by Lam, Laura
You’ll dream forever, or so the doctor said.
— A banned Elladan lullaby
Lily Verre left to visit Pozzi with her son the day before we were to perform for the Princess of Ellada.
As soon as Cyan spied Lily leaving her building, pushing her son in his wicker wheelchair, she’d run back to the Penny Rookeries to fetch us, as we were too far away for her to reach us with her mind. Luckily we had a free afternoon that day while Maske tinkered in his workshop, tweaking the props we’d be using at the palace. We gathered supplies, wearing dark civilian clothes. Unlike when we snuck into Shadow Elwood’s apartments, we wouldn’t have the cover of night, and we’d have to take a different approach.
I hid in the alleyway near the entrance to Lily’s apartments. Cyan paused in front of the door, rummaging in her bag for something. The doorman stood stiffly at attention in his buttoned coat and cap. Drystan wore scruffy clothes, his fair hair hidden by a cap and his face smudged with dirt. He darted down the street and grabbed Cyan’s bag.
‘Help!’ Cyan screeched, wringing her hands and acting the part of the helpless maiden. ‘Thief!’
The doorman hesitated and then took off after the fleeing thief, perhaps hoping to impress the damsel in distress. Cyan, quick as a snake, opened the door and slipped inside, and I followed. Moments later, Drystan came in as well, wiping his face clean of grime. We knew Lily’s number thanks to her letters for Maske, and so up the stairs we went.
Halfway up the stairs, a wave of exhaustion overwhelmed me and I stumbled. Before Drystan or Cyan could notice, I forced my feet forward. I’d been tired all day, but now, wiping my burning eyes, it was as if I hadn’t slept at all. Time for another dose of Elixir.
Drystan took out his lock picks and set to work. I turned on the Eclipse, a Vestige artefact that would disable any other Vestige within a small radius. We’d borrowed it from Maske before, and if he ever noticed it go missing temporarily, he never commented on it. We didn’t anticipate Lily Verre was solvent enough to own Vestige alarms, but it was better safe than sorry.
With a satisfied sigh, Drystan finished picking the lock. It opened with a little snick and the door swung inwards. We crept inside, closing the door softly behind us. Through the haze of exhaustion I wondered what, if anything, we’d find in the home of Lily Verre.
It was dim inside, the apartment being one of the cheaper ones at the back of the building where the sun was blocked by other tenements. Cyan flicked on the light, and we all froze.
Lily Verre sat in the middle of the room.
‘Hello, you three,’ she said calmly, in her true voice rather than the one she affected as the widow dating our mentor. ‘How nice of you to come calling.’
One eyebrow arched, her chin lifted. She rose in a smooth motion. ‘Sit down,’ she ordered.
Unsure what else to do, we obeyed, perching across from her on the sofa. One thing was for certain – she was a far better Shadow than Elwood had ever been. She must have waited until Cyan began her ploy with the guard and then hurried back to her apartments to wait for us. I had to appreciate her skill. My body tingled and my mind filled with Chimaera warmth. Her son was in the next room, strong as a furnace.
I wondered what she had planned for us.
The apartment was unassuming, with no personal knick-knacks or belongings. It could have been a hotel room. My damp palms slipped on the dark red leather of the sofa. Paintings of generic landscapes of rolling hills dotted with cows and sheep lined the wall. There was an empty desk of dark wood with locked drawers. A bookshelf lined another wall, heavy with leather-bound tomes, but I couldn’t read the peeling gilt titles from where I sat.
‘When did you know that we knew?’ I asked, my mouth dry.
‘I knew you’d figure it out at some point. You took longer than I expected. You followed me from the cafe to Pozzi’s a few weeks ago. I wondered if you’d accuse me then, give up the game, but you didn’t. Which I found curious. Didn’t take much to deduce that you’d try to sneak in. Would have been useless, even if I wasn’t here. There’s nothing to find.’
‘What have you been telling Pozzi about us?’
Her eyes darted away, but not before I saw the regret there. ‘More than you’d like.’
‘Where’s your son?’ I asked, as if I couldn’t feel him burning the edges of my mind.
