Chapter 8: Chapter Eight

She prowled onto the lecture stage like a mountain cat and I could only stare.

Aralia Cordivar was young—later I would learn that she was the youngest person ever admitted to Harmine, and the youngest person to become head of Laboratories for Special Research, and the first woman. A Imperial-grade savant. She was actually only a year or two older than me, and yet she seemed so fully realized, so powerful, so confident. Her dark hair was close-cropped, her lips full, her golden-orbed gaze intent as it swept the rows. She waited for the lecture hall to hush, and as it filled with silence, it seemed to fill also with her presence.

“I am here because Master Yvell has asked me to introduce a new field of alchemical study, based on my team’s groundbreaking new work in the Special Research division. This past year, Harmine researchers have isolated the very alchemical Principles of Manhood. We have succeeded in inducing, regulating, revising, and precluding the reproductive traits and sex characteristics of the flesh. This has given us the ability to corral and unmake certain Unhygienic Degeneracies and to accelerate and amplify Hygienic Virtues, with rapidly increasing precision. Very soon, the announcements of our historic findings will herald brand new directions for Imperial Social Hygiene policy in every institution and at every level of society.”

A murmur and rustle of excitement had been building. She waited for it to peak and recede.

“Provisionally, we have been calling this new field Apomasaics. Beginning next term, I will be teaching the first ever introductory course. The expansion of research into this new field has been given high priority by the Imperial Social Hygiene Review Board. Upon completion of the course, students will become eligible to propose their own research topics and design their own experiments. I should not need to tell you that research that helps lay the groundwork for new Imperial policy will be prioritized. There will be two hundred spots available in the course. My team will screen applicants based on merit, and merit alone. Report to Special Research by the fifteenth for instructions. I regret that I will not be taking questions.”

She swept off the lecture stage to a storm of applause, pleas, demands and shouted questions. I watched the hubbub for a minute, stunned, then I gathered my things. I left the alchemy halls and took a shortcut through another maze-like building of empty classrooms and then a botany greenhouse, through a courtyard, to the entrance hall of the massive library.

The Harmine Archives were a wonder of the world. As big as several granaries stacked together above ground, it was also a chambered nautilus shell spiraling deep belowground—a single vast ramp unfurling and gradually narrowing, with wings extending off of it. I had been in such awe of this place when I first arrived. Right now, I couldn’t seem to pay much attention to my surroundings.

I passed the front desk and wandered downwards on a richly dyed red carpet, passing endless recessed terraces of long wooden bookshelves, my mind spinning. Eventually, I chose a terrace and turned to follow it, walking the narrow way between two tall bookshelves. After a while, one of the bookshelves parted to make way for a doorway. Past it, there was a sunken alcove with a few desks and armchairs in it. An alchemical lamp gave off a steady golden glow. I descended into the cozy space and slumped onto a couch, my arm draped over my eyes.

I remembered when Gresha told me she could prepare me to take the merit exams, and I imagined taking them as akin to getting on a ship to a distant realm. The same feeling was in me now. That tiny circle of light had opened in my belly, a dark yet clear lantern of desire—where to go towards, what I needed, how to choose. Already a wild idea—not yet a plan—was taking shape in the deepest part of me.

I sat up. If I did this...

This time there would be no mentor to guide me. I was, in fact, staggeringly alone. And yet, I could not believe how lucky, how well-positioned I was. It seemed like pure magic that I was, of all possible places, here, and of all possible times, now. Every vagary and nuance of circumstance in the world and in history had evidently, and yet impossibly, placed me in this privileged position of opportunity. The opportunity to actually—

I flinched from naming it clearly in the front of my mind. The blockades of silence I had laid around my un-admittable desire were so strong. My whole body itched with heat as unbearable shame clutched and tore at my insides. The memory of Carame looking at me, unreadable face cast in deep shadow by the white chemical light. Kisma looking at me, stricken. The jeering voices of the town children—perverts—kuffa—degenerates.

