Amina rolled her eyes and scowled. “Your next line is, ‘I’ve also found the elixir of eternal youth’. Every two-bit doctor has been coming forward saying they have a cure for the stonewose curse since the times when our profession was referred to as alchemy.”
She started to walk away, going back to the surely-more-important business of caring for the wounded.
“Did any of them actually manage to do it?”
And that was when Amina stopped, turned around, walked right up to me, and started talking very quietly. “What, exactly, did you manage to do?”
“While Ikamja and I were traveling through the Desolation, there was a moment where we… became trapped. She started to lose herself for lack of…” Finishing the sentence would have made it too blatant. “I don’t know quite what I did, but I did something with my EV field that got rid of the hunger.”
Amina turned my words over in her mind, focus growing more intense. “And she was cured? No longer has the hunger?”
I shrugged. “This was about two weeks ago, it hasn’t been long enough for me to know. But it worked in the moment; she didn’t take a chunk out of me, but she was just as sated as if she had.”
“And you’re not sick,” Amina asked, fully serious. “Your regeneration hasn’t been weaker, no long-lasting consequences?”
“No. Well… I passed out after doing it. And I was tired, bone-tired when I woke up again. But it was just fatigue, it went away after a day or two of rest.”
Amina kept her serious expression, but in her eyes I could already begin to see a glimmer of excitement. “We need to talk somewhere more private.”
That somewhere turned out to be out back of the infirmary, a hidden corner with relatively little foot traffic. Amina parked me there, then without any further ado proceeded to start dragging out as much of her lab equipment as she could carry. Her half-shark anatomy gave her impressive strength, but it still took quite a while.
“Can you repeat what you did?” she asked me.
“Yes! Well, I think. I’ve tried to do it again a couple of times, and I think I have something, but there wasn’t really any way to test if I was doing exactly the same thing or not. Does that make sense?”
“Yes it does, I think.”
By the time Amina was done, she had accomplished two things. The first was to absolutely exhaust herself. The second was to create a crude approximation of something I knew all too well: her vitometer setup. The vitometer was a machine that could detect and, to a lesser degree, analyze the elan vital, a machine Amina had spent decades developing. It was through the vitometer that we had initially figured out the root cause of my regenerative abilities, so it only made sense that we’d start from there when it came to testing out a new extension of that same power. In practice, it looked sort of like a giant coil electromagnet crossed with one of those deep-sea submersibles, with a big metal cone on one end for sensing.
Amina grabbed me by the shoulders and directed me into the right angle and range. Then she retreated to the vitometer’s control panel, an array of switches and buttons, and went through the practiced movements of activating and tuning the machine.
“Aaaaaand… there. Alright, we’re ready. Emma, do the thing.”
Doing the thing, in this case, meant trying to replicate the push I’d performed when I’d healed Ikamja. The replication was never going to be perfect, not without an actual target to push into, but with a lot of concentration I could reach out into the air a few inches in front of my body. It sucked. The feeling was like digging my own nails into my palms, the pain of the damage itself combining with the awful sensation of strain with no resistance.
But I did it anyway. After a few seconds, the steady signs of something happening came into play. Sparks of static electricity danced across my clothes and into the ground, the EV field bleeding off into waste charge, and my head spun with a sudden exhaustion. Amina started making some very interesting facial expressions, so I held it as long as I could, keeping the push braced outward against the empty air until I was sure that I was about to collapse. Then I let it relax back into me. Unlike when I actually used that power for something, I didn’t immediately pass out, the exhaustion partially recuperated as I allowed my EV field to return to normal. What wasn’t normal was Amina’s reaction.
Her bluish skin never showed blood very well, but by the way she was sweating I got the feeling that she would have gone pale if she could. One hand went over her mouth in total awe. For a second it looked like she was terrified. Then, gradually, her expression shifted, the dropped jaw turning into a broad grin.
“Emma. We need to do that again. We need to do that again right now before I completely lose my composure.”
We did. Two more times. And with the way Amina’s excitement kept growing and growing, we probably would have kept adjusting angles and narrowing in on the perfect settings for the vitometer if I hadn’t hit my limit. As it was, though, the third attempt ended on a sour note. I finally lost my strength, getting so weak for a moment that I fell onto the ground and had to fight not to pass out.
Amina was very apologetic about having pushed me so far, rushing off to get something for my strength. That ended up being tea and some fresh fruit. What Amina couldn’t give me was any time to eat those refreshments without listening to her excited ramblings.
You see, the experiment we’d just performed had apparently turned the last half-century of electromagnetiovitalics research totally on its head. Even with the simple, one-dimensional data that could be provided by three rounds with the vitometer, there were already implications that could be gathered, structures in the functioning of high-powered EV fields that the science hadn’t even begun to conceive of. The fields fluctuated rapidly, but with a definite harmonic structure, akin to the difference between static charge built up unevenly across an insulator and an orderly current rushing through a conductive solid.
I didn’t know half as much as she did about the topic, of course, but as I regained my strength I found myself able to follow along. During down periods I had occasionally studied electromagnetovitalics from books or by visiting university lectures, and the construction of the machine to return me to Selene had been a crash course in application. Even an engineer, grease-stained and having only the knowledge of the boiler room, can make decent conversation with someone who holds a doctorate.
