash and a splintered soul.
“I’ll get you out,” Parisa whispered to him. To some distant him, to his little fractures. The solution dawned like clarity in her mind.
If he was in pieces, she would take whatever rubble remained for herself.
