Chapter VII: No Cutting to the Chase
My third meeting with Dr. Tersine was at the end of that week, on a Pentaday. I was slightly better-rested than I’d been during the lectures, thankfully, so when I arrived at her door I was actually vaguely cognizant of what was taking place around me. She greeted me with her traditional enthusiasm, but didn’t jump immediately into tests like she had the previous two meetings.
“Before we get started, there’s something I’d like to show you. This room,” she gestured broadly to the hall where we’d been meeting so far, “it isn’t my proper laboratory, not really. Mostly it’s for teaching students. My real lab, where my actual work goes on, is in a basement room. Would you like to come and see it?”
“Oh, yes, of course!”
Dr. Tersine smiled and grinned, sweeping ahead of me as she retrieved the key to the door from one of the pockets of her coat. The green-painted wood door resisted the key briefly before opening. Tersine waved me ahead, and I set off down the stairs.
The laboratory proper was about the equivalent of two stories below ground level. It was a much smaller room than the hall up above, but contained the greater balance of Tersine’s actual equipment, making for an incredibly packed chamber. The air was musty and laden with chemical scents, dimly lit by electric lanterns hung from the inactive gas lamps in the walls, ventilated only by the door up and a single shaft in the ceiling near the corner.
I took in the whole place with wide eyes. It looked like a lab’s lab, like the platonic ideal of the word “laboratory,” the type of laboratory where you have to put the emphasis on the second syllable. Tersine was a doctor of bioelectromagnetics, the strange way that pure electromagnetic phenomena seemed to underlie biological functions in a very macroscopic way on Selene. To an eye used to Earthly science, her lab seemed to hold a bewildering array of equipment from wildly separate fields.
One corner looked like a chemist’s lab, all bunsen burners and titration apparatus and centrifuges, backed up by an enormous wall-sized rack used solely for holding and categorizing glassware of various sizes and shapes. A few of her experiments were still in motion, chemicals being boiled off or kept in constant motion by clockwork agitators. Another part of the lab was all biology, with an enormous cage well-stocked with little white laboratory mice next to a desk laden with anatomical diagrams and scattered notes. Yet another corner was entirely devoted to the physical sciences, festooned with coils of wire and well-stocked with hand-made sensors and meters of every description. The centerpiece of it was a huge machine plugged into a pile of bulky cells, one that reminded me of nothing more than Dr. Charcharias’s vitometer.
“What is that?”
“Oh, yes, that thing. My intention was that it would be a device for generating an artificial EV field so that we could study it in more detail without using a live subject. As it is, there’s been some sort of mistake with the wiring. All it does is emit rather dangerous electrical discharges.”
“Are you sure it’s safe to have around?”
“Completely safe, so long as it doesn’t get activated.”
I didn’t push the question, but my rating of Tersine’s common sense dropped, along with my enthusiasm for being in a small underground laboratory with her. I didn’t dwell on it long, and quickly went back to acting like the kid in the proverbial candy shop. Dr. Tersine seemed willing to accommodate me, answering all of my little questions and occasionally telling humorous anecdotes about various bits of equipment.
One thing that caught my attention was a series of stoppered bottles, each labeled with a long chemical name. It took me a minute before I recognized where I’d heard the names before: they were all chemical extracts of various plants. In between the scopolamine and the atropine was a bottle full of milky, translucent fluid labeled “amphetamine.” Immediately upon seeing that label, my eyes went wide and my brain kicked into high gear.
“Mind if I take a closer look?”
“No problem at all,” Tersine said. “Don’t drop it.”
I picked up the bottle and started examining the label. Tersine at least believed it to be pure, pure enough for consumption, and her note had it listed at a decent concentration. No mention of entianomers, so it was probably racemic. The bottle must have contained at least half a liter; enough for several months.
“Why do you have this?”
Tersine shrugged. “Originally it was a practice of my skill at chemical refinement. I’ve used it in a couple of experiments to see how it interacts with various electromagnetic fields. Now it’s mostly there because I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.”
“Can I take this?”
Tersine frowned. All of a sudden, she was back to being that strange, dark persona that had broken out once or twice on my first visit. “Why?”
