Chapter 21
Desmond met us on the second floor and led us into his laboratory, where Wilder set my belongings on the nearest table.
He shook his brother’s hand, and I got an odd feeling—part nostalgia, part anxiety—as I watched them standing face-to-face.
They said nothing to each other. Not a word.
They seemed to have come to some sort of unspoken understanding, but it felt like the kind of compromise where both parties wind up not happy but equally disgruntled and resigned.
Wilder gave me a hug, then left the room. A moment later, his footsteps echoed as they pounded down the stairs.
Desmond and I faced each other in awkward silence from opposite sides of an empty lab table until Wilder’s steps had completely faded. Until we heard the distant, soft thump of the huge front door, one floor below.
“I was afraid you’d revoke your invitation, after yesterday.” After I’d stood up to him in front of the Bluehelm and my professors.
“I’m disappointed by your lack of faith in me. I would never go back on my word to you.”
“You keep trying to get me kicked out, Desmond.” I frowned up at him, unable to understand the series of contradictions that seemed to form his entire being. “That makes you difficult to trust.”
He frowned. “Why would it? I’ve been nothing but honest about my efforts.”
“Yet less than transparent about the reason.”
“That is not the same as dishonest.”
I couldn’t fault his logic. But neither did I like it. “You are infuriating,” I said, staring directly up at him from across the table, my hands splayed on the surface.
His left brow rose, and when the corresponding corner of his mouth matched it, I found myself unnerved by his resemblance to Wilder. “Well, we seem to have that, at least, in common.”
Desmond left the laboratory door open while he showed me my work space, and I could only stare around the room.
I’d been there before, of course, but being welcomed into the space felt different than sneaking in.
Desmond’s lab was as large as the entire student lab on the third floor of the Seminary, and he was allotting me a full third of it, when I’d only had a single table before.
He gave me a tour of the supply room—he had a large closet, where the students only had a wall cabinet—and showed me where my supplies had been stored.
“But you’re welcome to anything you need from my stores as well,” he added, one hand propped against a wall hook from which hung several thick aprons.
“Though I’d ask you to start making your own beyn.
Not because I’m selfish with mine, but because distillation of one’s own beyn is the hallmark skill of any elite-level alchemist, and thus it is a worthy pursuit. ”
Which I knew, of course. Just as he clearly knew that I had not yet begun redeveloping my own formula, since being struck with amnesia.
“Thank you.” I stared at an array of equipment I hadn’t even glanced at the day before, when I’d only needed what was laid on out his drying rack.
This time, my gaze skimmed vials of brightly colored powdered ingredients and already-mixed, carefully labeled suspensions.
Burners, and beakers, and vials. The immense athanor, which I would only have to share with one person.
And I burst into tears.
Desmond gaped at me, clearly perplexed, while I tried to reclaim my composure. “What…?” he began, hands opening uselessly at his sides. “What is the concern? Is the supply closet lacking?”
“Quite possibly.” I wiped tears from my face with the backs of my fingers. “But if so, I would have no way of knowing. And I’m fairly certain that even before I lost my memory, that wasn’t the kind of problem I would cry over.”
“That’s accurate,” Desmond said. “But you seem somewhat changed since then. Beyond simply missing your memory.”
“I suspect I’m more than somewhat changed.”
“No.” He crossed his arms over his tunic, firmly anchoring his opinion with the display of authority. “You are only somewhat changed. The Amber Fallbrook I knew and”—he cleared his throat, his cheeks flushing slightly—“respected is still in there.”
“And do you respect this version of me? This version that flounders, and breaks windows, and bursts into uncontrolled fits of emotion?” I’d had no idea that I cared about his answer until I asked the question.
Then, suddenly, I seemed to hang on his silence, balanced on the precipice of it, arms flailing over the chasm as I waited for words that might pull me back from the edge.
Or send me plummeting over.
“As odd as it might seem to you, I think I respect this version of you even more. Though I admit I hardly know what to do with the tears.” He frowned at my damp cheeks. “However you always seemed to.”
I frowned up at him, clutching the strap of my satchel until the leather cut into my palm. “How could you possibly respect me, diminished as I’ve become?”
And what on earth had I done with tears?