As we talked, though, squatting in the dirt and slowly burning in the harsh sun of the Desolation, the topic of conversation changed from science to history. There was a reason why Amina had compared my claim to being able to cure a stonewose to the elixir of eternal youth. People had been searching for it for centuries: generals looking for a source of elite troops, social reformers seeking to bring about world peace, genius inventors looking to leave their marks on history. From the perspective of the human population of Imbrium, the stonewose were a part of the terrain, a constant danger as well as a constant reminder of the age of the planet and one’s own frailty. Religions used the stonewose as examples of ultimate sin: healers treated their regeneration as a signpost of what their field might one day be capable of. Some reformers had tried to create peace, to treat stonewose as people of equal status to humans, durkahn, and the other peoples of Selene, but the problem of the flesh hunger always got in the way sooner or later.
Amina sighed, overtaken by emotion. Sadness, perhaps, or a sort of nostalgic grief. “I guess I should explain why I know so much about this.”
“Does it really require an explanation?”
She shrugged. “I want to apologize for… earlier. Before you left. And I figure being honest is the best way to make up for that.”
“I… okay. Tell the story.”
Amina nodded. “So, the first time I realized I was gonna die I was… fourteen years old. That was the first time I had to get something cut out of me. A piece of liver went bad, bad enough that it was either cut it out of me or die. I mean, I was probably going to die of an infection or blood loss even if they did cut it out of me, but “probably” was better than “definitely,” if that makes any sense.”
“No, it does,” I said. “I’ve been in similar situations.”
I hoped that Amina would assume I was referring to fights to the death, because what I was actually thinking about was sending myself back to Selene. There was a very real risk that that machine would have just destroyed my mind entirely.
“Obviously I lived,” Amina continued. “Though that was more due to my own toughness than anything the surgeon was able to do. And that was where I started learning medicine. But because I was too young to train, I also ended up learning quite a bit about the history. I would sneak into the Amrinval university just to read all the books, memorize all of the names of all the women who had worked on the grand problem over the years.
“I couldn’t help but feel like they were the same as me, like I was part of this same grand inheritance all the way down the centuries. We were both explorers, scientists, throwing ourselves headlong into solving an impossible problem in the name of curiosity. Or, well, in the name of survival, in my case.”
I couldn’t help but pull her into a hug. I didn’t know if that’s the “correct” response to hearing someone tell you that, but I did it anyway. All this stuff I was hearing wasn’t exactly a revelation; I’d known almost since the moment we met that Amina was on a ticking clock, her own mutant biology fighting against itself, and anything I could have said would have rung hollow coming from an immortal. So I didn’t say anything at all.
Things started to fall into a routine after that. We were in a military camp, after all, and that meant operating on military time. Everyone, Laura especially, was disappointed to learn about the time limitation, but I did my best not to worry about it out loud, even if I was simmering with resentment internally. Having only ten hours a day to spend on Selene felt all the sweeter when I could spend it with the girl I loved.
So a lot of that time was spent doing exactly that: Laura and I fucked, we joked, I sat next to her while she sketched out portraits of random soldiers or of the war machines that she was allowed to get close to or just vistas of the Desolation. I couldn’t spend ten hours a day hanging out with my girlfriend, of course. Technically speaking I was also involved in the impending operation, so at least some of my time had to go toward supporting that. Given that my primary form of military usefulness was being an unkillable super-soldier, that meant a lot of weapons training with Rook.
It had been a while since the last time I’d spent any significant amount of time getting serious attention from our local cyborg. Sure enough, within fifteen minutes of the start of the first training session on the first day, she had deemed me unacceptably sloppy.
“Your stance is weak, you’ve forgotten all about your edge alignment, and if you try to shoot a gun like that you’ll end up doing more damage to yourself than the enemy will,” were her precise words.
Back to boot camp for me, then. Neither Rook nor I got exhausted like normal people did, so we could do as many as six hours at a time of rigorous drill. Rook disassembled me, taking my technique apart right down to the position of my feet and the way my hand sat on the saber’s hilt, and built it all back up. We only had a few days, after all, and I needed to be exceptional if I was going to be able to contribute anything at all to a full military operation.
The other thing I did during that time was continue helping Amina. I was explicitly disallowed, on Rook’s orders, from experimenting with the new use of my EV field more than once per day, but with how quickly Amina was iterating on her vitometer, even one new test every twenty-four hours meant steady improvement. Within two days of that initial test, something was starting to come together. Amina scrounged the entire camp for bits of wiring, for spare galvanics, for pieces of metal alloy, and considering my own experiences had almost certainly stolen some.
She was making a machine, some sort of EV generator. I helped where I could, acting as a sounding board for her ideas of the device’s function, but this was mostly the sort of high-end stuff that I didn’t really understand. Amina, though, was fully lost in the thrill of contribution.
Everyone was like that. I think the discipline of all the actual soldiers around must have infected us. Anna and Unity went through our expedition gear again and again, making sure everything was spic and span and well-kept against the harsh conditions. Laura, despite everything, was quite involved in that end of things: her archaeology experience meant that she knew a thing or two about maintaining large groups of people in the Desolation. Amina assured the higher-ups that her work with me was far more valuable than the equivalent amount of time spent treating insect bites and heatstroke.
There was one person, though, who wasn’t meshing quite so well with the surroundings. It was odd, actually, because you would normally expect that she would have been perfectly at home amidst rigid bureaucracy and vicious, brutal objective-seeking. “Take no captives” was her family motto, after all. But then, considering what had happened in the lead-up to the battle in Grantval, perhaps I should have seen it coming that Lady Halflance wasn’t quite fully herself.