I realized that I had no idea what the Selenian attitude towards drugs was, and if Tersine was going to assume that I was some kind of addict. Then again, people on Earth tended to assume that about ADHD medications as well. So I decided to err on the side of privacy.
“It helps me think. I know the correct dose to not get a bad reaction, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Tersine continued to stare with that dark expression. It felt like she was looking right through me. Just when I was considering waving my arm around to see if she was still aware of my presence, she snapped back with a huge grin on her face.
“How about this? I’ll give it to you as a gift after the testing. Think of it as a reward for work well done.”
I set down the jar. It hadn’t struck me until that exact moment how much I had missed being able to take my medications. “Thank you. In that case, I don’t think we should waste any more time.”
There was already one area of the lab that had been almost fully cleared out, creating a nice open space for whatever it was that we were going to do. “Set it up just for you,” Tersine said. “I imagine you might be coming down here more often.”
This week’s experiments were somewhat more intense than the previous ones, and as she explained the procedure I began to understand why she had felt the need to hold out the medication as a reward. The first test was going to be a more direct test of my regeneration. Tersine would open up a cut on my upper arm and point some instruments at it as it healed shut. Then she’d have to do it several more times, even in different locations, though she was quick to promise me that she’d only cut in places with low pain sensitivity. I told her that I’d been shot, impaled, and at one point literally dismembered, so a shallow cut with a blade wouldn’t faze me. Then she offered me some opium dissolved in alcohol. You had best believe that I took it.
The first few cuts went by in relative silence. Tersine cut, I winced, she went to write down measurements, then repeat. Somehow, though, the repeated jolts of pain grew steadily worse over time, not better, until the little cuts felt almost as bad as the impalements. I needed something to distract me from the pain: small talk.
“What’s the end goal of all of this? Like, what do you think we can achieve by studying this?”
Tersine stopped, the scalpel hovering just above my shoulder. “Well, for one thing, we could replicate it. Imagine, if you will, a machine that could attach to a wound and heal it just as quickly as you do naturally. Imagine how that might change war, or prevent deaths via accident, or even eliminate murder.”
“No more war, or suffering, or traffic accidents,” I muttered, not caring that Tersine wouldn’t recognize a line from a Gamera movie.
“And depending on the exact nature of your ability, it could do the same for disease. No more plagues or poxes or consumption. No more cancer, potentially.”
That had been Dr. Charcharias’s entire reason for sending me to Tersine, the knowledge that my body might hold the key to protecting her against her own unstable genetics. I didn’t know if Tersine knew that.
She, meanwhile, was building up steam and energy, growing more energetic with each phrase. “There are other things you could cure as well, with enough understanding of the élan vital. Disfigurements, dismemberments, degenerative conditions of the nerves and skeleton. With enough understanding of your condition, I could cure the blind, the deaf, the invalid and the infertile.”
And then, right at the peak of her energy, the scalpel cut. I had been following along with Tersine’s monologue, but the cut brought me back to ground, leaving me stuck between two moments, one of pain and one of confusion. Dr. Tersine imagined a world where any condition might be cured, any sickness, any infirmity. It was a tempting vision, but an incomplete one.
“No more blind,” I said as Tersine walked away to take down the readings from the latest cut. “No more deaf. No more disabled.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And that’s just if we can replicate your ability with a machine. If we can find the source, figure out why this happened… We could give it to everybody. It would be a whole new world. That’s why I’m so excited, you know. To have you with me on this.”
“Uhh… thank you? I like your enthusiasm. I’m just… not sure that your end goals are quite as good an idea as you think they are.”
Tersine sighed. “Forgive me, I’m probably not explaining them very well. Someday I’ll sit you down and explain the whole of my ideology.” She moved back to my side and prepared for another cut. I prepared as well, trying to distract myself from the pain. To my surprise, however, this time it was Tersine who initiated small talk.
“Have you heard about the killings? Girls found brutalized in their own homes; it’s all very penny dreadful.”
I stammered, refusing to believe that I’d heard her properly. “Yes, I’ve heard of them. And you ask because…?”
Tersine grinned. “Everyone’s talking about it. I wanted to hear your thoughts on the situation.”
