It wasn’t until I’d returned to Amrinval from many months abroad that I realized how unusual it was that Halflance Manor had a lawn. Given that a lawn was, above all else, a sign of wealth and excess, you would think it would be totally expected; but Halflance Manor was unique in another way, that being that it was inside the city limits, surrounded on all sides by the urban buildup. There were plenty of aristocratic manors inside of cities, and plenty of manors outside of the cities had lawns, but having a lawn inside a city made Halflance Manor almost unique.
Lady Halflance made use of that lawn, too. The central field was the site of games of armball and training exercises for the guards. Out around the edges of the field there were three further structures: the groundskeeper’s hut, the armory, and the place where I was going on the fine winter morning just after my return. The place that I didn’t want to have to go to. The place I would rather think about the sociopolitical implications of a lawn than enter. That would be Doctor Charcharias’s lab.
Doctor Amina Charcharias had a long story. Her first mother had been an experimental subject in the Cassandran Empire’s Svenhal labs, subject to a program attempting to create superior breeds of human beings through the combination of human and animal tissue. Under the supervision of the Director of the labs, Doctor Nika Tolva Tersinêvka, Charcharias’s pregnant mother had had her womb injected with shark tissue before being subjected to heavy electric shocks. Against all logic, this produced a viable fetus.
She had never told me the story of how her mother escaped, or what it must have been like as a monstrous hybrid-child living on the edges of society, shunned for her visible differences and constantly dealing with various chronic illnesses. The way she told it to me, Amina’s life story started with her becoming an army surgeon fighting during the Second Secession War, when the empire that had made her came back to reclaim their wayward former colony. That was where she met Colonel Sir Margaret Halflance, the future war hero.
Margaret Halflance had a habit of picking up people she found interesting, a habit which I had learned about firsthand. It had been Margaret who had put Charcharias through medical school when the war was over, making her a proper doctor. And it was Margaret who convinced her wife, Lady Sarah Halflance, owner of the family’s noble title, to bring Doctor Charcharias on as a live-in doctor and subject of the family’s patronage. Everyone involved with the Halflance family received Amina’s care, and in exchange for that service she had free reign to work on her own medical experiments.
Those experiments were what was most important to her. The forced hybridization of human and shark had produced a distinctly unstable biology, riddled with cancers and other such maladies. She’d had half a dozen operations already to remove tumors as they popped up, but even though she wasn’t yet forty, Charcharias’s days were numbered.
And I was there to bring her yet more bad news.
I paused for a moment with my hand on the door to Charcharias’s lab. There was no way around this. I wasn’t very well going to not tell her what had happened.
The lab itself was a simple, two-story structure. The first floor was a combination doctor’s office and workshop; the second floor was Doctor Charcharias’s flat. Just like Sir Margaret had said, Charcharias was at work in there. She was facing away from me as I entered, bent over a bench upon which was set up an enormous machine of iron bars and copper wires, galvanic stacks and alloy shells. I didn’t know exactly which machine this was, but it was no doubt part of her study into electromagnetovitalics in some way or another.
“Amina?” I said.
Charcharias whipped around, a smile forming on her face. “Oh, Emma, hello! Wonderful morning, isn’t it? I was wondering when you’d come around and visit me, since you got back.”
I chuckled nervously, thankful she didn’t realize I’d been avoiding her precisely to delay having this exact conversation. “Well, you know how it is, I’ve been… I mean I haven’t exactly been busy, but there’s been a lot going on, you know?”
“Yes, of course. I heard something about Parker Halflance returning home? I’ve never met her, you know. What’s she like?”
It was still weird hearing people refer to my girlfriend by her first name. Ever since I’d met her she’d always gone by her middle name, Laura, probably to make sure that nobody made the connection that she was the heir to the Halflance family.
“She’s… I honestly can’t even begin. Not right now. I, uh. So, New Alderburg, the University, all of that.”
“Yes.” There was a slight twitch in Charcharias’s features, a momentary slip in her total happiness. “I really thought you would have sent letters, or something to that effect. But then, I suppose Doctor Tolva didn’t either, so…”
“Yeah, those things are related.” I moved around, as though I could sneak out into Amina’s peripheral vision and avoid her attention. “Have you heard any of the news from New Alderburg? The big news, important things.”
