Page 48 of This Vicious Hunger
Many of the liquids are green in colour, though the higher numbers are also frequently red, rust-orange, and such dark colours as to be almost black. Then I spot one whose colour is a milky white, and within the mixture there is a single spiny brackish-red castor seedpod. I recognise it from Olea’s catalogue. She’d said that three or four of the large, speckled seeds inside the seedpod contain enough poison to kill a person.
I turn back to the doctor. She is checking the notes strapped toone of the rat cages with a resigned shake of her head. “What is the end goal?” I ask.
“What do you think? Talk me through it.”
It’s clear that Petaccia considers this a genuine question. It’s a test, but one she believes I will pass. She waits patiently while I sort through my thoughts, wading through the horror that curls deep in me, so deep it is pain, but also so deep I am able to sift through it like sand. I hold up one hand and count on my fingers, hoping the gesture will calm the hum of my nerves and the sickness in my belly.
“Okay. Well. You’re likely using toxins distilled from Olea’s plants to attempt some kind of medical healing. I see theRicinus communisin that one, and given that youareboth a botanist and a trained medical doctor, I think it’s a fair assumption that you’d want to combine the two. I know that toxins have been used before now for experimental trials—isn’t it foxglove that’s been discussed for an irregular heartbeat? And of course poppies—Papaver somniferum—yield opium, which is often used as a pain medication.”
“Good,” Petaccia encourages. “Go on.”
I shift awkwardly, glancing around the room. There is little other indication to me of the doctor’s end goal. These animals are obviously very, very sick, but what with?
“May I examine them…?” I gesture at the animals.
Petaccia lifts one shoulder in a half shrug.Go ahead.I am not familiar with most animals in the flesh. I have read countless books borrowed from my father detailing the aspects of animal husbandry, and my mother’s childhood on the farm gave her a few choice stories that she often told me, like the time the family dog had puppies—but I have never had an animal of my own, neverowned a working horse or dog, or any kind of pet. I wander to the cages.
Up close things are no clearer. The rats and mice are not skittish like I would expect; they sit with laboured breaths or burrow deep in their bedding. My heart thuds and my hands are clammy with cold sweat. I reach up to the bars of the cage housing the bird and it does nothing. The rabbit is the same.
“They all look critically ill.” Petaccia waits expectantly for me to continue. “But I can’t see a common cause. Is it… something in the body or the blood?”
“There is no common cause,” Petaccia says. “And the cause itself is not important.”
A shiver snakes down my spine as the pieces slowly fall into place. But I can’t be right—I simply can’t. “Right.” I count off on my fingers again. “So it’s a medical trial in which plant toxins play a role, and it looks as though you’re trying to combine them with something viscous—something that can travel around the body when… injected or ingested? But the cause of comorbidity isn’t vital, so…”
My thoughts twist to Olea. She killed that bird in the garden, stone-dead from a single touch. I’m almost certain of that now. The two of them are harnessing the power of these plants at the risk of death, which means the potential payoff must be huge. And what do each of these animals have in common? Not the illness—but the end.
“End of life,” I blurt in horror. “You’re studying the process of death after illness.”
“Not just studying, Thora. I am trying to find a universal cure for all ailments.” She turns to look at the row upon row of antidotes, her expression hard to read. She chews on her lower lip.“And it’s not fucking working. You’re right—it must be ingested. Intravenous delivery doesn’t work as the site of injection is prone to necrosis. Water isn’t a strong enough carrier. Saline is better but the salt ruins the balance. I’ve tried blends of countless vitamins and minerals, different toxins too—but everything in my gut and my research says that the toxin itself is almost irrelevant once you find the correct thing to bind it with. It could be a… avaccine. The best success I’ve had is with crushed animal offcuts, blended offal, as the body doesn’t reject it so fast, but you can’t blend it fine enough for injection unless you water it down too much. And the mice and rats won’t drink it; they choke if they’re forced. There’s something in the offal, something… I’m so close.”
The doctor turns to me now and her eyes are wide and wild. The shiver down my spine is now a full-body tremble. I feel sick and—and excited too. I think I understand. I think I can see it.
“Has there been any progress?” I ask shakily. “Have any of your cures worked?”
“If there is any kind of positive transformation, it fails almost immediately. I think it’s breaking down inside the body, so it—it needs to actfaster. A failure is still a damn failure. I narrowed down the toxins but, in the end, had to open it back up again to ensure my tests were broad enough. Do you understand? I am on the cusp of something so great here, so great it will upend life and medicine as we know it. A cure for all—do you see the potential, Thora?”
And suddenly I do. It hits me like a hurricane.A cure for all.No more babies or mothers lost in childbirth, no more soldiers lost to gangrene, no more pneumonia or fevers or cholera or dysentery. No more mourning and grieving, undertakers and sepulchres and cradles.
“A cure for…” I whisper.
“A cure for natural death.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ileave La Vita a ghost. I must stride with such purpose, such an air of determination, that the other scholars in the square avoid me, a few even shivering when I cross their paths. My stomach gnaws with its familiar, aching hunger, but I ignore it. I feel faint. Sick. Heavy and light at the same time.
“Is the toxicity catching?” I asked the doctor before leaving the lower lab. I think of it, already, asthe Tombsbecause that is what the cages remind me of. Petaccia gave me a look filled with curiosity. I added, “Is that why the vine died?”
I was thinking of Olea, of the bird, and the way my own skin seems hot and crackling to the touch sometimes, but it was her own hands Petaccia looked at. I didn’t wonder until now if that meant she has spent more time in the garden than she is willing to admit.
“I had never considered that any of the plants’ toxicity could be transferred outside the garden by a carrier such as yourself,” she said simply. “But perhaps now I will think on it.”
As I walk back to my rooms, I stare at my hands. The nail beds are faintly blue-black, as if I’ve bruised each one. There is asore inside my mouth, at the corner of my lips, and I worry at it, opening the wound so that my tongue floods with the iron tang of blood. My skin feels scorching in the sunlight, a low-grade fever burning at my very core. I wonder, just for a second, if I might be dying.
The thought is so maudlin, so extreme, that it shocks me to stillness. I reach my rooms, driven there by the desperate need to escape the heat, the blinding brightness filling my vision. Sweat curls my upper lip, my mouth claggy with blood, my trousers rub the skin between my legs raw, and my shirt sticks to every exposed part of skin.
I tumble into my rooms, throwing the shutters closed against the daylight—and the garden. The thought of it makes me sick. Sicker than I have ever been. It is not nausea, rather a squirming oily tide that crashes like the roll of an ocean and then falls into hollowness with each hammering breath. I strip the clothes from my body, ripping and tearing until there is nothing left but anaemic skin, bruises upon bruises on my arms and legs and stomach. I don’t know where any of them came from.