I sighed deeply. Apparently Tersine was one of those people who, had she been born on Earth instead of Selene, would have listened to a lot of true crime podcasts. The majority of my feelings about the murders were wrapped up in the fact that I’d known Maria Faith, and the mystery of the Woman in White, which made it difficult to talk about.
“The police aren’t going to be able to solve it, I know that much. I want to find whoever did it and… I don’t know. Kill them so that they can never kill again? Tie them up and dump them in front of the nearest prison with a note?”
The scalpel dug into the skin of my forearm, a stinging pain. This time, Tersine moved slowly, pivoting the scalpel so as to hold the incision open for longer. “Don’t burst a gasket, now. You never know how dangerous it might be, getting involved with a killer like that. It really wouldn’t be fun for anyone involved if we were this close to a breakthrough only for you to end up dead in a gutter.”
I gritted my teeth. Was Tersine trying to make it as painful as possible? “I’ll… I’ll take that into consideration. I mean, as we have seen, I’m not exactly—” I don’t know exactly what happened, Tersine’s hand slipping or the scalpel hitting a new nerve, but there was a burst of pain. It was enough to make me gasp. “I’m not exactly easy to hurt!”
She and I both seemed to realize the irony at about the same moment. I started laughing nervously. “Are you sure about that?” Tersine said as she took the scalpel off of me and retreated to her machine.
“Well, I’m not immune to pain,” I said lamely.
“Then it’s a very good thing that we have enough readings. Three from the shoulder, three from the lumbar region, and three from the forearm should be enough to establish a baseline. If we ever have to do it again, I’ll give you more laudanum.”
I stood up from the chair where Tersine had had me sitting and rolled down my sleeve. The pain was gone, but the echo of it remained in my memory. “I was afraid you’d say that. What’s up next?”
“Well, I was thinking for our next test we could—”
Someone knocked three times on the door. Tersine immediately scowled. “Not now…” she muttered to herself. Then she went right back to her usual smile and yelled to the door, “Who is it?”
“Courier!” The voice coming muffled through the door sounded young, maybe even a teenager. “I’m looking for an ‘Emma’, is she in there?”
Tersine shot me a glance, raising an eyebrow. I shrugged at her.
“Come in!” Tersine said.
The woman was indeed young, eighteen or a couple of years away from eighteen in either direction. She was smartly dressed in a burgundy uniform that reminded me of the military, and her platinum colored hair was cut short and angular. She stood rod-straight and looked between Tersine and myself, unsure of how to proceed.
“A Courier?” I said.
“With the New Alderburg Couriers, Miss. A lady paid a couple hundred dinars to the company if I ran out and found an Emma Farrier and relayed to her a confidential message. I’ve been running across the city looking for her.”
A single dinar was enough to pay for a decent meal. A couple hundred was absurd for just a message, but I was beginning to suspect who I knew would pay the expense. “I’m Emma,” I said. “What’s the message?”
The courier nodded, getting up close and purposefully placing her back to Tersine. “Blackbird wishes to speak to you, with extreme urgency,” she whispered. “You are meant to know the location.”
The roof of my apartment building, to be precise. I nodded and muttered something about having understood it, at which point the courier hurried back up the stairs without a second glance. I turned to Tersine.
“I need to go,” I said. “It’s important. I hope the one test was enough?”
“It’s not ideal, but I can work with it.”
Before I left, I quickly ran over to the side table and grabbed the jar of amphetamine I’d been promised. I was going to cherish the bitter, bitter medication as though it were my own child. As I went for the door, I realized there was something that had been bugging me since the moment I walked in.
“Where’s your assistant? Is she still sick?”
Tersine’s expression went bitter, and when she responded her voice was listless and dreary. “She’s out on an errand, actually. You’d be shocked how hard it is to find metallic zinc in this city.”
Eeeeeeeesh.
Oh that Doc is definitely behind everything.
Right so the Reikverratr is Tersine right? Instead of kidnapping and trying to hold Emma she just let's her come to her and do whatever tests she needs, the assistants are the wolves.
Assuming you mean the reikverratr from the previous book, she got eaten.
@SaffronDragon nope