“Only vague stories. I’ve mostly been fairly cooped up here on the manor since we all got back from Urcos. What happened?”
I couldn’t breathe. Dammit, I knew that I needed to tell Amina what had happened, but how could I? How could I tell her that someone she had considered a close enough friend to recommend me to was actually the monster that had destroyed her life before it even began?
“How did you meet Doctor Tolva, anyway?”
She made a face, one that I’m fairly sure would have involved raising an eyebrow, if she had eyebrows at all. Her bluish shark-hybrid skin didn’t permit hair growth. “We’ve never met, technically speaking. But two, maybe three years ago we stumbled into each other through mutual acquaintances. We were both working in the same field, electromagnetovitalics, it happens. Why?”
“Did you ever look into what was going on at the Svenhal labs after you left them? Who was in charge, how it all related to the rest of the Cassandran Empire?”
“Emma, what the hell are you implying?” Charcharias said with a sort of cold fury.
Before I could think about it any longer, everything spilled out at once. “The lead of research at the Svenhal labs for the last few decades was a woman by the name of Doctor Nika Tolva Tersinêvka. She’s obsessed with eugenics, the creation of a new and superior human species through the manipulation of the EV field and mechanical apparatus. Several years ago she retired from her position at Svenhal to move to Bluerose, where she’s been working as a Cassandran spy for the last several years. She’s also the woman who brought me to Selene in the first place as one of her experiments in creating an artificial woman: an alraune.”
I guess I really should have expected what came next. Amina went very still, and judging by the way her arms were suddenly resting very heavily on her workbench she was almost definitely struggling to stand. Her breaths were shallow and her brilliantly blue eyes incredibly wide.
I fell silent as well. Slowly, Amina regained control of her limbs. She staggered across her lab as though she’d been shot, nearly collapsing against one of her cabinets. Her whole body was trembling, she looked like she was dying right in front of my eyes. A few times she tried to say something, her throat working as it tried to swallow her fear, but to no avail. She threw open the cabinet, procured a fine glass flask full of a pale yellow liquid, bit off the stopper, and drank half of it in one go.
“I’m sorry, Amina.”
“Fuck off, Emma.”
Amina’s anger made me flinch. I was losing control over the situation in ways I hadn’t even known I’d had control of in the first place. “There was no way you could have known! The government had no idea who she was either, she immigrated under a pseudonym, she was incredibly secretive about her past!”
“How much did she learn?” Amina growled. “How much did you teach her?”
“I didn’t know who she was either!” I shrieked. “She did a few rounds of tests and that was it! She tried to kill me half a dozen times!”
“But she still learned something. The completion of the experiment that she started, what was it, six months ago now? And I gave it right to her.” Amina made it three steps, then slumped down into an examination stool. “She was already years ahead of anything I was capable of, and now thanks to my fuckup the gap’s even wider.”
“There was no way you could have known, Amina.”
“I know,” she said. “I know. Of course I know that.” She took another swig out of the flask of what I hoped was just an alcoholic drink. “What did you do, after you found out?”
“It was a whole thing,” I said. “We fought a lot. She kidnapped some friends of mine, I rescued them with some allies, she ran off into the desert in search of some ancient ruin she thinks is the key to everything, we followed her. Several people died.”
Amina looked up at me, a spark of hope lighting up her face. “Did you get a look at her notes? Her lab? Did you steal anything useful?”
The memories of the raid on Tersine’s lab flashed in front of my eyes. The old abandoned factory had been converted into a warren, one part laboratory, one part staging ground, and one part barracks for her personal army of wolf-human hybrids. I could remember with crisp detail the shape of the machine she had used to bring me to Selene, the map of the Great Desolation she kept on one wall.
“No, we didn’t. We were too busy trying to rescue that kidnapped friend I mentioned. I’m sorry.”
Amina threw herself out of her seat. “Fuck! Damn it all, Emma! Then we learned nothing!”
She went on a mini-rampage, throwing a stack of papers onto the floor, slamming her hand into a countertop, grabbing a piece of glasswork and shattering it on the floor. After a few seconds of exertion, she stopped, bending double as she was consumed by peals of racking coughs.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh no. What is it?”