Desmond sighed. “The Amber I knew a month ago was brilliant, in every sense of the word. She was clever and shrewd. Vibrant, luminous, and intense. She was vivid, arresting, and colorful. You are still all of those things.”
I shook my head, fully prepared to argue, but he went on.
“Yet that Amber Fallbrook had never faced a true hardship. Things came easily to her. Words. Theories. Experimental techniques.” He paused, and his gaze seemed to retreat from mine. “Choices.”
Choices?
“That Amber didn’t have to struggle with anything, so she didn’t have much sympathy for those who did.”
“I was cruel?” My heart ached at the thought, and yet some angry impulse made me want to debate the premise.
Which was exactly his point.
“Not intentionally,” Desmond said. “You were…driven. You saw everything in binary terms. Right and wrong. Efficient and inefficient. Worthy or unworthy.”
“Worthy of what?”
“Of thought. Of your time. It made you an exceptional alchemist. The ideal, in many ways. And yet this Amber seems to embody an element the previous version was missing.”
“Compassion?”
He nodded. “Or consideration, at least.”
“I admit, I don’t like the thought that I was cruel. Or even inconsiderate.” Though my interactions with several of my classmates so far seemed to confirm Desmond’s claim. “But compassion isn’t helping me recover my skill. Or my memory.”
He studied me, leaning with one hip against an empty workstation, his arms crossed over the front of his thick, stained safety apron. “Which is it you want? Your skill or your memory?”
“Am I limited to one?”
“I’ve never known you to be limited by anything.” His focus narrowed intensely on me, and his gaze suddenly felt bottomless.
I sucked in a breath, shocked by the abrupt sensation of a plunge, as if the very floor had disappeared from beneath my feet.
“But even if you aren’t able to recover your memory,” he continued, “there’s no real loss in being forced to relearn alchemy from the beginning.”
Cold fear crawled up my spine. “Of course there is! There’s lost time and lost skill! Both of which could lead to the loss of my life when the Black Trial comes. But you aren’t thinking of that, are you? Because you don’t think I should do it.”
He blinked at me, calmly enough to be vastly irritating.
“I am thinking of that, because I know you will do it. My point is that it is highly unlikely, statistically speaking, for you to learn alchemy the same way twice, and in relearning, you will gain techniques and aptitudes you missed or dismissed the first time around. Given your new understanding of the concepts of struggle and disadvantage, it’s entirely likely that this time you won’t undervalue the slower, less direct route to a solution, by which avenue you might discover entirely new ideas and options. ”
“You’re saying I should let myself meander, in alchemy? That I should get lost in scientific theory?”
Or perhaps in life? That was a romantic notion, but…
“I’m saying that maybe this time you won’t dismiss that idea entirely.”
I nodded slowly. “That seems like a valuable lesson to learn, in certain circumstances. When one has time to meander. When one’s life is not on the line.
” I lifted an accusatory brow at him. “Say, if one were a staff researcher with stable employment, a huge private lab, and bright career prospects.”
Desmond somehow managed to scowl even as one corner of his mouth turned up.
“The most efficient route in my circumstance, however, seems to be to recover my memory, because with it would come all of my skill.” I crossed both arms over my chest before adding, “Wilder agrees.”
He scowled. “A bit of an irony, considering that his skill can mostly be attributed to instinct given free rein. Pure aptitude, both untempered and undisciplined.”
“And yet he has already contributed quite a bit to the field of Panacea, whether or not the Alchemary recognizes his work.”
“Indeed,” Desmond said, and I could not contain my surprise.
“And with that statement, you’ve made my point.
While you wait for your memory to come back—or while you work actively toward that goal—would your time not also be well spent relearning alchemy with an eye toward paths and possibilities you likely did not take the first time? ”
“That does make a certain sense,” I finally admitted. “Learning alchemy via new pathways. And yet I am at a loss for how to begin.”
“Well, if you will allow me to help you…?”
“Yes. Please.” I wanted to regain my former skill level and standing—to survive the trials—more than I wanted to be able to say I’d done it all on my own.
Though that was still true. I had done it on my own, before I’d been robbed of that knowledge.
“I understand that you’ve been quite literally burning the midnight oil in your studies. That you’ve largely caught up on vocabulary and concepts. On at least Fundamentals-year theory.”
“Yes, but so far, that isn’t unlocking an understanding of higher-level concepts.”