"Yes, but could you win?"
They both knew the answer to that.
The metal walls dissolved, and with them the meryon as well. The smell of the landfill filled Jane's nostrils again, and she was standing beside the pile of her clothes. She squatted to scoop up an armful of the best. She was so tired. There had to be someplace she could find shelter.
Jane slept that night in a wooden crate at the edge of the landfill. In the morning she crawled outside, sore and aching. She stood and looked around.
Above the trees, to the west, faerie towers melted into a gray sky. The skyscrapers had merged together into a single silhouetted wall. A magickal smog hung over the City. It looked sick with possibility.
— 12 —
SIRIN'S EXPERIMENTS ALWAYS WORKED.
That's what bugged Jane. They could construct identical assemblages of retorts and glass tubing, heat them with Bunsen burners feeding off the same petcock, flames tuned to the same height and color, measure out portions of sal ammoniac and exsanguinated toad's liver from the same carboys, their weights identical to the gram, and come morning Sirin's alembic would contain an azure essential oil with a spirit of light dancing in its depths and Jane's would be black with carbonized gunk. She had to pay for any glassware rendered unreusable, so there would follow a good fifteen minutes' sincere and futile brushwork at the sink before the thing would finally and mercifully burst in her hands. It seemed her fingers were always stained and bandaged, where Sirin's were long and slim and white as milk.
It wasn't fair.
Frustrated, she stepped out of the Alk-200 lab and let the thronging students sweep her away. The hall echoed with the clicking of hooves and heels. Everyone was in hurry, walking rapidly, turning suddenly to step into a classroom, appearing abruptly from side corridors no wider than a doorway. They seemed to be constantly popping in and out of existence. Jane's half of the traffic suddenly poured down a wide marble staircase, and she was carried along with them. Three floors she descended, and made it to the dissecting theater just as the bell rang.
Monkey was in a benevolent mood and had saved her a seat by the railing. Jane nodded thanks as Monkey lifted her stack of books away. Comparative and Speculative Anatomy was one of Jane's favorite classes. She looked forward to next semester, when she'd get to do some dissecting herself.
"Are we still on the centaur?" she whispered.
"No, I think he finally rotted." Monkey giggled, slipped a foot out of its shoe, and tugged at one of her own braids. "By the look of the control, I'd guess we're finally going to get to see something cute cut up."
"About time."
In the narrow horseshoe balcony, students were settling themselves in, a bright ripple of beaks and bat-wings, horns, jackal's-heads, bandannas, and horsehair plumes. Below, the control stood by the linen-covered dissecting table. He was a well-made young fey in an olive dressing gown provided by the Department. He had sleek black hair and a scornful eye—he was scanning the audience dispassionately—and when his gaze met Jane's she shivered involuntarily, as if somebody had touched ice to the nape of her neck.
The Chirurgeon strode into the amphitheater. With a muffled clatter everyone rose. Solemn and imposing in black, she brooded over the corpse, hands folded, like a priestess at the altar. When the class had reseated themselves, she nodded to either side. A teaching assistant whipped the linen cover away. The control put the gown aside and stood naked beside the dissecting table.
Monkey's eyes narrowed. She wrote a large "7" on the top of her yellow tablet. A nixie to her other side reached over to scrawl "6.5 at most!" beneath the 7 and underlined the most! three times.
Monkey dipped her head to stifle her laughter.
"—the incidence and frequency of the minor organs," the Chirurgeon was saying, "the gallbladder, suprarenal glands and kidneys in particular." She gestured down at the corpse, a gray twin of the young fey beside her. "The abdominal cavity has already been partially opened by a transverse and a lower vertical incision. Now I shall continue the operation by making a second vertical incision and opening the peritoneal cavity."
Hands the color of bone china floated delicately down to make the first cut. They flicked an invisible bit of tissue onto the floor as an offering to the Goddess.
An elbow dug into Jane's ribs. Glancing to the side, she saw that Monkey had filled her tablet page with a careful rendering of the control's genitalia. Jane scowled and shook her head.
This was serious, damn it.
By the end of class Jane's hand was cramped and aching from taking notes, and Monkey's drawing was surrounded by a woven wreath of lesser penises in varying states of erection. The Chirurgeon laid down her scalpel and with the slightest hint of a bow removed herself from the amphitheater. The air brightened. The students began to stand, chatter, gather up their books. The control put on his gown. "Oh, hey," Jane said. "Are you done with my Shearer's?"
"The dissection manual?" Monkey asked airily. "I ate it."
"You what?"
"I ate it. Why else would I want it? I was hungry and I ate it."
"But I need it for class."
"Then you shouldn't have given it to me." Monkey's beady eyes glittered strangely, maliciously, in her round face. "Really, Jane, you can be so dim at times." With a sudden standing backflip she disappeared through the doorway.
Jane's hands clenched. But really it was no more than she had learned to expect. Roommates were forever eating your books, having anxiety attacks, adopting rats and carnivorous slimes which they then expected you to feed, getting drunk and throwing up on your best dress, moving into the closet and refusing to come out for months on end, threatening suicide the night before Finals, leaving piles of rotting leaves in the middle of the floor, entertaining boyfriends in your bed because it was made and theirs not, evolving into large bloodsucking insects. Monkey was actually good of her kind.
Well, she could always pick up a new manual.
She took an express elevator eight floors up to the University bookstore. Over the past year Jane had come to know the layout well, the nature and locations of its antitheft systems and the identity of the part-time plainclothes dick. Security was tight up front by the cash registers. But there was an emergency exit at the back of the store, hidden from the cameras by the overstocked back shelves. Opening it would automatically trip an alarm, but that shouldn't be too big a problem.
Jane gathered up a new Shearer's and traced an indirect path toward the exit. Luckily, she'd had the foresight to case the back halls recently and break the lock on a nearby stairwell door. She was pretty sure she could be down a flight before the detective reached the door, and around a corner by the time he got to the stairs. There was an element of risk, but it was a method she'd never used and was eager to try out.
She took a deep breath and put a hand on the push bar.
A sudden sense of dark unease swept through her, a heavy wash of gravitas that unsettled her stomach and left a bitter taste in her mouth.
Iron talons seized her shoulder. "Miss Alderberry."
It was Doctor Nemesis.
"Ma'am!" Stricken, she looked up into her adviser's face. The doctor's eyeglasses rode low on her beak, two luminous disks under a painfully weak pair of watery pink eyes. The effect was like being stared at by two separate creatures, one of which you pitied and the other feared.
"I have been going over your laboratory reports, Miss Alderberry." Dr. Nemesis put an arm through hers, and walked her toward the front. "They are, if I may confide in you, disappointing, most disappointing in a student of your potential."