Page 35 of The Library at Hellebore
“I could have been the one to encourage Adam to cut Eoan in half.”
“We’re alive, aren’t we?”
We.I recalled then that she had saidweseveral times last night, had not thought about it then but was certainly thinking about in that moment: we, not as in us survivors, but as a pronoun for herself. I was sure of that. Minji cocked a look at me before she stared out at the wall behind us, its surfacepapered with a reflective teal material. Deep in the verdancy, gold-eyed foxes prowled through shrubbery and undergrowth, hunting the rabbits cowering in the stylized foliage.
Unable to help myself, I asked, “Has Ford—”
“Has Ford what?” said Minji.
I swallowed. “Has he tried anything?”
She considered this. Her smock was blotched with blooms of rust and flaking gore, but it only somehow added to the tenderness of her appearance. Bathed in the light, with her wide face and ascetic features, she was a lithograph of a fairy-tale princess: a child bride awaiting her hero, simultaneously very young and terribly ancient. Her eyes however belonged to something older and hungrier than royalty itself. When she spoke, it was without emotion.
“Does it matter if he has?”
Minji cocked her head in one direction and then the next, an animalic gesture exacerbated by her unblinking regard.
“Honestly? Yes,” I said, tapping at my cracked lower lip. None of us had thought to bring lip balm to graduation, which feels like a collective oversight when I think about it. Perhaps there is a divergent timeline where our success was recorded for posterity and our pictures were distributed to all the major newspapers. Wouldn’t it have been terrible if we were inducted into adulthood looking less than groomed? “Yes, it has always mattered. Even if you don’t seem to think it matters.”
“It doesn’t. Men have been terrible for as long as your kind have existed,” said Minji with clinical plainness, theyourin that sentence given no special inflection, spoken in the same deadened tone as the rest of her statement.
“Mykind?” I repeated. There it was.
Minji shrugged. There wasn’t any challenge in her expression, nothing that suggested she thought this revelation significant or even an epiphany at all. As the line goes, for her, this was a normal Wednesday. “Mine too, I suppose. Most of this body is still human. The brain is human. Mostly.”
“You—I didn’t—you didn’t tell me,” I said haltingly, looking Minji over from temples to toes, unable to demarcate what differentiated her from human. Questions frothed. I had a hundred things to ask, a thousand memories to dissect and interrogate, but my tongue sat leaden in my mouth, heavy as a gravestone.
“You didn’t ask.”
“Fair,” I said again. It wasn’t a cop-out if it was true.
Minji sank into the armchair with me, her leg sliding over my thigh, an entirely sororal gesture, as was the arm curling around my shoulders. She rested her head in the hollow of my clavicle and despite recent epiphanies, I closed my eyes, glutting myself on the sensation, on the somehow clean salt smell of her. You’d think a lifetime alone would inoculate you against touch starvation but then you’re proven wrong.
“Hivemind or weird alien creature?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, finality in her tone.
Because I did understand boundaries, I dropped it.
We sat there for an indeterminate period, time macerating, ablating cohesion, softening enough that past and present and future seemed to accordion together, and it felt both like the instant when it became clear we were becoming friends and like we were standing at the other’s funerals, eulogizing the dead like we were just girls, miraculous in our mundanity. The air rippled with heat.
“She was dying.”
I didn’t have to ask who.
“We asked. She said yes.” Minji’s voice was low and confessional. “They’d been experimenting on her.”
“Who?”
“She didn’t say. We wish we remembered but we don’t.” She nestled closer. Unburdened of her—its? Their?—need for subterfuge, her voice developed and discarded accents seemingly at random, rising and descending in octave, increasing in tempo, slowing, the changes occurring sometimes mid-sentence, resulting in an utterly schizophrenic listening experience. I might have been unnerved if the last twenty hours hadn’t already been so bizarre. “That is a lie. We remember some things. We remember begging. We remember the laboratory. We remember being unwound, measured.”
As she said this, Minji palmed her stomach.
“And someone talking about profit margins and patents, of course.” Laughter squeezed out of her, ebbing in a moment.
I stroked my hand over the shining expanse of her black hair. Easy enough to pretend we were sisters, that she was just here to confide a nightmare, and I wasn’t frightened by the fact I couldn’t parse which part of her was human and which part of her was not. Flesh lied, it seemed.
“Of course,” I said gently and because it felt important, I asked: “Do you knowwhythey were…”
