To live or die at loreli.., p.26
To Live Or Die At Lorelight Academy, page 26
“What price are you willing to pay?” a voice in a dark place within me asks, “to survive and claim the future you think you so deserve?”
I shake my head out of it.
I’ll figure something out.
“Wish me luck,” I tell the skeletons as I leave, forcing myself to glance a bit longer than comfortable at their ankles.
Just to learn a few extra things before we do what we need to do.
Then I grab one last tool, and leave the room.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
Farah has been staring at the Simulacrum Semicorpus for a few minutes now.
I don’t blame her.
It’s a hard choice.
“And you would do it?” she asks, turning to look at me.
She’s asked more or less the same question a few times now. “If you wanted me to, I would. I’m not a doctor, but I know enough, and we have enough supplies to do it relatively safely.”
She nods, and glances down at her foot.
I feel the sickening, stomach-twisting feeling again.
Disgust, sadness, nerves, and above all, sympathy.
“Would…would you do it?” she asks suddenly, looking at me with sad, emerald-green eyes.
“I just said, Farah,” I start to say. “We’d make it as safe as we—”
“That’s not what I mean,” she says. “Not this time. I mean…if you were in my position, would you do it?”
I let out a soft breath of air.
“I think I would absolutely do it,” I tell her, holding her gaze.
A brief look of shame spreads across her face. I keep talking.
“I think I would do it,” I repeat, “but I have no idea, Farah. It’s a big deal, and I have a feeling it’s the kind of situation it’s a little different to actually be in yourself.”
She nods.
“But I want to get out of here,” I continue. “And if I died in here because I chose wrong…”
I let the thought hang.
“But if you risked it…” she says. My stomach turns again, and the sympathy comes in waves. This is the reason the choice is difficult. “Broken bones heal.” Her voice is quiet. “Eventually.”
“Eventually they do.”
“And if you decided not to do it,” she continues, “and you make it out alive, you…you can still walk for the rest of your life after.”
“Right.”
I swallow the lump in my throat. She does the same.
“That’s the operable word, though, isn’t it?” I ask. “The concept that it all hinges on: If. If you get out of here alive with leg intact, it will heal eventually.”
I let the thought simmer and sink in for a little while, and realize something. Something that might help.
“I’d rather make it out alive with a missing limb that didn’t need to go than lie dying on the ground at Lorelight thinking the Semicorpus could have saved me. Of those two regrets? I’d gladly take the first.”
Farah blinks and nods.
“And—” I add, with a smile, “if I somehow, despite everything, conquered all this danger and death, or even avenged Lorelight at the end of it, all with the Semicorpus? I’d make sure they let me keep the damn thing.” I nod toward the sphere of steel that looks so solid right now but I know is capable of moving like liquid gel.
Farah laughs.
“Oh, yeah,” I encourage. “This thing’s not going back in a glass case in Yoostie. You’d have to bury me with it.”
Farah laughs too, and sniffs, and wipes away a single tear that’s leaked from her eye. That tells me she’s made up her mind.
I think she realizes it, too.
“Knock me the fuck out,” she commands.
“Shall do.”
“I don’t want to feel a single speck of pain,” she presses. “Before—during—after.”
“We’ve got enough here to keep a rhinoceros asleep for a week.”
“Good,” she warns. “Because if I get grumpy I will charge you like a rhino.”
“On your brand-new foot!”
Her smile falters a little.
“What are you gonna do with the old one? Burn it?”
“It’s up to you, isn’t it?” I ask.
“You’re the doctor.”
“That’s true,” I say. “I am officially a licensed and registered doctor, with a medical degree, so I do know best.”
After a laugh, I share my plan.
“I’m gonna freeze it,” I say quietly. “Just in case we can…we can ever…yeah.”
“Yeah,” Farah says, eyes downcast. Then she looks back up at me fiercely. “And if it was unnecessary, and we make it out alive, I’ll keep it as a trophy. Commemorating how I was willing to do whatever it takes.”
“Good. Perfectly sane. Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
I’ve chosen and cleaned one of the rooms on Yoostie’s first floor. The Lounge has too many contaminants. The second floor medical office itself is still on a floor that’s teeming with ferals. The kitchen, while having no shortage of supplies, is not the kind of place for something like this.
I’ve also chosen this room because it has a large fireplace. I’ve stacked it and started building the fire already, with plenty of stock to keep the flame hot. I’ll need it as hot as I can make it for when I…cauterize the wound.
Everything is ready.
A bedsheet on the draconic middle walkway for pacing professors that Farah will lie down upon.
I could pace that walkway myself, just about now. Anxiety. Not just for this, but for the lingering questions—
When will you be faced with a similar choice?
When it comes time to survive, what price are you willing to pay?
Am I willing to sacrifice my own leg?
Am I willing to sacrifice…
I glance down at the table, and the girl drinking from the cup of chosen anesthetic I’ve given her.