‘Frey’s in the bedroom.’ Her voice softened when she spoke his name.
‘How old is he?’ Cyan asked.
‘Seven, and he’s all I have in this world. Or all I did have, before I met Maske.’
‘Don’t pretend you care for Maske,’ I said, my voice sharp. ‘You used him to get closer to us.’
She shook her head. ‘Initially. But he’s a sweet man, and cares for me. And I for him.’
‘He cares for the person you pretend to be around him,’ Drystan said.
Lily Verre flinched. She changed the subject. ‘My son nearly died two years ago when his scales and horns appeared.’ I remembered the one glimpse of his face I’d had, when we’d followed Lily. The light had caught on dark green scales.
His too-small, too-flat nose, the nostrils long and thin. The small horns poking from the scarf wrapped around him. The long, thin fingers, the nails dark and sharp like claws.
‘He’s Chimaera,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Yes, though I do not know how. The person who sired him was not.’
Cyan and I exchanged a look. We didn’t have to send our thoughts to know what the other was thinking: his father could have had unseen abilities. Or his mother. Was Lily like us?
‘So I went to the Royal Physician. It was before he went away on sabbatical. I had heard rumours that he was studying birth anomalies. Frey was in a coma, and I thought he would die. Pozzi was able to save him. I was in his debt. I still am.’
So it was as we suspected – if she was telling the truth.
‘You’ve not recently turned Shadow,’ Drystan said, lifting his eyebrow at her. ‘You’re better than Elwood, whom I’m sure you know was hired to find us last year.’
At his name, her lip curled ever so slightly. ‘I was a Shadow long before I met Pozzi, yes. And Elwood, well, I can’t say I’m particularly sorry to see the end of him. He stole plenty of cases from me over the years, and charged outrageously for shoddy work.’
‘I’ve never heard of a female Shadow,’ Cyan said. Neither had I. And judging by Lily Verre’s true accent, if this was it, she had been born to nobility or rich merchants. There was a story here, that was for sure. How had she become a Shadow?
‘You wouldn’t have heard of me as a female Shadow,’ she said. ‘I dressed as a man. Alban Verani.’
We gaped. I didn’t know much about him – he was active when I was a small child, but Cyril had found him interesting and told me stories. Alban Verani had been one of the best Shadows in Ellada, and one of the youngest. He’d also been quite the mystery – no one knew where he had come from. He solved almost every case he took on, but people never learned anything about him. He’d supposedly died two years ago, though there were conspiracy theories about what had really happened to him: that he’d been murdered by the Eel of Imachara, the Lerium Lord. That he’d decided he’d made enough riches and retired from his life as a Shadow. That he’d been driven out of Ellada by other Shadows. No one would have guessed that he had been this small blonde woman before us now.
The look on Cyril’s face when I told him would be priceless.
‘Yet that’s not the complete truth of the matter. Life has a way of being more complicated.’ She hesitated, then squared her shoulders. ‘I was assigned male at birth, yet when I was a little younger than you, I realized that was not correct. I am female, though it took me many years to let that side of me flourish. I continued dressing as a man, and working as a Shadow was easier in trousers.’ Her face closed. ‘Yet it was constrictive. I married, and I kept the truth from my Andrea for years. She guessed, though, and when I told her, she accepted it. Even cel
ebrated it.’ Grief was in every line of her face.
My mouth opened, then closed again. I’d heard of people who transitioned to another gender, but I had never met anyone who had done it before. I peered at her more closely, but she still looked exactly like Lily to me. ‘So there is the truth of it. What now, my doves? You know what I am. I know that you know. There’s much knowing of things now. Where do we go from here?’ She smiled as if this was all terribly amusing, but underneath I sensed she was nervous.
‘Stop reporting to him,’ I said.
‘Not that simple. I have to give him at least a little something every time I bring Frey for his medication.’
‘He needs regular treatments?’ I asked, my voice growing dry.
‘Once a week, just like you. The Elixir slows the changes, keeps him far healthier than he would be otherwise.’
‘What about when the Physician was away on sabbatical?’
