Chapter 10
“I guess some people are actually from Boston.”
Scowling, Yasmine threw her blue, Columbia-branded squeeze-ball at her office wall, catching it again when it boomeranged off the plaster.
“Yes, I know, Sylvia. But Bella Dragomir—”
“So I’m about to introduce you to a fascinating concept known as immigration.”
Yasmine groaned into the phone speaker loud enough to drown out the rest of Sylvia’s sentence. She caught the ball once more, set it down, and turned towards her laptop, where she’d been looking over Sylvia’s investigation.
“There’s no birth certificate,” Yasmine said petulantly as she scrolled through the abundant e-mail.
Sylvia scoffed. “Yes, because those are so readily available on the internet. The rest of what I found speaks for itself.”
Unfortunately, it did.
Sylvia had been able to dig up high school transcripts for one Arabella Dragomir at Walpole High School, class of 2014.
Just like Bella had said, Walpole was a suburb about twenty-five minutes outside of Boston.
And if she did graduate in 2014, that put her on a realistic timeline to be entering her post-doc phase this year.
Yasmine scrolled through the transcript, glancing at Bella's classes.
An A in Biology. A in Physics. B- in Spanish. Yasmine snorted. So she’s bad at something. That’s comforting.
But, everything still felt off.
“How do we know she didn’t plant this transcript for us to find?” Yasmine murmured.
“I have a better question,” Sylvia said. “Why the hell would a random Columbia post-doc be fabricating her background?”
Fair point. Not that she’d ever give Sylvia that kind of gratification.
“God, I don’t know. She’s just so damn secretive about it.”
“Okay, and? Why do you even care? Maybe she killed her family and now she’s in witness protection.
Maybe she runs a secret drug cartel. I’m pretty sure you’d still employ her in your lab regardless.
Your moral standards are incredibly flexible.
Like, your best friend meets almost every criteria for the dictionary definition of a serial killer. And we’re still buddies.”
Yasmine rolled her eyes and reached for one of the pencils lying across her desk. She chewed on the eraser.
“I’m not sure what best friend you’re talking about,” she said.
“Me, you asshole,” Sylvia spat.
Yasmine grinned.
A knock hammered at her office door.
Startled, Yasmine instinctually slammed her laptop shut and hung up on Sylvia in one fell swoop, quickly opening a notebook to try and look busy.
“Professor Sokolov.”
Oh, for the love of God.
Yasmine slowly swiveled her chair around toward the unfortunately familiar voice.
Fuming by her doorframe was none other than Professor Ford Waldorf: human male, distinguished professor in the area of biology, aged somewhere between sixty and corpse, owner of a purple midlife-crisis Ferrari that occupies two faculty parking spaces. Also, the bane of Yasmine’s academic existence.
“That would be me,” she replied, smiling without her eyes. “How can I help you today, Professor?”
“Hmm.” He made a grand show of thinking about it, furrowing his peppery eyebrows. He was almost as performative as Sylvia. “Oh, I know! How about you stop stealing my goddamn post-docs to work on your fraudulent research?”
Yasmine’s eyebrows rose comically.
Oh.
Riiight.
So, the thing about Suggesting the president of Columbia University and the Director of the NIH to give you a combined gazillion dollars in funding for your moonshot project is that—unless you also Suggest all your colleagues as well—you will become immediately hated by all of them.
Not that she really blamed them. She would probably feel the same in their shoes.
Still, that didn’t mean it wasn’t agitating. Gossip about Yasmine was pretty much the main hobby for most professors in the department, and Waldorf was the most vocal amongst them.
When a post-doc is hired, they are typically hired to work under one specific professor, in that professor’s lab, on that professor’s research. Clearly Yasmine hadn’t hired Bella, which meant…
“She’s on my grant,” Waldorf said, dramatically pointing at his chest. “My budget. My lab. Do you know how competitive it was to get her?”
At that, Yasmine sat incrementally forward in her seat. She couldn’t care less about his complaining, but if he knew something interesting about Bella…
“Why?” she said with a shrug, feigning disinterest. “Is she special or something?”
Waldorf let out a short, humorless laugh.
“Oh, like you don’t know,” he seethed. “Dragomir turned down three other Ivy League labs and an industry offer. A real one. Not your imaginary Nobel bait.”
Turned down three Ivy labs? God, as if she could get hotter…
“She came here for me. Because I have a twenty-year track record placing post-docs into tenure lines,” he continued. “Because I run a stable lab, a real lab, and I have funding that doesn’t evaporate when someone looks too closely at it.”
Yasmine withheld a laugh. He clearly didn’t know Bella at all.
Neither did Yasmine, obviously. But she knew her well enough to tell that she was not motivated in the least by stability.
If she really turned down two Ivies to be here, it was because of something much more interesting than the promise of tenure.
Yasmine frowned. Journeying down that train of thought, something at the back of her skull itched. It felt like she was forgetting something.
Trying to summon whatever it was, she grabbed her squeeze ball off her desk and began to toss it between her hands. The vein in Waldorf’s forehead protruded a bit further every time she caught it.
“Do you know where she went for undergrad?” she asked. The trail Sylvia found stopped at high school, then re-materialized at Princeton for her masters. An agitating gap lay in-between. Yasmine couldn’t stand a mystery.
He blinked, caught off guard by the question, then his scowl deepened.
“Undergrad? Why does that even matter?”
Yasmine shrugged. “Humor me, and maybe I’ll give her back.”
“You don’t have her to begin with,” he growled, smacking the doorframe.
“Careful, Waldorf.”
He seethed, curling his fingers into the wood. Yasmine was going to get her way: they both knew that already. This whole argument was just ceremonial.
Eventually, he threw his hands up. “I don’t remember. Wasn’t important.”
Yasmine rolled her eyes. Useless.
