> “I picked up the Stone and weighed it in my hand. A fine simulacrum, but it will not last very long. These two children need it more than I do, if they are to survive into this new world I have initiated them into. So I bequeathed it to them along with the rest of their spoils.”
The prior and current incarnations of Beatrice were nothing if not methodical. Despite the large number of rings in the jar, it only took a few hours for her to work her way through every single one. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like, to slowly remember bits and pieces of your life, all out of order, all without any context. But somehow she managed it, not even pausing to eat, only taking sips of her new-and-improved serum. A serum I realized Jade traveled across the country for.
“What did you tell the glamour, exactly?” I asked, the disparate parts finally coming together.
“Ugh, my honeymoon,” said Beatrice, vigorously shaking her head back and forth as if she had drank something bitter. “Two pumps and done every night. Should have known then.”
“TMI, TMI!” I yelled. “That’s what you’re focused on now? With everything that’s happened?”
“I can only process what’s in front of me,” she said, dropping yet another ring onto a piece of paper and staring into the memories that soon appeared on the page.
“Jack-Jack,” she muttered a few moments later. “He was so little, I had forgotten, even before.”
Beatrice wiped a small tear from her eye and I pretended not to notice while she reached her hand into the jar again.
“And to answer your question, I told her more than I wish I had. Especially now that I know what she did to me.”
“Great,” I said. “Another angry magic being wandering free.”
“That’s my fault, is it?” asked Beatrice, snatching a handful of rings and dumping them on successive pieces of paper. “You’re the one who took that necklace, you’re the one who wore it around the city like a trendy piece of clothing, you’re the one who seems to have fed her enough life-force or whatever metaphysical thing exists inside us to let her break free.”
“I didn’t have a choice!”
“You keep saying that,” said Beatrice quietly. “But it’s not true. You always have a choice. You had a choice when I offered you the contract. You had a choice when they offered you money beyond imagining to give up your gold token. Yet you convinced yourself that you are helpless. A pawn. A stone cast into a river’s flow. But I don’t buy it. I don’t believe it.”
“What would you have done, then?” I said. “You controlled me, made me put on that ring. I was just suppose to say no thanks?”
“I would have let you go,” she said. “Found someone else.”
“Sure you would have,” I said. “Like you let Doug go. Like you let Kate go.”
“I can change,” said Beatrice. “By the time I met you I-”
“Yes, definitely,” I said. “That’s why you had to turn yourself into an emotionless robot.”
“And that was a mistake. I understand that now,” she said. “But what do you see when you look at yourself? A coward who’s too afraid to challenge anyone?”
“You met Dalia,” I said. “You know what the Guild is capable of. What am I supposed to do?”
“If I help you retrieve the Compendium, and you bring it back to them, do you honestly think that will be the end of it? That it will be all unicorns and rainbows the rest of the way?”
“I … I don’t know. But I need to find out how my mom was connected to all of this. I need to keep going. I need to see this through.”
“Then you’re dumber than I thought,” said Beatrice, turning the jar upside down and letting the last few rings drop with a thud onto the wooden desk. “And that’s why I won’t be helping you. There’s a cot in the back corner over there. It’s yours for the night, but tomorrow, I’m sending you on your way.”
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I tossed and turned in Beatrice’s stupid, uncomfortable cot all night. How could I sleep with all that had happened over the past day? I had been trapped in an endless void, attacked by an apparently sentient tree, forced my ex-boyfriend into an indentured apprenticeship, and flown across the country to find out that my former mentor had become even more of a sociopath. And with all of that, the thing that was actually keeping me awake was Beatrice’s words.
“You always have a choice.”
But who was she to judge me, after all she had done? I had made a choice, sure, to pick that apple pie Quest that had delivered me into her waiting arms, and I had made a choice not to cower before her when she tried to force her way into my mind.
But then something had happened.
Maybe it was the command Beatrice had implanted in me. I had felt so helpless at how my body had rebelled against me. At how I couldn’t even take off a tiny piece of jewelry from my finger. Then I had won her approval and let her control me in a different way. I had stood by while she forced my friends to trash the Met. Heck, I was the one who made them do it, with barely a protest.