‘He gave me Elixir, and I administered it. But once he returned, he disliked giving me caches of it, so I have to visit him again.’
‘What do you know about it?’ I asked, rubbing the spot in the inner crook of my elbow where Pozzi stuck in the long needle.
‘Not much. Just that it’s part Vestige, and it seems to work.’ But she paused.
‘You know more than that,’ Cyan said with certainty. ‘If you want us to have a shot at trusting you, you need to tell us. Cease that incessant chatter in your head and let me in. I can already filter through some of it.’ She smiled, and Lily blanched. I was surprised that Cyan was so forthright, but she must have been able to realize that Lily already knew some of what she could do.
‘Have you told Pozzi about Cyan?’ I asked.
Lily’s mouth twisted. ‘I told him I had suspicions that she could do more than she let on, but not the exact nature. Fine. I shall lower my defences, and Cyan shall project it to you. But do not delve deeper than what I offer to you freely. It is my mind, my privacy. Do I have your word on this?’ She stared at Cyan, unblinking.
Cyan stiffened. ‘You do.’
‘Very well.’ She paused. ‘What you see will completely change your opinion of the Royal Physician.’
‘We’ve never trusted him,’ I said, my mouth dry.
‘And that is wise of you. But even so, I don’t think any of you have fully suspected what sort of man he truly is. Remember, Cyan, no peeking in corners you shouldn’t. I’ll know if you do. And you need my help.’
Cyan’s face was pinched. ‘I gave you my word,’ she said.
Lily Verre closed her eyes. Cyan kept hers open, but her eyes rolled up into her skull until only the whites showed. For a moment, they glowed the bright blue of Penglass, and then her head slumped forward.
I took Drystan’s hand in mine, warm and comforting. And then we closed our eyes and let the images project into the darkness of our minds’ eyes.
It was like when I was thrown into the past memories of Anisa when she wanted me to understand more of the Chimaera she had raised, an age, an eon ago.
The images jumped: Lily rested her hands on a woman’s pregnant belly, spreading her fingers on soft skin, feeling the movement within. The baby kicked, and the woman laughed.
‘Lily,’ she said. ‘Did you feel that?’ The baby kicked again.
I-as-Lily thought of Andrea, and my throat closed with tears. The scene cut to the birth. I held Andrea’s hand, and she was surrounded by doctors as they scrutinized her.
Andrea began to bleed. At first the doctors were not concerned, but then their eyes grew worried above the gauze masks. They tried to usher me from the room, but I would not leave. My Andrea looked at me as she died, her hand growing slack in mine. The grief threatened to unhinge me completely, so I did my best to close off all feeling. I sat by my wife, completely numb, as she grew cold.
The doctors surrounded us in their frantic ballet, trying to save the child. Eventually they pushed me away, and I sat hunched in a corner. I wanted to die.
A few minutes later, a thin, high cry cut through the barrier I’d erected around myself. My head lifted, and I saw a tiny, moving fist.
‘The child has a caul,’ one of the doctors said, shamed.
‘Cut it off,’ the other doctor, a woman, instructed. ‘I’ll not hold with superstition here.’
The caul was cut, delicately enough that it did not scar his face later in life.
The female doctor wiped my son free of blood and looked down at him, frowning.
‘What is it?’ I asked, terrified. ‘Is my son all right?’
Her brow smoothed. ‘I just thought for a moment I saw something odd. He’s small for his age, and he’s not kicking his feet.’
They set him in my arms. He was small, but his cry was fierce. If he had died, I would not have lasted the night. I would have joined my wife and my child. Yet he survived, and so I brought my baby home. Around where the umbilical cord was cut, there was a cluster of small scales. Later, they fell off, but I always remembered them, delicate. I kept one in a box.
I worked as Alban Verani to support us, but the rest of the time, I was Lily Verre. I saw my son, aged five, at the playground, so much smaller than the other children. Never able to walk. So many broken bones. Yet, strangely, they healed much faster than they should have.
Two years ago Frey suffered from seizures, and all I could do was turn him to one side, press down his tongue with a spoon, and hold him as he jerked and I sobbed.
