“I’m not going to leave you here alone.”
“I promise I won’t burn your lab down.”
He chuckled softly, and I found myself smiling, despite the fear growing like a tumor inside me. “I meant that I’m not going to abandon you here.”
“You don’t even think I should be doing this.”
“In part, because I don’t want you to die.” His voice deepened in a way that echoed through me, triggering quakes like the rumble of the earth itself before entire towns heaved into collapse. “Leaving you to struggle alone would be counter to that goal.”
“Of keeping me alive?”
Desmond nodded and stepped back, his copper-eyed gaze holding mine. “Exactly.”
“Do you go to this much trouble for all of your childhood friends?”
He blinked, and something visceral passed behind his eyes, swallowing his smile like a beast leaping from the ocean to devour a bird. “No one haseverbeen as much trouble as you are, Amber.” But then he seemed to brush the thought aside. “Also, I have no other friends.”
“You…?”
He shrugged, as if that statement meant no more to him than announcing that we had run out of clean beakers. “Alchemy—the Alchemary, at least—does not prize personal relationships. You might have noticed that the staff researchers are all unmarried? The theory is that relationships get in the way of true science. They serve to distract.”
“I see.” In truth, Icouldsee that concept reflected in interactions I’d observed but never truly considered. And in the fact that while many of the professors were married, none of the staff researchers, as far as I knew, had spouses or children. They all lived in dormitory-style on-campus apartments.
Students, however, clearly weren’t yet expected to cast off personal relationships in order to better serve alchemy. So, why did I feel so isolated among them?
“Is that why, aside from Wilder, my cohort seems to want little to do with me?” I asked. “Did I simply take alchemy more seriously than the rest?” Had I already chosen my craft over camaraderie?
Desmond gave me a strangely assessing look, as if he were trying to divine the origin of my question in order to know how to answer. “No. And yes. Respectively. Most students take alchemy seriously, but most also have friendships and other personal relationships.” He turned abruptly back to my primary workstation. “You’re getting in your own way.”
I frowned as I followed him to the table. “What do you mean?”
“You’re second-guessing yourself. Depending too much upon what you know and not enough on your instincts and memory. You’ve done all this before, whether you remember it or not.”
“But Ido notremember it, so those experiences are of no use to me.”
“That’s not true.” Desmond’s quiet smile burned in me like the spark from a flint strike. “Do you remember the day you woke up with no memory? You and I left the Dormitory together, to go see Dr. Winhoof.”
“Yes.” I remembered, but I had no idea what point he was making.
“You turned directly and specifically in the direction of the Conservatory that morning, all on your own, though you had no memory of ever being on the Alchemary campus.”
“I—” I frowned, trying to remember that moment. My memory since that morning was virtually unimpeachable, but I had little recall of events that hadn’t made enough impression on me to form a memory.
“The same is true of my lab space.”
“I turned in the right direction?” I guessed with a smile, to cover the flustered feeling chewing on my very nerve endings.
“Essentially,” Desmond said. “From the first moment you stepped into the space, you seemed to know where everything was stored. You haven’t once struggled to find a component or a piece of equipment, though I didn’t point them all out during the tour.”
“That’s likely because this space is impeccably organized. I give you credit in that regard. I could not imagine a more logical and better organized storage system, and—”
“Youorganized this lab,” Desmond said, this time with a broad, almost gloating smile.
“I…?”
“Yes. When you moved into the space last year, you declared my organizational skills to be utterly subpar, and you set about remedying that. Without asking permission, I might add.”
My cheeks burned like banked coals as embarrassment overwhelmed his point entirely. “I do apologize for overstepping.”
