Masquerade

by Lam, Laura

  He finished introducing himself and then talked passionately about the necessity of studying the intricacies of the human body, how it was a combination of nature and machine. To fix it, he said, we must understand its systems, how everything is connected. He took off his glove to demonstrate, wriggling his Vestige fingers under the bright surgical lights. He had every student under his spell, and even I was impressed by his enthusiastic speech. He was like a magician, almost, pulling back a veil to reveal the mysteries of the human body.

  Pozzi lectured for about twenty minutes, and then the time came for the dissection. With a showman’s flick of his wrist, he took away the cloth covering the Vestige tank. The body floated within a light green substance. Through the murky liquid, I could tell it was a man with grey hair, but nothing more.

  ‘This is a piece of Vestige known as an Ampulla,’ Pozzi explained, pointing to the container. ‘Corpses stored within it do not decay. This is useful with such a shortage of cadavers.’

  The top of the Ampulla opened, and the cadaver rose from within. The man had been in his sixties when he died. His body had been shaved, and his eyes were closed. He had a hawk nose, and he looked almost as if he were sleeping. But the texture of his skin was wrong: too dry and stiff. It was very clear that no one inhabited that shell any longer. The smell of formaldehyde and embalming fluid, chemical and yet somehow earthy, permeated the room.

  Down the man’s chest, a huge Y-shaped incision had been made. I couldn’t stop staring at the bloodless gash from the bottom of the neck to just above the groin.

  ‘This is one of the first lectures of the semester, so you have not seen this cadaver before, have you?’ Doctor Pozzi asked the class. They shook their heads.

  ‘I suppose I have the privilege of introducing you, then. He will be your cadaver for the semester, and slowly, you will dissect or watch every part of him being dissected. These anatomy classes change your perception of the human body forever. So far, you have seen diagrams in books, the muscles perfectly butterflied, bloodless, pristine. Or you’ve seen wax models, intricate in their detail. But you have not sliced through actual flesh, peeled it back, recognized what it is within us. What makes us human. This is what you shall discover.’

  He paused, meeting most of the students’ eyes in turn. I shivered when his eyes brushed mine. ‘We have no way of knowing what this man was like in life. Judging by those bruises around his neck, he was a criminal hung for his crimes, his body then donated to science. But that’s only one facet of the story. That tells us almost nothing about him. What were his crimes? Why did he commit them? Who did he love, who loved him, who did he leave behind? You’ll never find out. But you will always be aware that he was once a man. His chest once rose and fell with breath, the heart that you are about to cut out of him and hold in your hand like a mango once beat blood through every vein in his body, powering that organic machine. And you have the gift of his body to see how every part of him fit together, and it’s how you will learn, one day, how to fix others when a part has broken down, to stop them from turning into a corpse.

  ‘You will probably give him a name at some point. When I taught, I encouraged this. He is your teacher, just as much as I am today, and all your professors will be.’

  At the end of his speech, we were all silent. Faces were grave as his words sunk in. I’d never thought much about how doctors were trained. Nobility filled many of the roles, as doctors, especially ones starting out, were pitifully paid. Later, they could amass a generous wage, especially if they achieved a rank like Pozzi’s. It was considered a vocation, a calling to heal. To me, they’d always been my bogeymen – featureless people hidden behind masks as they studied me, quantifying me, writing about me like a specimen. I’d always imagined that was how they saw me, and every patient – as a problem to be fixed, not a person with a past and a life and a future.

  I remembered Doctor Ambrose’s face, tapping the tablet with his stylus, hidden behind his moustache as he decided without telling me that I should be cut into his notion of a woman. Pozzi had taken me here deliberately to show me that there were doctors of different types; that not all of them were like the ones who’d treated me as a child.

  I could see that these doctors were a far cry from the emotionless automatons I’d encountered in my past. Some of the students weren’t much older than me, and looked nauseated at the sight of the wrinkled, preserved flesh of the unknown man. They were swallowing and clutching their pens too hard as they made shaky notes. Others were unperturbed.