I jumped up and began to pace. Was this a huge mistake? What a few moments before seemed like divine providence suddenly sounded harebrained, far too risky. I would be certainly be inquisitioned if I were caught, perhaps sent for reconditioning, disappeared, even executed. Actually going through with this idea felt akin to stepping off a cliff into thin air and expecting to walk straight out over nothingness. My marrow itself crawled with the terror of falling and breaking on the rocks. Better to stay perfectly still, not draw any attention, and remain undetectable. Hide inside my own skin. I knew that was the sound strategy. I knew it worked. I was, after, all, unutterably alone.

Oh, I missed—I missed Heather. If she were here, she would grab me and stop me from pacing, lead me to the couch, sit me down. She would talk to me in her firm, trustworthy voice, and get me to stop breathing so fast. I slumped back onto the couch.

If Gresha were here, she wouldn’t think much of me for spinning around in a thought-circle until I tripped over myself and fell over. Gresha was a chemist at heart. She would grunt one word at me and that word would be ‘titration’. She would probably even make me recite a definition of titration, to calm me down.

Titration is the chemist’s strategy for combining volatile reagents. Any mixing of substances that causes a reaction—such as an explosion— can be prevented from causing that reaction by mixing the substances more slowly and in smaller amounts. I remembered Gresha positioning me over a beaker in the Foundry with a dropper, pointing at the gear-clock on the wall. “Every four hundred seconds, add another drop,” she husked, before stalking away to work on something else.

Right now, I was the volatile reaction. My panic, my shame, my overwhelm. So what were the over-mixed substances? This wild plan was definitely one of them, and the other was...perhaps the consequences of its failure? Well, I had no control over the second element. It was so much larger than me. But the first I could approach more slowly, in smaller pieces. It was clearly too soon to consider the whole thing right now, anyway. I could go about setting the preliminary elements into motion without committing to anything. I was nowhere near the precipice yet—the threshold of true embarkation, beyond which there was no retreat back to safety.

All I had to do now was focus on the next part, then the next part, then the part after that. Slower and smaller bites. That was all. I sagged into the couch.

This had been a long, hard day already, and it was barely noon. All I wanted to do was go find a book to curl up with and turn off my brain. Which was too bad, because it was probably time to eat lunch and go to my next class.

~ ~ ~

The next day I presented myself at the Special Research laboratories. A clerk pulled my file and flipped through it, stopping a few times to copy information over to another form. I craned my neck and he noticed.

“Your merit exam scores,” he said, by way of explanation.

He flipped through a few more pages.

“No hygienic infractions on record, no foreign implications or correspondences...you appear to be a good candidate.”

He slapped the file closed lightly. “You should hear back from us by the start of next term.”

I was turning to leave when he placed his right hand over his heart in the loyalty salute and recited, “Honor, Pride, Duty.”

He looked at me expectantly with sharp, pale eyes. My file was still in front of him. Frozen in place, I mumbled the words back to him. He nodded at me. I fled self-consciously.

~ ~ ~

The last weeks of my first term passed in blur of late fall weather. I spent most of my time in the alchemy labs, trying to establish a presence with the various lab assistants and Factors as a familiar and helpful face. I ran messages, helped wash and sort glassware, delivered packages, ran errands and otherwise tried to make myself indispensable, while dropping shameless hints that I was looking for a job. Not all my motivations were even ulterior.

I did need to start drawing a wage soon. The private Imperial bond that came with my merit exam results, to pay for travel costs and initial school supplies, was almost used up. Most other students here came from merchant families or were noble-born, with lands, estates, and sorcery talent. Even most of the other merit students were probably not without some family support.

Me though? The idea of writing to my mother for pocket change was laughable—dearest Ma, I know that as you get one of my sisters to read this you are probably hassling my other siblings for your drinking money, but please, can you send me some?

I knew Gresha and Heather would help me if I needed it, probably Kisma, too, but I was determined that bothering them for their hard-earned wages would be my last resort.

