Unveiled

by Ruth Vincent

  I pressed my fingers against my face, fighting back the panic that clutched at me every time I thought about Obadiah’s condition. Eva was looking at me, her eyes wide and serious.

  “You should take him to one of those drug treatment centers,” she said.

  “He refuses to go. And honestly, I don’t think they could help him. This isn’t a normal narcotic. It’s not any known substance. Those places are designed to combat heroin, meth, coke, whatever. But this isn’t like that.”

  Eva was silent, nodding.

  I listened for signs of anyone out in the hall and then spoke.

  “What’s Tamira not telling me? The other component of this substance, the one she wouldn’t talk about, do you know what it is?”

  Eva frowned. “I think Tamira just didn’t want to talk about it because she’s telling the truth. We really don’t know. It wouldn’t be right for her to make a definitive statement about something that’s still mostly conjecture.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t satisfied.

  “You must have some ideas, though. I mean, I won’t hold you to anything you say—I’m just curious. What do you think this stuff is? I mean, you personally?”

  Eva glanced behind her back to make sure no one was coming.

  “I’m worried one of the other members of the team might come in the break room and overhear us,” she said. “Come on. I know a part of the lab that Tamira would have no problem with me showing you, and we’d have total privacy there.”

  We left the break room and walked down the hall. Eva opened a door and turned on the lights.

  The room was full of cages. Fluffy white lab rats scampered around inside. The whole room had a musky, animal smell. There were sounds of squeaking and scuffling, and curious rats stood up on their hind legs, pressing their pink noses between the bars and peering at us with their beady black eyes, whiskers twitching back and forth.

  “I hope they don’t freak you out,” Eva said apologetically.

  “No, I think they’re cute.” I smiled at the small furry face snuffling next to me.

  “One of my jobs here, as the lowest person on the totem pole at the lab, is to feed and clean their cages, when they’re not in use in an experiment. No one is going to be coming in here today. It’s probably the most soundproof place we have in the lab for us to talk.”

  She paused, and I could hear the soft clang of a rat running on a wheel.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Mab. In the last couple months, some of the memories have been coming back to me, since my accident at Obadiah’s club.”

  I nodded, my heart beating faster. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; I’d always heard that memory loss from head injuries was often temporary. What had Eva remembered? Had she remembered the Vale? Did she remember what I’d told her, about being a changeling?

  “I keep thinking that surely I’m not really remembering, surely I’m just recalling a dream,” she said, and I bit my tongue. Of course Eva would doubt herself, if memories of magic had resurfaced.

  “Honestly, though, that’s the real reason I’m so excited to be working at this lab. I mean, Tamira is amazing, and I’m really looking forward to doing my graduate work, but when I found out what Reggie told you, that the lab rats the NYPD gave Elixir to had levitated, I felt I had to research this stuff myself.”

  I cast a glance at the furry little bodies running around in the cages beside us. Whoever had done that experiment the first time must have doubted their own senses.

  “They did a repeat of the first trial, just to make sure the people who reported those initial results weren’t crazy,” Eva went on. “It worked again. That’s when I knew I had to take this job.”

  “Of course you’d want to be on the cutting edge of studying something that extraordinary,” I said.

  Her face looked grave. “Yes, but that’s not the only reason.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then spoke.

  “I remembered something about the night of the accident. I hadn’t told anyone, because I figured no one would believe me. But I remember flying. I thought I’d gone nuts—but if this substance made the lab rats levitate after they drank it, I guess it’s no crazier than the same thing happening to me.”

  She laughed, a hysterical little laugh. “You probably don’t believe any of this. If you saw the tapes of the rats levitating, though . . .”

  I cut her off. “Eva, I believe you.”

  She was silent, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, her eyes skeptical.

  “I was there that night, remember?”

  “You saw me fly?”

  I nodded.

  She stared at me wide-eyed, barely breathing.

  “Well, thank you for not thinking I’m nuts,” she said at last.

  “Of course.”

  She was silent for a moment, staring down at the rows of cages.

  “I meant what I said to you at the street fair. We could be doing research that will change the world. I mean, this substance, whatever it is, it’s totally new. I bet that a hundred years from now, kids will be reading about Tamira Campbell in their science textbooks, the way we read about Marie Curie. She’ll go down in history for discovering this stuff.”

  I nodded, feeling suddenly afraid. Humans were going to “discover” magic. What would the implications to that even be?

  I began to pace back and forth between the racks of cages.

  “The thing that Tamira didn’t want to tell you,” said Eva, “is that we do sort of know what the other component of this substance is. Or, at least, we know what it isn’t.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked breathlessly.

  “Well, she told you how this substance is made up of two parts, right? For the sake of example, let’s call them X and Y. X is human dopamine, or similar enough to it. And the problem is we don’t know what the hell Y is. At first we thought Y was strands of DNA,” she explained, “because the structure looked similar. But then when we examined it more closely, it wasn’t. At least Y wasn’t human DNA, or the DNA of any other animal. Like I said, we’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  I held my breath, thinking.

