Page 42 of This Vicious Hunger

“Close isn’t the same as there ,” Olea says, and she sounds just like Petaccia. “I have provided her with strain after strain, different genera and families. I thought the answer was in the plants, not the carrier.”

“Petaccia is convinced it’s the carrier.”

“I know. But.” Olea sighs, blowing her hair off her face. She looks so old when she does it, ancient and wizened and sad. “Either way it’s not working and I’m so, so tired.”

“Florencia will find a solution,” I insist. “She will find a cure, for the world—and for you.”

“Maybe.” Olea wilts and my heart breaks. “But Florencia doesn’t have to live with it like I do. And I honestly don’t know how much longer I can.”

Every second without touching Olea is agony.

At first the pain is physical. It is like the lash of a thousand whips, my skin so sensitive to sunlight that it opens with the gentlest touch.

I’m dizzy and sick in unpredictable waves, always worse during the daylight hours, though it returns with a vengeance if I stay too long in the garden at night.

It is a balancing act, razor-sharp pain on either side of the wire.

And then, slowly, as the toxins begin to metabolise in my body and the physical symptoms subside, it is in my heart that I feel the pangs of longing. I am not acclimatising fast enough. I need her, and I need her now.

The garden calls to me, sweet whispers on the evening breeze; I spend my days in Petaccia’s labs, my lectures long forgotten, stacks of notes and microscope slides, blisters on my fingertips from burning solutions blended to form differing strengths of animal-organ colloid.

Petaccia does most of her work in the Tombs in the night hours, when I am poring over the pages and cuttings of Olea’s catalogue in the garden by candlelight.

The doctor has two current strains on the go, her current focus the reduced, gooey sap from a Pueraria lobata kudzu and the fibrous remains of a piglet heart reduced to pulp.

I try to make sure I manage three or four dinners a week with Leonardo, just to keep him happy, but that lasts only about as long as my first antidote attempt.

With my first experiment—quickening breath of the rat, heart racing, pupils dilating, followed by immediate cardiac arrest—the dinners and breakfasts slow to a trickle.

Leo doesn’t mention the garden or Olea, though I can see the question in his stare.

The way he looks at me sometimes, just a little too long—as if he’s silently comparing me to Clara again, as if he’s monitoring my health, my moods, my hunger.

I don’t know what I’d say if he asked; if he smelled the garden on me once, he must know I’m visiting again, and he must also see that my interest in my lectures has waned since I’m spending so much time in Petaccia’s lab.

I’m not sure I could bring myself to lie to him about it.

So I can’t talk to him about my research, and I can’t talk to him about the garden.

There’s only so long I can listen to him ramble about Almerto and the drought, or the lectures he’s attended on mythology, poetry, philosophy, before I’ll snap.

How is any of that important when I’m dealing with life and death itself?

How long will Leo let me keep pretending that everything is the same as it was before he stops wanting my company?

When I visit Olea’s garden, I take fresh care.

I wear long sleeves and cover the nape of my neck with a thin headscarf.

Gloves, socks, any spare scrap of clothing to cover as much of my skin as I can…

It all helps to control the rise of my appetite and the painful rush in my ears.

I begin to weigh myself daily, to document my cravings—even the ones that flush my cheeks and coil with tension in my innermost parts.

Although my dinners with Leo often make me question myself, most of the time I am filled with fresh purpose.

I wake early, working amongst the animal cages, often falling asleep with my head propped in my hands against the metal workbench.

My clothes are stained with blood. I haven’t yet discovered why Petaccia has had more success with the offal, whether the type of toxin truly matters. There is a whole world to uncover.

At first I am squeamish with the animals.

I don’t like to inject them, and Petaccia is right: feeding them medicine is worse.

Still, there is no other solution bar experimentation on myself, and that will hardly do.

I grow a backbone, start small, administering Petaccia’s antidote tests so she can spend more time in the other lab on this floor, a darkroom where she keeps deep-sea and night-crawling specimens.

She tells me, for instance, of the blind aquatic salamander— Proteus anguinus —which spends its whole life in the darkness of caves in the southeast, living for nine or ten decades.

