the dissolution of this pair. I want to see what they can accomplish if left to their own devices. They’re developing into something new. The Doctrine, when it manifests, will be something new.” It will also be the oldest thing in the world, the note which, when sounded without obstruction or acoustic manipulation, creates reality. It’s impossible to say whether this pair of cuckoos is on their way to manifesting, for these are uncharted waters. There’s no map. There’s no compass. There is only the project, stretching out ahead of them, unchanging, unchangeable.
This is alchemy of the type the masters could only dream of. Paracelsus, Pythagoras, Baker—not one of them has touched these vaunted heights, or come this close to finally fully realizing their dreams.
Leigh looks at him for a moment more before she bows her head and agrees, “I will leave them.”
“Good.” He leans forward, kisses her forehead, imagines he can hear the rustle of dead leaves and feathers inside the ivory cage of her skeleton. She is dangerous, this construct of dead women and living vermin. She is bright and brilliant, and she will kill him one day, if he isn’t careful. If he allows it. “Remember the auguries. Have faith.”
“I always have,” she says.
“Now get your people. I want that mess upstairs gone before the plane takes off.” He turns and walks away.
Patience is a virtue to Leigh Barrow. She was born in stillness; she will die in motion. Everything between those points is the tension of the coiled spring, the held breath, the knife in the process of being drawn. She holds herself patient and cold as Reed—her keeper, her lover, her master, and her rival, all bound in a single imperfect human skin—leaves her behind.
Only when he rounds the corner and is gone does she move, potential converting into action as she whips around, balancing on the balls of her feet, and runs, cat-light, down the darkened hallway. She doesn’t bother turning the lights on. Even were her night vision poorer than it is, that wouldn’t matter; she knows every curve of this hall. She’s walked it every day for years. She needs no visual cues to tell her where she’s going, and wouldn’t know what to do with them if they were provided.
Leigh is aware of the contradiction inherent in her existence. She is a human being, a scientist; she remembers half a dozen PhD programs, and another half-dozen disciplines on top of those. Her bones were stolen from the graves and deathbeds of thirteen brilliant women—and if those deathbeds were made by a long-dead alchemist, rather than by natural selection, she has no sympathy for them. Without their deaths, her birth would have been impossible. She is a palimpsest girl, a denizen of the Up-and-Under called into the light and brightness of the modern world, and if the women who make her up didn’t want to die, they should have been more careful. They should have barred their doors and locked their windows, not left them open for a shadow to slip through like a thief in the night, hands full of knives and heart full of larceny. They should have known that what they possessed, the bright, brilliant nature of their minds, was more precious than gold, more transmutable than lead. They should have realized precautions were required.
For her, life is the lab and the lab is life. The lab is where she awoke, confused, filled with the shrieking souls of countless dead. The wings of crows beat in her ribcage, prisoned in the fleshy confines of her heart; sometimes she feels their feathers brushing against her bones, which are a mixture of human, caprine, and whalebone scrimshaw, carved so beautifully that she sometimes thinks it a pity she needs skin. She would be so much more attractive as a walking specter of tendon and bone, exposing her creator’s artwork to the world.
This portion of the lab is her territory before anyone else’s; even Reed is cautious about walking down her halls. There’s never any way of knowing what terrible things she has cooking in her private rooms, or how they might react to someone exposing them to the light. Reed is her master: she won’t directly disobey his orders. Those horrible cuckoo children, with their twee names and their calf’s eyes, will be allowed to live their petty little lives, at least for now. At least until he sees the wisdom of doing things her way.