“So.” She pressed the ball between her hands, applying pressure. “Anything else?”
His eyes fluttered in disbelief. “What do you mean, anything else? So you agree? You’re going to leave her alone?”
Yasmine shrugged. “No, I don’t think I will. She wants to work in my lab, and if she really is as impressive as you say, why should I stop her?”
Waldorf’s eyes darkened, shoulders stiffening. Yasmine saw the kicked dog getting ready to bite. “Her job is tied to my funding. If she wants to leave my position, she will have to leave Columbia.”
Wow. That’s the best he’s got?
Boring.
Yasmine sighed, tiring of this circular argument. She got up from her seat, grabbed her laptop, and headed for the door.
Unfortunately, an annoying obstacle was blocking her exit.
She patted his arm delicately. “Would you mind getting out of the way?”
Waldorf spluttered, looking at her as if she was a block of wood that had just gained sentience. “Where are you going? We’re in the middle of a discussion!”
In his surprise, he took a half-step to the right, allowing her to shoulder her way through the door. She waved her hand dismissively behind herself as she left.
“Don’t worry, I’ll have some funding allocated to you so you can find a new science servant,” she called out, not bothering to watch the expression on his face. Her mind was already trained forward. She desperately needed to be at the one place on campus where no one could bother her.
***
Snapping on her nitrile gloves, Yasmine slowly lifted the lid of the tank.
“Good morning, Francesca. Hope you slept better than me,” she whispered, hand grasping around the floating mass of red spikes. The sea urchin’s spines lurched away from her fingers, allowing her to turn it over and inspect it from all sides.
Its jaw seemed in working order. No visible injuries or decay. No signs of infection.
Her eyes flitted to the sticky note on the front of the glass.
Francesca. S. franciscanus. Est. age: 120 - 130 yrs.
“And yet you still manage to look younger than Waldorf. Fascinating."
Smirking to herself, she slowly lifted the urchin out of its tank, cradling it like a baby in her hands before setting it into a shallow magnesium chloride bath to anesthetize it for sampling.
She paused, watching it bob in the solution, its spines relaxing.
She always felt bad transferring it for testing.
She imagined it must feel scared being thrust into the open air like that.
Yasmine certainly wouldn’t like it if some giant white-coated god picked her up and squeezed the oxygen out of her lungs every Tuesday.
I’m way too maternal over these things.
It was hard not to be. They were strange, inherently offputting, and also potentially the solution for extending her son’s life.
Emphasis on potentially.
Little-known fact about the red sea urchin: they are effectively immortal. Which meant, theoretically, if she could understand the mechanisms for why that was, she could design a model for creating immortality in human beings.
Well, maybe.
If it sounded stupid that she’d focus on a red sea urchin instead of herself, a human being turned vampire, let the record show that she already tried that approach.
She’d spent the last forty years rigorously punishing her body with a battery of tests every day of the week, and she’d learned almost nothing that got her any closer to replicating vampirism scientifically.
All her blood work had been regular. All her imaging scans had been unremarkable. Every marker she could measure behaved like that of an ordinary human woman in her thirties.
So she decided to shift focus. She figured if she could identify how immortality functioned in something as small and simple as a sea urchin, if she could understand what mechanisms they used to repair their cells at such astonishing rates, it would give her a better lens to go back to studying herself.
Odds are it would take years, but she had years.
Wallace didn’t, though. Wallace only had seventy more, if he was lucky.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath in, she tabbed through the latest lab results, picked up a pen and threw open her notebook. Over the course of the next two hours, she jotted down the new numbers, plugged them into the analysis program, then summarized her findings in plain English in her journal:
Nothing new.
Fuck.
It had been the same for months now. Her current experiment was showing no change.
The experiment before that had been the same.
She’d have to shift course again, find a new theory to focus on.
But, she couldn’t let herself be deterred by failure.
Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. Science takes time.
That didn’t change the fact that she needed a drink.
Against her better instincts, she peeled off her gloves, and reached for her phone.
Yasmine: do you drink?
Yasmine: let me clarify. do you drink liquids besides all the milk in my fridge?
Her foot tapped nervously on the floor as she waited for a response, her eyes gliding to Francesca, who was sloshing silently in the bath, staring up at her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Yasmine muttered.
Adult blonde: maybe
Yasmine rolled her eyes. “Can you believe this woman?”
She almost showed the sea urchin the screen to prove her point, before realizing what she was doing. It doesn’t even have eyes, Yasmine.
Yasmine: can you not be all mysterious for like 5 seconds i really need a drink
Adult blonde: hahaha
Adult blonde: ok but you’re paying
Yasmine: OBVIOUSLY
Adult blonde has sent a location on Google Maps. Would you like to open it?
Yasmine: what the hell is this place? It has a rating average of 1.47 stars
Adult blonde: it’s cheap. and compared to the one next door we probably won’t get mugged
Yasmine: what a shining endorsement
Yasmine: no if im going to pay we’re going somewhere respectable
Yasmine: meet me at my office after you’re done with your lectures and we can go there together
Adult blonde: sorry but i have to work, remember? I have a shift at the Nightingale until ten
Yasmine frowned.
Yasmine: what? why are you still working there?
Adult blonde: for money? This is america, I still have to find a way to pay for the dentist even if I’m freeloading at my boss’s house
Yasmine: ugh.
It would be so much easier if it was socially acceptable to drop a few million dollars into someone’s bank account.
Yasmine: fine ill pick you up from your shift at the job you should quit later
Adult blonde: lol… you’re such a gentleman
Yasmine took a shaky breath in, closing her eyes. Her heart was hammering in her chest for no good reason. She just—she couldn’t stop imagining Bella’s stupid pretty face smirking on the other side of the phone, giggling to herself.
Yasmine: see you at ten.