  Doctor Pozzi called a few students down from the top benches to watch more closely, and they clustered in a rough semi-circle behind the body on the slab. Pozzi gave me a meaningful look, inviting me to come closer, but I shook my head minutely. The operating room grew quiet, reverent, almost as if it were a church, the body on an altar and Pozzi the priest.

  When he pulled back the skin on the chest, I wanted to throw up.

  The skin rolled back, stiff. Beneath was what could only be described as old meat, and the remains of old fat, like scrambled egg. A few students looked a little green around the gills. I gripped the desk in front of me hard, determined not to retch in front of a room full of strangers.

  Pozzi chose one of the students clustered nearby to dissect the heart. The sternum had already been cut through, but they still had to remove the cage of the sternum and ribs to access the heart underneath.

  The boy couldn’t have been older than twenty. He rolled his neck before reaching into the chest and taking out the sternum. I gaped at it held in his hands, resisting the urge to rest my fingers against my own ribcage. He gazed into the cavity of the dead man’s chest, the other students peering over his shoulder. Pozzi invited all the students to walk by and look at it while the heart was still within the chest.

  ‘In reality, we should ideally have one cadaver for every five or six of you, and we’d be in the laboratory, but there’s a drastic shortage,’ he said as they filed past.

  A student raised his hand, tentative. When Pozzi nodded at him, he asked, ‘I never understood that. Don’t plenty of people die?’

  ‘Unfortunately, yes, plenty of people die each day in Imachara, especially in the recent fires.’ Fires, I thought wryly. I suppose that’s one euphemism for Kashura Forester attacks. ‘But you have to specify that your body can be used for science. Most elect against it, and so we have access to criminals and a few people who die in the hospital on campus, and that’s it. It’s not enough, but we make the most of what we have.’

  My mouth went dry. I remembered the dreams of the person winding through the streets, and through the cemetery. The sound of the shovel, and the thump as it hit the wood of the coffin.

  Rising with the last of the students, I was determined to push away my squeamishness and see what lay within the human body. The man’s face was red with rosacea. He had a notch missing from his ear, which in some gangs of Imachara meant he had killed someone. His heart nestled behind his rib cage, which had now been spread like wings. I could hear my own heartbeat thundering in my ears. This was what was within all of us, slippery organs in shades of purple and yellow and red, save for the bright green of the gallbladder.

  Pozzi selected another volunteer to make the cuts. He chose a girl with spectacles and hair in a long braid down her back. She picked up the scalpel with her gloved hands, which were steady as a surgeon’s. Deftly, she reached into the dead man’s chest before bringing out the heart like a prize. It rested in her hand, bloodless and dead. Pozzi clapped, congratulating her, and motioned for her to pass it to another student, who weighed it on a nearby set of scales. Each student came up and held it for a second of silence. Then the doctor asked her to put it back into the cavity.

  He chose yet another student to fold back the sternum and put everything back as it was, resting the flaps of skin together. Once it was done, the man still looked very dead, the gash of the Y incision dark and ugly. Pozzi lowered him back into the coffin-like Ampulla tank. I w
as glad when he was out of sight. My skin still crawled.

  Pozzi looked at all the students, future doctors of Ellada.

  ‘Your professor will be back next week, and you will continue to explore this man’s body. Remember that even though we all have the same organs within us, there will be slight differences as well. If you cut the exact same spot on every person, without first deducing exactly where each organ is, you could do more harm than good. Remember that. Do not grow too proud and believe you know everything about the human body. There is always more to discover. Hidden depths you cannot fathom. Never forget that in many ways you will always be a novice. But that does not mean you should not strive to learn all that you can, to push the limits of what we can yet understand.’

  The students broke into solemn applause. I couldn’t stop looking at their hands, all of which had just held a dead human heart.

  I lingered after the students left. If I’d been raised without doctors constantly poking and prying into my privacy, perhaps I’d be less mistrustful of medicine. Maybe I’d even be interested enough to go into it, to discover others who were like me. As it stood, I was still wary of doctors. It was my main fear about Pozzi – that I was nothing more than another experiment, an unwilling subject.