She has already depleted the number she brought back to St. Elianto.

I start calling this other laboratory the Cave.

The darkness, so complete Petaccia must navigate the equipment by touch alone, unsettles me more than I’m willing to admit.

But even in the Tombs I don’t touch the animals more than I have to; I hardly look at them even.

It makes it easier to pretend that what I’m doing has no consequence beyond my own success.

Of course, it isn’t long before that changes.

After the third bloody, gurgling death with Petaccia’s Antidote #689, I start to monitor the surviving subjects closely, finding that the birds die easier than the rodents.

The rabbits are the worst of all. I push the sickness down in my belly and create a chart, body mass to antidote, time since consumption versus severity of end-of-life indicators.

Then I move to concoctions and experimentations of my own.

I wear gloves, just in case there are still traces of the garden in my skin, but it doesn’t help with the guilt.

I take deep breaths and think of Olea—and, I won’t lie, of the golden acclaim that will be laid at our feet when we succeed.

First I try a rat. Then a goldfinch. I finely dice offal and mix it with a paste of crushed leaves and ibogaine from one of Olea’s Tabernanthe iboga , try cubes of fresh cow meat injected with a saline colloid.

I switch tactics, microdosing a red-eyed mouse with pure powdered strychnine.

This works better, three weeks of slow sickening, a brief reprieve from the symptoms, then death.

It is thrilling. A doorway of discovery opened. I think of my father, of his constant desire for change, for betterment. Better equipment, better delivery, better results. Like him, I am an angel of death.

Unfortunately, all my experiments end the same way.

Failure. Failure. Failure.

When I arrive in the garden tonight Olea is crying.

She wears her usual nightgown, and I my armour of cloth.

We walk six feet apart in the silence of the balmy night until we reach the fountain— our fountain.

Olea doesn’t speak until we are settled; she sinks down in the exact place where we kissed, and I perch on the stone fountain, my hands and feet and face well away from any of the plants below.

“Talk to me,” I urge.

She glances up and her face is a pale oval.

There is no moon tonight and the garden is stranger and more beautiful than I have ever seen it.

She’s never let me in during total darkness before and I can see why.

Some of these plants glow , a faint blue-green bioluminescence that is barely visible at any other time.

She was right that I would have once been afraid.

Things are different now; I see it for its truth.

The garden is a fairy world, unnatural and terrifying and yet the most natural thing in the world.

Olea does not glow, but the faint plant light catches on her skin, playing in the shadows under her eyes, the dark fullness of her lips.

She is ethereal. The tears on her cheeks only exaggerate the effect.

If I could, I would smother her with kisses, roll her into my arms and hold her there.

I know I can’t, not without the same commitment to poisoning myself as before, and oh god, it is agony.

“Florencia had another failure today, with the lizard.”

“The salamander?” I haven’t seen Petaccia since yesterday morning, when she’d been sunny and cautiously optimistic in her lab notes. My heart sinks into the pit of my stomach. Another failure. How long before we accept that the hypothesis is flawed? The thought pinches my throat closed.

“She was so incredibly hopeful this time. She swears there’s something in the darkness.

It’s like…” She gestures at the garden helplessly.

“It’s like we have all the pieces and just can’t put them together.

How many times can we twist the same variables and get something close-but-not-quite?

At what point do we have to accept that it doesn’t work? ”

My same thoughts from Olea’s lips sound unholy. “It will work,” I insist. It has to. “If the toxins were only ever going to kill, why do the survival times vary so much?”

“Temperament. Health. Physical characteristics. Breeding. Thora, the possibilities are endless. Every time you pick a new subject, how can you guarantee you’re not changing something irreversibly by moving from one subject to the next? Nothing is universal.”

I turn this over in my mind. Desperation is the rocks in my pockets, dragging me into a murky lake of despair.

“We can’t stop now,” I say. “Imagine—”

“Don’t you understand?” Olea snaps. “I’m so fucking sick of imagining . I can’t keep doing this.” She jumps to her feet so suddenly I’m thrown off-balance, grazing the back of my leg on the crooked stone of the fountain. Pain shrieks up my leg, even through my trousers.