For a while, she lived in fear. Maybe she’d angered Maclan, leaving like that. He had made something quite clear to her that night: if she ever spoke publicly about what happened, he would kill her. And given what she’d witnessed him do, the sorcery he’d done to the door, the way he’d altered the air in the room so that her cries went unheard—what else could he do to her? To Sam?
Alchemy,he’d called it. Alchemy, a myth, except she’d experienced it firsthand, knew how it could hurt her.
Besides, even if she did speak out, who could she tell? Who would even believe her? No one else in the building would have heard a sound come from Maclan’s office. As he had said, the police can’t convict an impossible crime.
She worried until she gave herself headaches. She tossed with nightmares,dreaming of cruel hands and cold eyes. Would Maclan even let her just quit like this? She didn’t know what kind of retribution he might seek, whether he might come looking for her, and for weeks after she quit she imagined a knock at her door and seeing him through the peephole.
But he didn’t show up. And after a while, she realized that he didn’t care to go looking for her because he’d already gotten what he wanted from her. She wasn’t worth the effort. In a few more months, maybe he wouldn’t remember her at all.
She applied for other jobs. She tried not to think about the factory anymore. In the end, she got a job at Mandarin Palace Chinese Food and started again from the bottom. And there, at the bottom, she made a quiet promise to herself, that her daughter would not end up in the same kind of room that she had ended up in, that no amount of money or prestige would be worth that cost. She promised that, for any price, for any sacrifice, no matter what that might mean, no matter what she had to do, she would keep Sam safe.
A bioalchemist is only as good as their force of personality. The stronger their character, the more powerfully their transmutation affects their receiver.
The Evolution of Bioalchemyby Democritus, 1869