So if I wanted to buy razors and soap and ink and paper and a better coat for the winter, I needed some way to earn money, and the alchemy labs were my surest option. The standard avenues for securing such a position—bribery and nepotism—were closed to me. I wasn’t delusional enough to rely on my nonexistent charisma to attract an actual faculty mentor or ally among the staff. I just had to hope that persistence would work. I knew it wasn’t a very good strategy, but I didn’t really know how else to go about it. Exams were coming up and if I didn’t get hired soon, I would have to break off from all the volunteering I was doing in the labs and pivot my time and attention into studying.

A week before exams, though, I got lucky. It was the fourth time in as many days that I brought the matter of a job up to one of the lab Factors, a tidy young man with premature gray hair at his temples and a strained look, whose name was Krema. I had just returned from crawling under an autoclave to reattach some plumbing and I was dripping on his office rug.

He threw up his hands.“All right! For grief’s sake. I’ll put you on the schedule, you know where it’s posted. Take this note,” he began scrawling, “down to the bursars office and get a punch card. You’ll start at five shillings a shift, like every other assistant. Payday is every fortnight. Now get out of my office before you ruin the floor.”

The next few days, I spent every spare minute in the Archives, studying. These were to be my first set of Harmine exams and I wasn’t sure how difficult they would be. I tried to over-prepare, and fell into bed every night eye-sore and ink-stained.

The exams turned out to be...difficult. I guessed that I had done fair-to-middling and was glad for how seriously I’d taken them. After finishing with the last of them, I got back to Oakridge House and shuffled up to my room, with no thought in my mind but to sleep until I couldn’t.

Alexi was out. And—there was an envelope on my bunk, addressed to me. From Special Research. I dropped my bookbag and tore it open, tiredness forgotten. I scanned the first few lines and a smile cracked my face—stiff muscles long out of practice.

I was in!

I flopped into bed and tried to savor the glow of accomplishment, but in ten breaths I was asleep.

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I woke from a familiar nightmare of hiding and fleeing through cold, cobbled streets. It was morning. I clambered down from my bunk and hobbled to the washroom on unsteady feet. When I re-entered the room again, it was full of boys. I froze.

It was Alexi, riffling through his desk drawers for something, and several of his tall, rich friends, laughing at some joke. They all turned to look at me, and I saw them immediately filter my existence out of their worldviews and turn away again. Perfect. I clambered blearily back into my bunk and tunneled back under my blankets, trying to tune out their banter. I was mostly unsuccessful.

“—that fiddler girl who plays at the Silver Pony! Artur says he tupped her, and if she’s that easy—”

“Don’t bother trying to tempt him, Lindon, this dolt’s still hung up on that man-eating cunt Aralia Cordivar.”

There was a peal of rough laughter.

“Shut your trap, I am not!”

“Oh no? ‘Miss Cordivar, m-may I go take a piss?’ That wasn’t you, eh? A shame to manly dignity itself, Wendell, that’s what—”

Alexi interjected, “Oh lay off him, Cresswell. We’ll to the Pony tonight, all agreed?”

“To the Pony!”

“The Pony!”

I shuddered. Boys. Scary. Gross. Dumb. Annoying. It seemed like every day I was finding another reason to not be one anymore. The thought sailed clear through my groggy morning consciousness before I realized it. Alexi found whatever he was looking for and I heard them all leave noisily—without closing the door. Fucking fuck.

~ ~ ~

Second term began on a gray week of slashing rain and wind. I arrived early to Aralia Cordivar’s introductory Apomasaics class, and climbed the amphitheater rows to a seat in the back of the lecture hall to watch the other students filter in. Overall, they looked older and more senior than me, though I recognized one or two from Yvell’s class. Gradually, the seats below me filled. I spun my quill nervously. It seemed I had barely made the cut. Would I be able to keep up, let alone strike off on my own well enough to—

I stiffened, eyes widening. A student, a dark-haired girl with nut-brown skin, had just entered the hall, her head lowered—but then she raised it and her vernal eyes flashed as she scanned the rows of seats. As she did, I dropped my quill and buried my gaze in my lap, my face heating in recognition. It was her.