  “The only thing we’ve been able to figure out so far is that whatever Y is, it lives in some kind of symbiotic relationship with X, the dopamine. If we add more dopamine to it, Y multiplies. It’s like the dopamine feeds it. But that still doesn’t tell us what Y is.”

  What if it was fairy DNA? I’d be hard-pressed to explain that to Tamira or even to Eva, but it was the most likely explanation I could think of. Was Elixir a mixture of fairy DNA and dopamine? What if Feydust was really fairy DNA, in human terms? And what if the goddesses’ tears of joy was a metaphor for a dopamine-like chemical? Maybe our world had been rich with this chemical until the drought, and then the Queen had to start supplementing it with the dopamine she derived from the children? It was so wrong. But it sort of made sense.

  I looked at Eva. She was standing next to one of the cages, reaching a finger through the bars to scratch the head of a large white rat that was nuzzling into her, its eyes closed in bliss at her touch.

  How in the world could I tell Eva that the Y-factor they were studying wasn’t even from this world? She might believe she had flown, but already that was stretching her credulity to capacity. How could I tell her what Tamira had in her agar-jell dishes down the hall right now was fairy DNA? And yet, if I didn’t say something, Tamira and her team would forever be on the wrong track in their investigation as to what the mysterious Y-factor was.

  “I should be getting back to work,” Eva said, glancing at her watch. She gave a behind-the-ears scratch goodbye to the rat. I could tell that one was her favorite. “Thanks for letting me talk about all this stuff. There’s no one else I can talk to about it, really.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I walked with Eva back to the room with all the researchers, and thanked Tamira again for her time.

  Walking past the racks of colorful ca
pped vials, I kept wondering if the clear substance contained in them was Elixir. I couldn’t smell it, sealed like that.

  A highly improper thought crossed my mind. Obadiah didn’t have any Elixir in his store anymore, since the cops had raided his stash. If I could get him a vial or two, would it hold off the symptoms of Thirst for a while? At least till I figured out a better plan? Tamira and her team all had their eyes down at their stations focusing on their work. But I dismissed the thought quickly, feeling ashamed. I’d never stolen anything in my life, and despite how badly I wanted to help Obadiah, it wouldn’t be right. Tamira and Eva had trusted me. I wasn’t going to betray that trust.

  I walked with empty pockets back out the long corridors of the lab and out into the street.

  Back in our apartment that night, to distract myself from thinking about the Elixir experiments, I decided to give Quinn a call. I didn’t think she’d pick up. Why would she be more responsive over the phone than she had been in person? But I had to try something. I didn’t want to come back to Reggie with my tail between my legs. What I wanted was for Quinn to send me a picture of her boyfriend, the one she’d started seeing when all the trouble started. Facial recognition software was getting better and better, and if Quinn wouldn’t give me any info about him, maybe I could find him that way?

  I sat down on my bed and dialed the number her mother had given me.

  As expected, the phone rang and rang but she didn’t pick up. All I got was a voicemail with a one hundred and eighty degree more cheerful version of Quinn’s voice on it. The chipper greeting, with the hint of a giggle on the end, showed me just how much Quinn had changed. She hadn’t always been a half-alive girl who barely left her room. The contrast was so sharp it made my heart ache and strengthened my resolve to do something to help her.

  Not giving up that she wasn’t taking calls, I also sent her a text:

  Please send a photo of your ex, if you have one. Much appreciated. Thanks, Mab Jones.

  I waited for a while but nothing came through. Likely nothing would. If she didn’t take calls, why would she take texts either?

  I set my phone down on the nightstand and was halfway to the kitchen, wondering why I’d bothered to contact her at all, when I heard a ping. I turned around.

  There was a message from Quinn:

  Okay. But it won’t help.

  Well, there was the optimism characteristic of the malaise that had swallowed her, I thought sardonically, opening the message. But there were photos. I almost leaped with joy. As my gaze fell on the first picture, my eyebrows rose. There was no denying he was strikingly handsome, like movie-star good-looking. I was a trifle surprised. Usually people dated someone in the same strata of attractiveness as themselves, and Quinn, even in the old photos of her happy and smiling with makeup on and in a stylish dress, was no more than average. Somehow, perhaps irrationally, it made me think better of this guy. A man that spectacularly attractive could have had any girl he wanted, could have had all the prettiest arm candy. If he’d chosen Quinn, it must have meant he actually liked her for who she really was, didn’t it? That didn’t mean he hadn’t hurt her, though.

  Then I realized there were more pictures. She’d sent me more than one. I scrolled down to view the other photos. But they weren’t more photos of the same guy. They were photos of different guys. Why had she sent me these? They had to be other guys she’d dated recently. I hadn’t asked for that, but it was nice of her to send them to me. She was actually trying to be helpful and forthcoming. It was such a contrast to the utterly walled-off girl in the bed. It felt like progress.

  I scrolled through the photos. All of these guys were total hotties. Damn, Quinn, I thought, kind of in awe at her dating prowess. Then again, it could all be fake. Maybe she’d copied and pasted up-and-coming idols off IMDB and passed them off as her boyfriends? I kept scrolling through what looked like the casting auditions for male leads in the latest YA dystopian blockbuster. And then I saw the last photo. I shrieked, almost dropping my phone.