Amina took a moment to catch her breath. “Not sure. It’s probably nothing that some drugs can’t handle, but maybe it is. Maybe it’s the end. I don’t have any more lung tissue that I can spare, so there’s always a chance that the hammer of the revolver is finally coming down on a full chamber and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish there was anything I could have done better. I’m a physicist, this is my field, but… there’s so little time.”
Amina leaned over a table, staring into the pale wood. “My daughter turns two years old in less than two months. Every day that passes it looks less likely I’ll see her turn three.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t think about that. I wish I had, I wish I had some good news. I’ll try to do what I can, I’ll help you with—”
The glare that Doctor Charcharias gave me in that moment could have shattered glass. “If you have anything intelligent to say, then say it. I don’t need platitudes right now, Emma. Leave me alone.”
I didn’t have anything better than platitudes, at least not when it came to words. Never stop moving forward, that was my motto. Never give up. The same self-admitted hero complex that had let me overcome the psychic keyhole Tersine and Falem had left in my brain made it certain that I wasn’t going to give up on Charcharias. But she knew what she needed in that moment, and if what she needed was to be alone, then so be it. I backed out of the laboratory, giving Amina every opportunity I could to change her mind. But she didn’t, and I ended up backing right out through the same door I’d come in.
So, obviously, that whole mess left me feeling like total shit. And as with most situations where I felt like total shit, I had a pre-built coping mechanism for dealing with it: cuddling with my girlfriend. I jogged back across the field and into Halflance manor, then made my way up to my room on the second floor. Laura and I had been sharing it ever since she returned to her old home. She’d had a room of her own from back before she left, but she refused to set foot inside it.
Laura was exactly where I’d left her: in the middle of a nap. I threw off my vest and undid the lace on my pants, slipping under the covers behind her. She was sound asleep, so much so that she hardly stirred even as I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and kissed the back of her neck. As much as the plain skin contact improved my mood, I needed to talk. So I did what came naturally, and bit her right on the earlobe.
I could feel Laura’s muscles stiffen under my hands. “That’d better be Emma who just bit me, or someone’s getting hit.”
“Sorry, love,” I said. “It was Tersine. I couldn’t stop her in time.”
“Truly her villainy knows no bounds. I’ll have to be more keen next time, faster than you even.”
I sighed, planting a few more kisses on the back of her jaw. “I talked to Amina.”
“Oh.” Laura turned around, leaving us face-to-face. For a minute she avoided the subject just as much as I’d been for the last several days, tracing her fingers tantalizingly along the patch of skin between my navel and the waist of my pants. She had gotten better about it than she had been, but using sex to distract from hard topics was something that still came easily to Laura.
“It didn’t go well.”
“How so?”
“I’m not totally sure. She kept blaming me for not knowing who Tersine was, but I think she may have just been mad at herself. And obviously she was upset about the lack of progress…”
I chose not to tell her just how bad things had gotten. Charcharias had been hired on as the family’s official physician when Laura was a teenager, so the impression I’d gotten was that they hardly ever spoke to each other as anything other than doctor and patient. The state of her sickness was something I had to let Amina decide whether she was going to disclose or not.
“Do you really think you could have done any better? It’s a miracle things went as well as they did.”
“I could have stolen something from her lab,” I said. “Tried to at least let us catch up with what she was capable of.”
“You were under time pressure. The longer you took in that lab, the more likely it was that somebody was going to get killed. One person really did.”
“I know,” I said with a sigh. “Fuck, I wish there was something I could do, you know?”
“I know the feeling well enough. Wish I could’ve saved Delilah. Wish I didn’t have to have been born to these shitty mothers, either.”
I pulled her into a kiss. I felt better, and if we kept talking it was just going to devolve into a big pity party. Laura got the message immediately, started reaching under my shirt. I ground my thigh between her legs, pressing my lips to her collarbone. A quiet moan escaped from between Laura’s lips.
And then the door flew open, and both of us jerked upright. I had to hold my collar closed, especially as I realized that we’d been interrupted by none other than Lady Halflance herself. She stood tall in the doorway, her eyes radiating a sort of passive disdain that you got used to from living in a house with her.
“There’s news with regards to Tersine. Come down, we must discuss it at once.”