Of course it was her. She would be an alchemist. Otherwise this could have been too easy. I took a deep breath and shook myself a little. Realistically, I had nothing to fear from her. She could not possibly know anything about me, let alone reveal it. We were in a class together. So what? There were almost two hundred other students. All I had to do was pretend not to notice her, and we would both get through this. No more penetrating, intimate eye contact or lingering, dangerous gazes, thank you very much.

There was only one teeny problem. For some reason, I was feeling extremely...drawn to her? I kept sneaking glimpses in her direction. She was beautiful, of course, but also...I groaned quietly and cursed myself for a fool. No. No, this was not the time to fixate creepily on a girl who’d met my eyes once, by chance or accident. I imagined Kisma’s disapproving expression, floating in front of my mind’s eye.

Resolved, I focused studiously on the lecture stage. After some uncomfortable minutes of forcing myself to stare straight ahead, Aralia Cordivar entered, and staring ahead immediately became much less of a chore.

Have you ever been utterly taken by someone and, at the same time, terrified of them? She was so young, only a couple years older than me, and yet she seemed to reign here, in an absolute way that had nothing to do with her actual age.

I was on the edge of my seat for the entire lesson, and every lesson after. She taught with the energy of a cyclone, a caged tiger, snapping questions, pointing vigorously at raised hands, covering the sliding blackboard in crisp, tight equations, then heaving it aside to get at the fresh surface underneath. She paced the room, a captain in total command of her ship. I scribbled furious notes with one hand, my mind desperately leaping to catch the next twist and the next in the trail of meanings and inferences she was blazing. When she paused to rake the assembled students with her proud, golden hawk-eyes, I froze in place lest I catch her attention by moving an inch, and yet some part of me exhilarated at the thought. Then the bell would ring and she would dust off her hands and exit the room with the profound disregard of someone who had better places to be, leaving her assistants to take questions, collect, assign and otherwise administrate.

And the laboratory days…

Aralia never came. Instead she left her Special Research team assistants to run the lab components in her stead, but still...it was alchemy like I had never seen it before, like I had never been able to imagine. They showed us how to write equations to derive tables upon tables of data for modeling sublimation and avoiding reagent contraindication, something I hadn’t known was even possible. These data projections combined with yet more equations to yield ingredient ratios, precursor metabolites, even reactant unlikelyhoods. They showed us advanced factoring that allowed the distillation of a draught that could awaken certain principles of the flesh (which they termed manly) while subduing others (take a wild, eye-rolling guess at what these ones were called). They showed us a multitude of alchemical pathways for sterilization and for fertility, for accelerating puberty and for delaying it, for reversing it and for revising it. And though they did not know it, they were showing me how I might transform.

While Aralia only ever taught the technical material of Apomasaics, her team members often paused in between teaching units to make lofty remarks that sounded somewhat scripted. Actually, there was much that reminded me of listening to someone drone aloud from a Ministry of Social Hygiene booklet back home in Stuhkrad.

I knew all that rubbish by heart and had developed an automatic habit at a young age of filtering propaganda from useful information. It helped me retain very little of what was said in between learning techniques. Besides, almost all I could think of was how I could bend what they were teaching to my own purpose. I often zoned out during these stretches to think about how I would reverse-engineer the very technique they had just demonstrated so it would yield the opposite effect. It was simple. I blanked out my face and nodded every so often. Internally, I was already celebrating what I was about to get away with under their very noses.

I was actually dumbfounded at how swimmingly everything was going so far. On top of classes, I was also working several shifts a week, so I was in the labs all the time. I prepped for classes and cleaned up after them. I helped weigh out materials and distribute equipment. Much of my time was spent with a glorified industrial-scale sterile dishwasher. I had keys, I had a cover story, I had large windows of time with unsupervised access to a world-class alchemy set-up and a vast selection of medicinal-grade precursors. On top of this, there were lots of students pursuing their own private projects in the labs at odd hours. I would be one among many. And one other crucial advantage had fallen right into my lap.