  The door to the surgery room opened and a young man came in, slightly out of breath.

  ‘Doctor, I came as soon as my lecture ended. I thought I could help you finish.’

  ‘Ah, hello Kai. Kai, this is Micah. Micah, this is Kai, my assistant.’

  Kai gave me a little bow. He was little older than me, and a few inches shorter. He was chubby, with an open face and the hint of a goatee. He wore a heavy coat despite the warmth within the operating theatre. His hair was brownish and curly. His smile was hesitant, shy, but genuine.

  I held out my hand and shook his. Kai had a surprisingly strong grip. ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said.

  ‘You came in good time. These Ampullas are annoyingly heavy to move. We’ll need all three of us. I can’t be bothered sending for the morgue orderly.’

  Kai needed no further encouragement. As we wheeled the Ampulla out of the lecture hall and down the corridor towards the morgue I thought of the room full of silent, dead bodies floating in tanks, chill and unmoving, and shuddered.

  At the morgue we were greeted by a young Byssian doctor. His dark hair was shaved close to his head and he was very tall, his skin black, his eyes brown.

  He shook Doctor Pozzi’s hand. ‘We are so pleased you were able to come and cover for us at such short notice, Royal Physician.’

  ‘Not a problem, Doctor Maral. It’s always thrilling to see the young minds that will grow to be the great medical minds of the next age. We must always pass the torch.’

  ‘That we must.’ Doctor Maral lapsed into silence.

  ‘Is everything all right, Doctor?’ Pozzi asked, all smooth concern.

  We’d reached the morgue. Doctor Maral took out the key and opened the door, wheeling the body inside. I couldn’t help but peek over his shoulder. More tanks, filled with unseen bodies. The blast of cold air from the room hit my cheeks. Doctor Maral closed the door and locked it again, putting the key back in his pocket and patting it.

  ‘We’ve finished the autopsy you were interested in. I thought . . . I thought you might wish to see the body before we begin preservation. Any additional observations you have would be invaluable.’

  Doctor Pozzi tried to hide it, but his eyes gleamed. ‘I’m happy to take a look, if you believe you’d find it helpful. I take it my assistants may join me?’

  ‘Of course, though I ask you do not mention what you see to others. I trust in your discretion.’ Doctor Maral led us to another door at the back of the morgue. He took out another key, unlocked it, and paused, waiting for our answers.

  ‘You have my word,’ Kai said, serious.

  ‘Mine, too,’ I added, though I hid a frown, wondering if this was the real reason he had brought me to the university today. What was beyond that door?

  Doctor Maral nodded once, and pushed open the door. The air was cold, and I shivered beneath my coat. The body on this slab was also stored in an Ampulla tank, the hair on the skin glistening.

  It was Dirk. The one who had been with Juliet and the other one, pale and red-eyed, whose name I’d already forgotten. His eyes were closed and he had a Y incision across his chest like the anatomy subject. Countless cuts scored the short, slick fur that covered his body. On his face, arms, and hands it was russet, though darker than I remembered as it was wet. His stomach was dappled lighter with white and grey.

  ‘He was at the Celestial Cathedral,’ I said. ‘One of the three Chimaera who called for peace.’

  Kai sucked in a breath, snuck me a look from beneath his lashes.

  ‘Very tragic,’ Doctor Maral agreed. ‘One of the bodies was never found. The third was too damaged to perform an autopsy.’

  My hand clenched into a fist. ‘Which body was not found?’

  ‘The leopard woman.’

  My heart lifted. Maybe Juliet hadn’t died but had managed to escape. If she was smart, she’d leave Ellada on the first boat and stay well away from those who wished to harm her. If only I could have spoken with her, just for a few minutes. She might have had answers.

  ‘How different is this man’s biology?’ Doctor Pozzi asked, clearly fascinated. Kai also held on to every word. I wondered how much he knew of Chimaera, how involved he was with Pozzi’s work.