Did my advice sway her? Guide her to making a decision she otherwise wouldn’t have made?
Amongst my own sacrifices…did I just sacrifice Farah’s ability to walk for the rest of her life?
“Okay,” she says, handing me the cup, and I fill it up with another measured dose. I’ve done the reading from the journals in the office. I’ve measured the doses as best I can. I’ve read up on the surgery—laughable and potentially disastrous as that would be.
There’s so much guesswork, though.
Even for the most straightforward sentences in the journal, I find myself asking if certain steps happen before or after certain other steps, if certain aspects change when amputating at the knee versus ankle, or the worst type of question of all: What do I do if this or that goes wrong?
The journal hedges against a few common mistakes. Just because the writer is brilliant, and has a surplus of common sense.
But the potential chain of events caused by my ineptitude and lack of education and practice cannot be understated.
The tools are ready.
They’re gruesome—gruesome ends require gruesome tools, I suppose. Even if for the sake of helping others. Crude as the tools seem, I’m aware that most of the sense comes from the crudeness of the hand that wields them.
“Okay,” I say when Farah finishes the second dose.
“Okay,” she says. “Is it gonna hurt?”
“Nope.”
“Good,” she says, slurring the word slightly. “Freeze it, because I’m gonna keep it.”
“Will do.”
“I’m gonna keep it as a trophy,” she says, eyes shut, words slurring almost into imperceptibility. “And I’ll keep it next to Sampson’s head.”
“Sounds good.”
“I don’t even care if I die,” she says. “I’m gonna kill him.”
…What?
“We’ll get him,” I encourage.
“I know…him…” she slurs. “I hate him…for…this…He can’t be allowed…to live…”
“We’ll get him,” I say again.
“You know for you and me and if we…it doesn’t matter…so lon…so long as…so much as…smuchas…smuch…smuch…summmm. We kill…”
…And, gone.
Farah’s head lolls to the side.
I run a few of the tests to make sure that she’s under.
“Okay,” I whisper to myself.
“See you when you wake up,” I tell her.
Then I begin.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Farah opens her eyes.
I thought for a while that she wouldn’t.
I have been sitting in the corner of the room, my head buried in my hands. It’s done, and…and…
I wipe my eyes and look back down at my feet.
I didn’t do a very good job.
I’m not sure exactly which steps I screwed up on. I don’t think any particular one.
Just doing everything a little bit wrong.
A little bit unsteady in the hand. Shaky in the mind. One step to the next, making my way through the procedure.
Things became so…
…so hectic.
I didn’t realize the problem I’d face. I thought it would be blood loss. And in a way, the problem was blood loss.
But the biggest problem was the time. The pressure. The loss of blood causing the clock to tick down.
It wasn’t until I was mid-surgery that I realized some steps required too many hands.
One hand had to hold a tool, and the other had to hold something stable. But then a third hand had to switch tools, and a fourth hand would pinch such and such artery.
Nurses.
Other doctors.
Seems obvious.
Realizing I didn’t have enough hands would have been crisis enough.
But I had to realize I didn’t have enough hands while Farah bled on the table below me.
It’s done, I tell myself. You figured it out.
And I did.
But the chaos has a cost.
I had to move things around, during the operation. Had to move supplies and materials into a different configuration than I had set them in the room previously.
The chest of ice, meant to keep Farah’s foot in the event that we could keep it frozen and reattach it through surgery or magic later, was moved around in my frantic rearrangement.
It wasn’t until after the deed was done, and Farah was stable, that I realized I had moved the ice chest right next to the fire, which I’d kept hot enough to cauterize the wound.
It had been hours.
I know little of magic. But Farah knows quite a bit more. And unless there’s magic out there beyond what she knows of, she won’t be walking on that foot ever again. Won’t be walking normally ever again.
That’s the price of my ineptitude.
The consequences of this risk.
There is no chance, now.
“…Will?” Farah groans.
I glance over.
She’s been in and out of consciousness a few times. But she’s never spoken.
“Yeah,” I say quietly.
“What happened?”
I feel a pit in my stomach.
“I cut off your foot, Farah.”
A long pause.
“Oh.”
Then she falls back asleep.
“…Will?” Farah asks.
It’s been another two hours since she last spoke.
“Yes, Farah?”
“What happened?”
I open my mouth to respond.
“Did it work?”
My lips work soundlessly.
“Yes,” I croak out. “I…”
I don’t want to burden her with my guilt. Not until she’s more awake. But I can’t help it.
“I couldn’t save the foot.”
Farah frowns, and I can see her brain working to overpower the anesthetic causing it to move so sluggishly.
“We cut it off,” she says.
“Right.”
She frowns. “The…ice?…Was gonna be a trophy.”
“Right,” I say. “That…didn’t work out.”
She frowns. “But we’ll reattach it after.”
