“Help me.”
“I will.”
“You promise?”
“Yes. I promise.”
Nico felt it again, the touch that had been against his cheek before, only now it was full-bodied, whole. He remembered it from years ago, suddenly reapplying itself like a fine layer of gauze over the person he’d once been.
You don’t need to help me, Nico. You have a life, plans, a future—
You should have all those things!
Face it, a ticking clock isn’t the same as a future.
You and your ticking clock, Gideon, that’s my future. That’s mine.
Gideon’s voice was apparitional, in two places at once.
“Sleep well, Nicky.” Distant. Safe.
Comforted, Nico finally closed his eyes and drifted, the warmth of his memories slowly fading into the precipice of rest.
PARISA
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.