A month into second term, Krema had thrust an inventory ledger into my hands and shown me how to fill out requisition forms for ordering new materials when they ran low. I had realized, all of a sudden, that all someone would need to do, if they saw me synthesizing something and wanted to find out what, would be to crack a ledger and peruse my withdrawals.

All lab assistants had access to raw materials, because regular students relied on us to fetch the precursors they needed, both in classes and out of them. When we measured out a dozen drams of sulfate, we marked it in the ledgers, along with the name of the requesting student and the date. At first I’d felt sheepish about my oversight. Then, I realized what a gift Krema had given me and I started grinning, and couldn’t stop. Now that I’d been trained on inventory, I could make the ledgers tell whatever tale I wanted.

Now, I could steal raw materials and hide the accounting inconsistencies. I could conceal my entire project. I would be invisible to any scrutiny beside a massively detailed audit. I was basically home free. Despite the bone-crushing horror-dread of being caught, I didn’t see how I could be caught. And more and more, I found myself looking forward to the thrill of getting away with it.

But the thing that really brought me to the precipice of beginning was an awareness that grew gradually, like an underground fungi, and then fruited above ground all at once, seemingly overnight. My bleak and narrow dreams of winter-dark, cobbled streets. That familiar pressed-in feeling I remembered from Stuhkrad before Gresha gave me a portal out.

Harmine was that portal—a gateway leading to a thousand possible worlds; options and possibilities no matter where I went; comfort and money all but guaranteed. This trapped feeling should never have followed me here. It was impossible.

And yet, it was back. I felt buried alive. I felt compressed beneath a mountain avalanche. The realization that I had felt like this for as long as I could remember haunted me. I marveled at the numbness I had cultivated to it, the numbness that was only just starting to slip. When I thought of a future beyond the next five years, when I thought of living past the age of, say, twenty-five, there was an endless nothing—that same absolute flatness, that same tasteless, weightless, odorless, invisible despair. And I began to realize it would keep coming back, no matter what heights and opportunities I drove myself at to avoid it.

About halfway through the term, I began to consciously feel myself being shaped around an acknowledgment—almost a surrender—that there were no other options, a kind of relieved resignation that there was really only one choice left to me.

I began to factor the schema for the substance myself, in a secret notebook that I kept tucked close against my skin, and only took out when I was sure I was alone. I labored over it, painstakingly, for a whole week, though most of that time was spent checking, double-checking, triple-checking my factoring. I checked my factoring so many times, in fact, that I could recite it in my sleep, and I was more than a little worried that I did.

As the term neared its final quarter, I fairly vibrated with the energy of my readiness. This direction I was set on felt as hard and clear and resolute as a diamond. It was yearning to be born, kicking inside of me. I needed to get it out of me and into the world. My hesitation began to chaff at me, to weigh on me like a stone hanging around my neck, growing slowly heavier every day that I did not begin.

So, I began.

At least, I tried. Gresha’s titration advice had worked a little too well on me. I had kept my gaze pointed fastidiously at only the next step, and the next, and when the precipice yawned before me suddenly, I froze. The realization slammed me in the stomach that if I had been looking at this horizon line from the beginning, I would have turned back long ago.

How do you normally change your life in this big of a way? Is there a normal way to transform completely, to pull off something as huge as—as becoming a girl? I had no idea. It was absolutely too big to think about—in order to do it all, I had to not think about it.

I went to the labs several days in a row, saying to myself that I would begin, and turning aside at the last moment. I turned left to leave the building instead of right down the corridor to the materials stockroom. Tomorrow—I’ll try tomorrow, I said to myself. Then I made it as far as the door handle to the stockroom. The next day I made it all the way to the enanthate barrel. In the end it took me over a dozen attempts before I finally worked up the courage to complete the first batch.

 

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