  ‘Not significantly. Entirely the same internally. Just the addition of this hair, here. Brain structure is slightly different, certain areas more developed. We’re still consulting with a brain surgeon to return with his full report. The implications could be astounding.’

  Like the ability for telepathy, or telekinesis.

  ‘It’s a shame we can’t use him for students,’ Doctor Maral went on. ‘We’re so short of corpses. Yet there’s so much uncertainty with that attack, and we’ve more work to do with him. Can’t risk students damaging the specimen.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a shame how far the current corpses have to spread around the students.’

  Doctor Pozzi turned serious. ‘Don’t turn to resurrection men.’

  Doctor Maral looked affronted, but also guilty. ‘We never would.’

  Resurrection men. They crept into graveyards to dig up fresh bodies, selling them to universities or anatomy schools. Doctor Pozzi asking Doctor Maral not to use them was pointless, even I knew that: pretty much all universities employed resurrection men on the sly. Not enough criminals were hung to meet the demand. Perhaps I was dreaming about someone finding bodies for quick funds. Yet maybe they weren’t searching for simple corpses for anatomy and they wanted corpses that were different from the norm. Like Dirk.

  My eyes couldn’t leave the smooth curve of his skull, fitted back together after doctors had come to saw it open, take out the brain that had housed all his thoughts and memories. What had this man been like? How had he felt about being Chimaera, and what other abilities had he possessed? He was a man murdered solely for looking different, killed while explicitly asking for peace and understanding. Now they’d taken his body and pulled it apart, peering within, trying to discover what made him tick.

  They’d do the same thing to me if I died and they knew I was Chimaera. My breath came fast and shallow, and I swayed on my feet. Without a word, I turned and fled the cool room, nearly running through the main morgue and out into the blessedly warm hallway. A few passing students looked at me curiously as I sat on the cool tile of the floor, head between my knees, trying to gain my breath back.

  Pozzi came out a moment later.

  ‘I should have realized how upsetting that would be for you. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, not fooling either of us.

  He passed me a few coins. ‘I must stay here and discuss the subject with Doctor Maral and Kai, but you take a cab home. I hope you found it enlightening, if a bit unnerving.’

  ‘It was interesting,’ I sa
id, and that wasn’t a lie.

  ‘It’s not easy to see people after the light of life has left them, I know.’ I did not respond, and we stood in silence for a moment before he continued. ‘Have you spoken to Maske yet about my offer to perform for the Princess?’

  ‘Not yet. I’ll check with him tonight and send you a missive in the morning, but I’m sure he’ll be most agreeable. Thank you.’

  ‘Wonderful. I’m sure the Princess would enjoy it immensely. Well, I’ll let you go on your way. Travel home safely, and my apologies again for upsetting you. I forget how non-doctors aren’t quite as hardened to the sight of death.’

  ‘I hope I never am,’ I said. He gave me something resembling a smile and turned away.

  9

  THE PRINCESS AND THE LILY

  All have heard the tale of Olivia Hyacinth. While her story may have had a basis in fact, it has grown to a myth in the retelling. Her child was stolen by a Chimaera while she was hanging out washing on her farm in Girit.

  She’d only turned from her babe for a moment, and when she turned back, a Siren had him in its slick, four-fingered front paws. The creature had no hair, and skin like a salamander’s, orange as a sunset and speckled with black spots. Her child was wrapped in a blanket, and the creature wasn’t touching the baby’s bare skin, which was lucky, as many Sirens have a touch of poison.

  ‘Please, give me back my child,’ Olivia implored.

  The creature only stuck out its sticky tongue in response, as if testing the air.

  Desperate, Olivia grabbed for the child, but the Siren darted out of the way, and within a blink was gone.

  Olivia screamed in rage and soon took to the swamps where the Sirens were said to nest, searching until, finally, she saw the speckled orange Chimaera. It had been six months by this point, and her heart hurt to see her baby so much bigger. But he was still alive, a smiling boy with wispy dark curls. A few drops of skin oil in the baby’s milk a day had made the baby immune to the Siren’s deadly touch.