  I recognized him at once. It was the guy Eva had had over the other night, the good-looking one I’d seen putting on his shoes in the hall, the one who walked out on Eva without even saying goodbye.

  I raced into the kitchen.

  Eva was standing by the stove. She was making her famous pollo guisado, Dominican stewed chicken. The air was warm from the preheating oven, and smelled pungently of the garlic she was chopping with deft, rhythmic strokes.

  “Eva,” I called out.

  She looked over at me without even losing the rhythm of her dice. Anyone else, I’d worry they were about to cut their fingers off, but not Eva.

  “That guy you had over the other night, the jerk, by any chance is this him?”

  I held up the picture on my phone.

  The knife slid from Eva’s fingers, and she barely caught it before it fell to the floor. She stared at the picture, one hand clutched to her mouth.

  “Holy shit, yeah, it is. Mab, how did you get this photo?”

  I told her in a few words about Quinn.

  Eva’s eyes grew very big. She didn’t say anything. The knife hovered motionless in her hands, her lips in a thin white line.

  My heart was beating very fast, a fear looming in my mind. This was the man who might have hurt Quinn. Oh god, had he done something to Eva, more than just walking out on her? I would hunt him down and kill him. But she had seemed so happy after their one-night stand.

  “Eva, he never hurt you, did he?”

  My heart was in my mouth as I looked at my best friend.

  “No, it wasn’t like that.” She used the exact same words Quinn had, but when Eva said it the conviction seemed genuine.

  I asked the question directly.

  “He never did anything . . . not consensual, did he?”

  “No, not at all.” When Eva looked into my eyes I could tell she was telling the truth.

  “I mean, I was hurt when he left,” she said. “But during, it was nothing but good. It was magical.”

  She kept using that word, I noticed, to describe this man.

  “So Quinn and I dated the same guy?” she said. “What are the odds of that?”

  But something in her voice sounded afraid. Like it wasn’t just coincidence.

  She went back to chopping garlic. But her heart wasn’t in it. She kept pausing, the knife dangling in her fingers.

  I watched her. Even though Eva seemed devastated that this Cory had dumped her, she wasn’t taking it like Quinn. She was still herself. She was hurt, yes, sad maybe, but not depressed. There was a world of difference between the two. Whatever had happened to Quinn hadn’t happened to Eva. So if there was a boy behind Quinn’s mysterious descent into despair, it must have been one of the other boys in the photos, not Cory. That was all I could think. Unless Quinn’s experience had just been totally different than Eva’s.

  Eva washed the garlic from her hands and then turned to me.

  “May I see that photo again, Mab?”

  I handed her the phone.

  She stared at his picture for a long moment, frowning.

  “Does it bother you to see him?” I asked. “I shouldn’t have shown it to you.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “I’m glad you did. I never took a photo of Cory, during the brief time we were together. I wish I had.”

  She turned to me and there was an expression on her face I couldn’t quite read.

  “So since Cory dated Quinn,” she asked at last, “are you considering him a suspect in your case?”

  I nodded, hoping this wasn’t too close to home for Eva.

  “We have been investigating anyone Quinn might have dated, since her mom said her symptoms started after seeing a new boyfriend,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s Cory. There are four other photos of guys that she sent me. It could be any of them too.”

  Eva still had that strange look on her face.

  “Did Quinn tell you where she met these guys?” she asked me.r />
  “No. Trying to extract information from Quinn is like trying to get blood from a stone. But I’m planning to work on her more about it. Maybe I can get something useful. You said you met Cory at your group, right?”

  Eva nodded. She had abandoned her cooking and taken a seat at our tiny kitchen table, steepling her fingers, clearly lost in thoughts she wasn’t sharing with me.

  I took a seat opposite her. An idea was occurring to me.

  “How big is your group?” I asked. “How many people typically show up for your monthly events?”

  “There’s a core group of about a dozen of us, but at some of the big rituals, we could easily get fifty or a hundred people. Some people show up once and don’t come back.”

  “So it’s possible Quinn might have come to your group? Maybe she met Cory the same place that you did?” Of course, it was also possible Quinn had met Cory somewhere else. And who knows how she’d found the other four guys. But now I had another potential “in” into Quinn: Eva’s group. What were the odds? And yet New York, for being a city of eight million, sometimes functioned uncannily like a small town in terms of the unlikely coincidences of running into people. It was a vast metropolis of thousands of tiny, tiny subcultures, and if you shared one of those, the world was actually quite small.

  “I wonder if anyone else in your group might remember Quinn, might have some information about her.” I felt bad asking Eva for another favor. Here I’d just asked to see her workplace, and now I was asking for an invitation to her group.

  Eva took the hint. “I’m sure Tiffany, the girl who runs our group, would be fine with you coming, if I vouched for you.”

  But that strange look was back in her face, her eyes wide, lips set in a thin hard line.

  “Eva, is it upsetting you to talk about this?” I asked. “I mean, I know everything with Cory is really fresh. We don’t have to discuss it right now. And if it’s not comfortable for me to come to your group, I have other ways I can work on to track Quinn’s exes down. It was just a thought.”