Toolkeepers’ notation. And my mother’s native language.
I slid quietly out of bed, careful not to disturb Desmond, and I settled onto the cold stone floor in front of the fireplace with my coded journal, pages angled so that they were illuminated by the fire.
And I realized, suddenly, that Past Amber hadn’t merely given me a signal. Not just a message. She’d unlocked the vault of my memory and opened the door just a sliver. Just enough to restore recognition of the languages I used to know.
Only, Past Amber wasn’t some stranger in control of my memories. She was me.I’dsomehow loosened my own hold on the vault in my head. Almost certainly because of what Desmond had told me.Knowinghad unlocked some small portion ofremembering.
The writing in my journal was neither my father’s Toolkeepers’ notation nor my mother’s native language but a strange and uneven combination of the two, so muddled that individual words were often formed of symbols from both tongues. No one who did not know both languages would ever have been able to decode the text.
It took me a while to parse out the first few pages, but the more I read, the clearer it became, and though I still could not remember writing it, Iunderstoodit.
I spent hours hunched in front of the fire, reading about Past Amber’s theories and experimentation. About her triumphs and failures. About manipulations of her classmates, which she did not consider cruel, because of their potential to benefit all of mankind.
I remembered my odd impulse to keep my father’s handkerchief. And Yoslyn’s claim that I’d lent my handkerchief to Adria afterI’dmade her cry. I read about my development of a new “enhanced” beyn and my trials of it in every conceivable usage. And finally, as Desmond rolled over in the bed to face me, blinking sleep from his eyes, I turned the last page, my gaze racing over the cryptic text.
“Amber?” He sat up, feet flat on the cold stone floor, copper- flecked eyes swimming with unease. “What are you doing?”
I closed the journal and stared up at him, stunned. “I know what I did with the gold-flecked suspension.”
“Youwhat?” Desmond frowned, as if I’d spoken utter nonsense. And the truth was not far off.
“I drank it,” I repeated as I hung his kettle over the fire. “Will you please portion out some leaves?” I waved one hand at the teacups lined up on a wall shelf mounted above his table.
“Youdrankthe suspension?”
“Yes. I mean, I must have. I wrote in the journal that that was my intent, and as near as I can tell, I wrote that just as you were walking into the laboratory that night. The last sentence isn’t even properly punctuated, as if you interrupted me right as I scratched out the final word.”
He stalked to the end of the room, then spun and paced back, without going anywhere near the teacups. “But why would you—?”
“Because that was the only way I knew of to square the circle. My theory, at that point, was that there is noonePhilosopher’s Stone. There is no one formula. No one technique. I realized, as I was contemplating Lord Calyx’s journals and my own path forward, once I’d made the silver-and-gold solution, that if the Philosopher’s Stone is intended to elevate something—someone—to its highest form, the only way to square the circle would be to imbibe the solution. To let it simmer within the human crucible and form alivingcompound.”
The look he gave me was part wonder and part horror. “But… that would mean thatyouare the Philosopher’s Stone.”
“Yes.” I nodded. Then I shook my head. “And no. My theory— mine, not Past Amber’s—is that I have turned myself intoaPhilosopher’s Stone. I have accomplished a higher form ofmy ownbeing. In theory. But that would likely look and feel—and function—differently for anyone else. I think that the Philosopher’s Stone isn’t one stone that can elevate everything it touches. It’s the result of one person’s grinding effort to do the best alchemy they can, and the result is as much about how much of your own heart and soul you put into that effort as about what the solution itself does. That’s the spiritual part. The mind is the intellectual effort to create it. And the body…” I shrugged. “Well, you have to drink it—or maybe you could smear it all over yourself, like a full-body salve—to square the circle.”
“Your blood,” Desmond whispered. “It was flecked with… something reflective. That’s what I saw that day, when you sat bleeding on my desktop. I couldn’t tell whether it looked silver or gold, in the light of my lantern, but it was definitely metallic.”
“Thathasto be because it’s in my system.”
“And your antidote from the Black Trial,” Desmond mused.
“What about it?” I asked as I finally took the teacups down myself.
“You sprayed blood into it, when you coughed. That’s why it worked better than it should have. Why no one could replicate it. Youarethe Philosopher’s Stone, and you literally coughed tiny bits of yourself into the antidote. So it worked like it would have if you’d made it with your enhanced beyn.”
“Yes!” I spun toward him, the cups clattering in my hand. “Thatmustbe what happened!”
“And the breathable water!” Desmond’s eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them. “That’s how you did it.”
“What? No.” I untied the cloth from atop his jar of dried tea leaves and poured a generous amount into each cup. “I didn’t do that. The prevailing theory is that one of the professors or staff researchers—”
“No, it was you,” Desmond said. “I knew it was you, almost immediately. But I couldn’t figure out how you’d done it. You must have bled or sweated into your viable air catalyst, and when you’d emptied your first air bladder and let it go, it opened—”
“Exposing that catalyst to the water…” Stunned, I sank into the nearest chair. “You think that was enough to catalyze the entire arena full of water?”
“It must have been. And it’s likely why you recovered from the toxic fumes, when Wilder did not.” He grabbed my hand and squeezed so hard my bones ground together. “Amber, we haveno ideawhat the limits of the Philosopher’s Stone are.”
“Well, we do know one limit,” I said. “It seems that if you drink the metallic solution, you are at a high risk of wiping out your own memory.”