He fell into a coma for four days. I took on no new cases. I stroked his skin, singing his favourite songs, my throat stiff with tears.
Frey’s eyes opened, but he did not see me.
I rubbed cream onto his dry skin. When the skin flaked off, there were the scales, almost invisible. He burned as if with a fever. And then there were the strange bumps on his forehead. I wondered if they were growths of cancer. It would have explained the seizures, but not the scales. I held cloths to his forehead, wondering if there would be another coma and if he would wake up from it.
The doctor who had birthed Frey stood in front of me, arms held out. She did not know what was wrong. But she was the one to tell me of the Royal Physician. She told me not to tell him she had given me his address, or she’d lose her licence – or worse. I kept her secret.
The vision shifted. Rather than flecks of memory, Lily told us the tale directly, peppered with flashes of reminiscence.
Sometimes I wished she had never sent me to the Royal Physician. And then I hated myself for daring to think such a thing, because then my child would be dead. And that would be worse, far worse, than dying myself.
I went to Pozzi. Alone, because my son could not be moved from his hospice bed at home. I wouldn’t let them take him to the hospital, for fear they’d see the scales. My friend since childhood, Erin, had become a nurse. She cared for him, and I knew she said nothing to anyone else of Frey’s anomalies. Then she grew ill, a cancer eating her from within, and she could care for him no more.
At first the Royal Physician pretended he had no time for me, that he could not help. But once I insisted and told him a little more than I wanted to, his curiosity was piqued enough that he came back with me. As soon as he saw Frey, he dosed him with something from a syringe. Immediately the seizures ceased, and several days later, Frey woke up.
I was so grateful, and saw Pozzi weekly for Frey’s treatments after that. I staged Alban Verani’s disappearance, letting that last remnant of him fall away. I don’t know how, as I was always very careful, but the Royal Physician discovered that I was Alban, though he never asked me to investigate for him. Not for a long time, in any case.
When he finally did, I was hesitant. Spying on youths, little more than children? Pozzi said they were runaways, but he made no promises to return them to their parents. I took the case because I was curious as much as because I owed him for Frey’s life.
Once, though, when I was waiting in the front rooms of Pozzi’s apartment while Frey was being dosed, I went snooping. Sneaking int
o his spare office, I rifled through the locked drawers of his filing cabinet, careful not to disturb anything.
And it was there that I discovered old medical records dating back years. And on one of them was my wife’s name.
He was the Royal Physician then, but he still owned a practice in Imachara that specialized in prenatal and neonatal care. The same practice Andrea had gone to.
I’d never seen him. He’d never treated her personally, as far as I knew, but he’d overseen her medication. I remembered going to the practice, watching Andrea pulling back her sleeve as the nurse administered a needle, right in the crook of her elbow, with something Pozzi had told them to give her.
It took a long time, and a lot more digging, but eventually I found out the truth: Pozzi had done something to Frey in the womb. I don’t know what. Frey probably would still have been weak and had seizures. His leg muscles might still have atrophied enough that he couldn’t walk. I have an uncle with the same condition. I don’t fully know what Pozzi did to my son. But I do know that, had Pozzi left my wife alone, Frey would not have scales. Or horns.
The memories that had illustrated the story faded, and the backs of my eyes were dark once again. I opened my eyes and looked at Lily Verre in horror.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m certain he made Frey a Chimaera. And, in all likelihood, he did something to you as well. Kindled latent powers, or created them to begin with. The Royal Physician is experimenting on you, my son, and probably others. I don’t know why, or to what purpose.’
I couldn’t speak. Neither could Cyan. Even Drystan was struck silent. Why would Pozzi do this? He was clearly not afraid of Chimaera, like Timur and his ilk. But to create and bring them back? Cyan was nearing twenty. He’d been doing this for a long time.
‘This is why you can trust me,’ Lily said, her voice shaking with emotion. ‘He changed my son without my consent. He then had the gall to pretend he was helping me, when truly he was manipulating me as neatly as a marionette. He doesn’t know that I’ve found this out, or I sure as Styx hope not. I’ll help you take him down, and I’ll delight in it.’