“I checked. So far nothing else is missing.” I waved the ledger triumphantly at him from where I perched on a cardboard box, amid a sea of papers.
“Still so competitive,” he complained. “I thought of it first.”
“No, you didn’t.” I turned back to the file.
“Spider. On your hair.”
I froze, eyes closed while Shin removed it. In the past, he’d have flicked it off, stinging my forehead smartly. Now, he handled it delicately and impersonally, like a stranger.
“It’s really disappointing how you don’t scream about things like this,” he murmured.
“Why should I?” I opened my eyes.
Shin’s face, that familiar set of planes that made up his nose and cheekbones, was so close that I could reach out and touch it. What made someone good-looking? Was it the symmetry of features, or the sharp shadows of his brows and lashes, the mobile curl of his mouth? In the very center of his eyes, so much darker than mine, I could see a tiny light, a gleam that sparked. Then it winked out and I was falling, drawn into a tunnel. Images flickered. Railway tracks submerged underwater. A ticket to nowhere. Fish swimming in a mirror. Somewhere, a midnight shape stirred, shadow rising from the depths of a river. The air thickened, a clot in my lungs. I gasped. Toppled forward.
“What’s wrong?”
Shin caught me as I fell, my thoughts tangled like riverweed, slippery and coiling. Dizzy, I steadied myself, pushing back. Sliding my hands along the width of his shoulders, the hard muscles that were those of a man and not a boy. My heart was racing like a horse on treacherous ground. If I weren’t careful, I’d make a fatal stumble.
He watched me with concern, dark brows frowning. Whatever it was I’d seen in his eyes—reflected shadows, a looking glass linked to another realm—was gone. There was only Shin and even then he was half a stranger to me.
“Do you often have spells like this?”
Spells. That was the right word. Dizzy spells, magic spells. The crooked twitch of a severed finger that had led us somewhere strange. I couldn’t speak, could only nod.
Shin’s hands gripped my shoulders. The pressure made me feel better. Then he was loosening my collar, working the top buttons quickly and deftly. Dazed, I wondered how many women he’d undressed. But he was careful, touching only the material of the dress. Careful not to touch me.
“Have you been tested for anemia? Lots of girls your age have it.”
Practical as always. I inhaled. Sunlight flooded back into the room, and the spell, whatever it was, lifted.
“Shin, have you ever dreamed about a little boy and a railway station?”
“No.” He sat down with a sigh, ignoring the dust.
“Well, I do. And it’s very odd because he talks to me. I feel as though I’ve met him before.”
“A little boy—is that me?”
I swatted him with a file. “Stop being so egotistical.”
He laughed and dodged. The file flew out of my hand and papers exploded everywhere, thin loose sheets covered with crabbed handwriting. It was Dr. Merton’s writing—lists and more lists of things mixed in with supplies that he’d ordered. Formaldehyde, spirits of tincture, scalpels. Fixatives for glass slides. And then I saw it: Finger donated by European patient. Dry preservation in salt.
I waved it under Shin’s nose. “This is it—the only finger so far that isn’t preserved in fluid!”
He read aloud as I peered over his shoulder. “Apparently this was a one-off, do-it-yourself preservation. Someone, a fellow doctor named—can’t quite read this—MacFarlane or MacGarland, who had a finger amputated on a jungle trip. Blood poisoning after an animal bite. I hope he didn’t do it himself.”
“No, it says W. Acton. William Acton—that surgeon who was just here. He told me he’d donated his friend’s finger.” The coincidence unsettled me, like a dark undertow.
“That’s a nice friendship,” said Shin drily.
I ignored him. “Packed in salt, which was probably all they had on them at the time. I wonder what they were doing.”
Discovering an actual record of the finger was a relief, I told myself. It had been removed by a proper doctor for medical reasons. The rest of it, the salesman’s obsession with luck, was just superstition.
“And here it is.” Shin took the now-familiar glass bottle out of his pocket and set it next to the other specimens we had already checked off.
“Put it behind, on the upper shelf,” I said with a shudder.