Page 48 of The Girl Who Inherits the Dead

“All basements are underground,” Delina murmurs.

The single room is cavernous, giving vibes halfway between a school library and science room gone wrong. Shelving packed with books and scrolls and papers line every wall, with cardboard boxes holding more scrolls stacked haphazard in every corner.

The middle of the room has a drain in the center, and is completely empty, but for a stack of spray paint off to one side. Stains and smudges of paint mar the enameled concrete, all worn down or washed away or completely harmless.

Along the edges are cold metal tables, like a mortuary, with an array of readings and tech equipment and everything in between.

“So when you said mad scientist, you meant it,” Delina says, cautiously sitting in one of the rolling lab chairs next to a table. “What are the chances someone’s died in here?”

“Well…” Chloe thinks for a few moments. “Probably higher than we’re comfortable with.”

The dead fly, still in a tiny plastic container, sits on one of the tables. The small coffin she sensed, the thing keeping all the air out, is nothing but a normal travel pill container.

“So you sensed this within moments of me sitting next to you,” Chloe starts, gesturing at it. “Gurlien and I thought it would take you longer.”

“It’s incredibly obvious,” Delina replies on autopilot.

“Good to know,” Chloe says. “Rule one of magic, the earlier it is in the process for you to reverse something or the closer it is to the original state, the easier it is. This goes for undoing a spell, for identifying what went wrong, for changing something into something else, and, most likely, bringing something back from the dead.”

Bile creeps up Delina’s throat, but she nods.

“So while it might be possible for you to raise century old bones, it wouldn’t be a good place to start, and you’d probably have significant trouble with it,” Chloe continues. “Just like it’s far easier for me to transform a sheet of plastic into a door, rather than a tiny slip of plastic wrap. It’s closer to what I want it to be.”

That almost makes sense.

“We know that the Necromancer currently active was able to raise someone from the dead who had been dead for fourteen hours, and a cat that had been dead for four days. We don’t…really want to test you on a person, for obvious reasons.”

“So a dead bug.”

“A dead bug. Courteously killed instantly, so you don’t have to worry about correcting any injuries.”

“No, its wings are bent from when it fell,” Delina says, and Chloe blinks owlishly at her. “It’s…I can tell.”

“Alrighty,” Chloe says, a little bit more unsteady. “So this is going to be pretty different from all my other experiments, isn’t it?”

Delina can’t think of anything to say, so she nods.

“I don’t want you to raise it, not yet,” Chloe says, and Delina’s skin crawls. “But we want to record what you can sense from it, so we get a baseline.” She sets a quick, simple recorder on the table, the sort you find reporters using on the field. “Can you repeat that?”

Delina does, and Chloe just nods, swinging in the chair.

“Based just by what you’re feeling, could you tell me how long it’s been dead? Forgetting that you already know.”

Delina squints down at the travel pill container.

Time doesn’t seem to have passed for the bug, still frozen in the worst moment. There’s no blood to cool and nothing for her to gauge.

“Maybe a general sense of hours, but nothing concrete,” she says, finally, after the lights overhead buzz. “The bird outside is a few days, at least, if not a week.”

Her mind flashes over to it, and there’s decay over some of the exposed skin.

“I’m gonna need to learn timelines for things like rigor mortis, aren’t I?” Delina quips, though the very idea is awful.

“Can you tell what killed the bug? As clinical as you can, not what you know killed it, but what in its body killed it?” At her owlish look, Chloe sighs. “If it had been squished, the answer would be the organs were compacted. If it had been attacked, it would be because pieces were missing. That sort of thing.”

Delina doesn’t know enough about fly biology, but she huffs anyway and tries to think.

“Can the answer be the nervous system stopped?” Delina asks, then lets her mind wander back outside. The bird’s organs are more clearly defined, easy to read, and there’s an echo of another set of talons piercing through the skin, through the ribs and shattering one, and into the lungs. “The bird was attacked by another bird.”

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