And in the aftermath, instead of trying to help them, I had made them forget what I had done. Then I had doubled-down and done the same thing to Duncan. Did they deserve what I thought I was doing to them? Maybe Duncan did. But none of them had deserved their current fates. And that was something I had put to the side for too long.
I sat up from the cot to find Beatrice still hunched over her desk. I watched silently as she wrote copiously into a little notebook, her hand whirring down the lines of the page like a virtuoso, stroking her bow back and forth across the strings.
“What are you doing?” I asked quietly. “Is your mind…”
“No, it’s normal. No buffs tonight. But having all of my memories again seems to have jumpstarted something inside me. I need to write it all down before I lose this spark.”
“I see,” I said. “Been thinking about what you said, and what I’ve done. I need to set things right. Need to mend what I’ve broken. Will you help me?”
“Probably not,” said Beatrice. “I have to reassess the last few months with clear eyes. And that doesn’t leave much time to-”
“The memory serum, it did something,” I said. “To Stacy, to Lisa, and to Duncan. They’re forgetting themselves. If I don’t reverse it somehow, there will be nothing left of them soon but empty shells.”
“And I suppose you’re going to blame me for that, too?”
“No. You may have provided the means, but it was my decision. My choice. And it was a bad one. And I need to fix it.”
It felt good to say those words out loud, even if they were just words. But words are the first step toward action. And I was tired of being paralyzed by my failure to take any.
“I will help you,” said Beatrice, closing her notebook. “It was my serum and it was imperfect. But I think I’ve rectified my errors. Come.”
She walked along the empty metal shelves, and I followed, wondering if it was going to be that easy. At the far back of the expansive warehouse basement was a sidewalk cellar door, like the kind you find on every New York City street. Beatrice pressed her palm at the seam where the two halves met and it glowed in response before vanishing. A set of cinder stairs lay underneath the barrier that was no longer there.
“Don’t tell me you have an entire second basement hiding under this one?” I asked, worrying that the answer would be yes.
“No,” said Beatrice, descending into the darkness. “Even if this place is pretty much impregnable, I needed a place to hide my most valuable research.”
The vestibule that greeted us at the bottom of the bottom was a study in contrasts to the room we had just left. Bright white walls were covered with erratic streaks of paint that circled the entire space, as if Jackson Pollock had been reborn inside and was trying to paint his way out.
“What is this?” I asked.
“An earlier experiment,” said Beatrice. “Keeping everything in my head while operating a higher plane of thought was proving too taxing, so I needed a way to get it all out. This was the result.”
“It’s kind of messy,” I said.
“From a certain point of view,” she replied. “I eventually found something better. But this is not why we’re here. Stand beside me, please.”
Beatrice motioned me toward the center of the small room and pressed her back against mine.
“Don’t move, or the next few moments will be very unpleasant.”
“Not moving,” I said, as I heard the drawing of a blade free from a metal scabbard.
“Is that the Medoblad you just unsheathed? What … what are you doing?” I asked, resisting every urge to turn fully around and stop her from impaling me with its stone-turning edge.
“Unlocking my secreta.”
I craned my neck as far as I could and watched in horror as Beatrice scored the Medoblad across her left palm. She let the blood drip onto the pale white surface below for a few seconds and then clapped her hands together before slamming them both into the floor so loudly that I thought the walls would crumble. A flash of blinding blue light erupted from where the blood had fallen and my eyes were forced shut.
Even closed, I could see some sort of runes rising up all around us, an ancient and powerful language long forgotten by the world. The floating symbols affixed themselves to the walls and the gears of what sounded like a great metal machine began to turn and turn, until the room finally fell quiet and I opened my eyes to find myself standing in the middle of rings of concentric shelves chocked full of anything and everything.
“What the hell was that?” I asked, my body refusing to move even an inch. “What the hell is this?”
“I told you,” said Beatrice quietly. “This is my Secretum Secretorum, my secret of secrets, and I am its key.”