“No, Farah.”
Her frown deepens, and she seems agitated.
“I thought we were going to put it back,” she says. “After.”
“That’s not going to happen. I made a mistake.”
“But if I can’t put it back after…then…then how…do I have…one foot?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes are swimming.
“But I’m gonna have a new foot.”
“No,” I tell her. “I made a mistake, Farah. I didn’t freeze it in time.”
“No,” she says, and tones of a suppressed horror work their way past the anesthetic. “You said I was going to have a new foot.”
Then I realize what she means.
The Simulacrum Semicorpus.
“Oh,” I say. “That new foot.”
“You’re so funny, Will,” Farah says. “I knew…I knew you were kidding.”
“I couldn’t save your foot, Farah.”
I can’t let this point go. Maybe it’s unfair of me to deliver it to her now, when she can’t fully process. It makes it clear that my motivations are selfish. To unburden myself. But I still can’t let it go.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says, dismissing it. “You tried…I’m sure. And none of this matters.”
“None of this matters?”
Farah shakes her head in an exaggerated fashion, like she started the movement and can’t stop the momentum of her own shaking head. It makes her look like a confident toddler answering in the negative.
“Nope,” she says. “We have important things to do.”
“I guess so.”
“I’m gonna cut off his foot,” Farah says. “And his head.”
“Okay,” I say, swallowing. “If that’ll make you feel better.”
She considers this.
“I don’t think I feel anything.”
“That’s the anesthetic.”
“Oh.”
She wakes up again after twenty minutes, and asks me how the operation went. She can’t remember the conversation we just had. I say the same things, only a little better this time.
She says the same things, too, and seems a few levels more aware. She internalizes the fact that I couldn’t save the foot this time, and tells me it doesn’t matter. This time, though, she leaves out some of the more nihilistic vagaries, and some of the more gruesome things she clearly plans on doing to Sampson.
She’s smart.
She’s kind.
She’s forgiving.
Our third conversation she’s fully roused. It’s been eight hours since the surgery.
She doesn’t bring up Sampson this time.
She doesn’t say anything like, “It doesn’t matter, none of this matters,” and instead says things like, “We knew we would have to do difficult things to survive,” and, “Considering you have no training, you did as well as you possibly could have,” and, “I knew the risks, and we’re doing this because I have a replacement available.”
It’s all much more comforting than the type of things she said when coming out of the anesthetic, but the abrupt shift in…in existential philosophy she seems to be exhibiting is more than a little nerve-racking.
The Semicorpus sits on the bed near her foot.
It’s Farah who’s going to be the one to activate it. Farah’s will and magic ability will shape the Semicorpus into the supernatural prosthetic it’s supposed to be.
For now she needs to rest.
For a little while, actually.
The pain is going to be intense for a while. In theory, the Semicorpus should actually help with that somewhat. It should interact with the mind somehow, convince it that nothing is wrong. That will affect how Farah feels pain.
But there will be pain, and a considerable amount.
The journal for the surgery suggests bedrest for several days. The journal on the Semicorpus doesn’t tell me anything useful about how it should change the advice of the former.
Farah seems cognizant, now.
Tired, but cognizant.
Night has fallen.
“I’m going to do a quick lap,” I tell her. “Make sure the hole to the second floor is still boarded up, make sure the tunnel is still doing okay. I’ll be back soon.”
“I’ll just sit here, I guess,” Farah says with a sigh and a smile. “And practice working this.”
She wiggles her toes.
The toes on her steel foot.
The musculature is amazing. The fidelity of the reproduction is mind-boggling.
And eerie.
“Don’t spend too much energy on it,” I tell her, following a few brief tidbits of general advice. “You’re going to be weak for a while.”
“It’s actually not so bad,” Farah says. “I can…I can feel from it. It’s muted, but I can feel the sheets, the hard floor…I don’t care if it drains me. It’s a good coping mechanism.”
“Okay, well,” I begin, gathering a few supplies just in case things go south on my quick lap around the doors and tunnels, “if it’s working out so well, no point in jeopardizing the process of getting better again by sapping yourself of what little energy you’re going to have.”
Farah pouts.
“Here,” I tell her, rifling through the unmarked journals until I find the pair I’m looking for. “A little light reading for you while I’m gone.”
Farah raises her eyebrow.
“Sampson is in the visitor logs for the medical office.”
I realize it’s a mistake as soon as I mention it.
I even see Farah flex her new steel foot, curl metallic toes in anger and fury at the mention of Sampson’s name.
“Is that so?” she asks quietly.
Well, I’ve already come this far.
“Yeah,” I say with a sigh. “Apparently a bit of an unorthodox visit, though I haven’t…haven’t had a chance to look into the details.”
Farah snatches the journals from my hand eagerly, and opens them, spreading them on her lap.
I’m still lingering by the blanket-layered stone where Farah’s resting when she glances up at me.
