“You think the Bluehelm is responsible for my amnesia?”
“Not intentionally,” he admitted. “That doesn’t benefit her. I think memory loss is an unintended side effect of whatever they did to you. Whatever they gave you.”
Every elixir has an unintended side effect.
He’d warned me of that more than once.
“I’ve often thought back to the day your hand was cut by the stained glass, when I saw something in your blood. At the time, I attributed it to Wilder’s elixir, but…” He hesitated, as if carefully weighing his next words. “The Alchemary has ways of getting what they want out of their alchemists, and of repressing any part that isn’t valued.”
A chill washed over me. “You think that that night, the Bluehelm gave me something, and it backfired.”
He nodded. “I don’t know what else could have done this to you. I don’t know where you went when you left, or what happened. And that has plagued me ever since.”
“What happened that night, Desmond? Tell me what youdoknow of the night I lost my memory. I left those things here?” I gestured at the crate full of material.
“No, they were already here. You did not come to my apartment that night. The last I saw of you was when you gathered your things and stomped out of the lab, your face flaming with anger.”
“Why was I angry?”
“Because we’d fought.”
“About what?”
Pain churned behind his eyes for so long that I did not think he was going to answer.
“The night before that—two nights before you woke up with my brother and without your memory—I told you I loved you.”
The ache in my chest threatened to swallow me whole. “And…what?” My voice held almost no volume. “I didn’t believe you?”
Desmond held my gaze, pain churning behind his eyes. “You didn’t believe inlove.”
I could not speak. I could only inhale the rich scents of my untouched meal, my fingernails digging into the woodgrain of the table while I tried to make sense of his bewildering statement. While I waited for him to explain.
“I told you I loved you, and you laughed,” Desmond finally said. “But you were not amused. You looked sad, as if youpitiedme. You said that the perception of love, like any other emotion, was just alchemy of the human body. That it was all to do with micro-volumes of various metals in our body’s fluids. In sweat, and blood, and tears, and other secretions. You said you had proven it. You had distilled all of what we call emotion into various solutions and had proven that they react like elements in alchemical experiments. That, you said, was the secret to your uniquely effective distillation of beyn—the inclusion of specific combinations of micro metals collected during moments of strong human emotion.”
I sat straighter, gaze narrowed on him from across the table. Something tugged at my memory, like the plucking of a harp string echoing deep into my brain. “Thatwas how I made beyn? The formula Wilder said I would not let anyone else see?”
“Yes.”
Frustration stirred inside me like a storm gathering strength. “Why have you never told me that?”
Desmond exhaled slowly, appearing distinctly uncomfortable with what he was about to say. “Telling you would have done no good, because even if I wanted to return that ability to you—and I do not—I couldn’t have. I don’t have your formula,” he said. “I cleaned out your lab space, but there wasn’t a single note relevant to your research. As far as I can tell, you kept it all in that journal, which—it turns out—is written entirely in some code even you can no longer interpret.”
“That is accurate,” I mumbled.
“And because I did not approve of your methods.”
Irritation narrowed my gaze on him. “They were not yours to approve of!”
“Yet I stand by my judgment.” His jaw clenched with an echo of the frustration I’d seen in him weeks ago, when he’d declared that I did not deserve my place here, even if I’d earned it.
“You owe me an explanation,” I insisted. “So that I can judge my methods for myself. How did I collect these emotions, in order to distill them?”
With a sigh, he glanced at the wooden box on the floor. “What did you find in that crate?”
I shrugged. “Folded cloth, of various sorts.”
“A set of bedsheets? Did you see those?”
