The Chemistry of a Kitchen

"The antidote is almost never a miracle. It is a common thing used at the right moment by someone who refused to stop thinking."

The lens held.

It had cracked, in three long hairlines that ran out from the point of impact like the arms of a star, and for a long moment the crypt hung in a kind of stunned silence, listening to the thin high ringing of the glass. But it did not fall. The draft that had begun in the shaft above it was a mere whisper, a hint of cold on the cheek, a breath. The fog moved a little. The lamps leaned. Then all was still.

"It didn't break," said Vespera.

"No."

"He threw it right."

"He threw it perfectly."

"Then why—"

"Because it is three inches thick, and it was made by smugglers who expected a lantern to be hung on it." Thalessa's mouth was dry. "He needs another."

She looked up.

Roderick clung to the head of the column, twenty-five feet above them, with his face pressed against the stone. He had thrown with his good arm. She saw him let it fall, and hang, and swing. She saw the long shudder go through his body. He lifted his head, and the eyes above the linen mask looked down at her, and she knew, as clearly as if he had spoken, that he had nothing left to throw.

"The revolver!" she cried.

He understood.

He fumbled at his belt. The silver snub-nosed gun came out, small and bright, and he held it in his hand for a moment as a man holds a thing he has had a long time. Then he drew back his arm.

"Wait," said Thalessa.

He stopped.

"Wait for the draft. Wait until the fog is lifted. It's thick down here. You must see the glass."

Seven minutes.

…

She turned back to the table, and the fog, and the girl.

Vespera was swaying.

She stood at the end of the table with one hand gripping the edge, her wet cloth drawn up over her nose, her dark eyes fixed on nothing. Her face above the mask was bluish, and glistening with sweat. A fine tremor ran through her. As Thalessa looked, her knees gave slightly, and she caught herself, and straightened, and stood there blinking.

"Vespera."

"I'm all right."

"You are not."

"It's only dizzy. It's the smell."

"How long have you had the mask on?"

"Since you gave it to me."

"It's been twenty minutes." Thalessa seized her wrist. The pulse was fast and thready. The skin was cold. "The mask is saturated. It's no longer working. Take it off."

"No—"

"Take it off, girl. It's holding gas now, not keeping it out."

She tore it away. The face beneath was white, almost gray, with livid marks round the mouth. The lips were blue. The eyes had a strange, glassy, distant look, such as a sleeper wears who is on the edge of waking.

"I feel," said Vespera slowly, "quite well."

"Sit down."

"I feel as though—"

Her eyes rolled up.

She went down all at once, in a heap, like a dropped doll, and Thalessa caught her under the arms and lowered her to the table. The girl's head lolled. Her mouth fell open. A thread of pink froth appeared at the corner of her lip.

Pulmonary, thought Thalessa, with a clinical, cold, distant calm. The gas has reached the lung. She has swallowed too much. The moist tissue, the swelling. She will drown in her own breath in ten minutes if I do nothing.

She did not hesitate.

She laid the girl flat on the white cloth among the burning jars. She tilted the head back, and opened the jaw, and cleared the mouth with two fingers. She knelt astride the thin body. She put her two palms flat on the ribs below the breast, and pressed down, and counted.

One. Two. Three.

It was the Sylvester method, as she had learned it at the Hospital of St. Martin, from a thin old surgeon with a tremor and a gift for teaching. Arms up. Arms down. Compress the chest. Release. Let the air flow in. It was slow work. It was heavy. It took the whole of one's strength, and the whole of one's will, and at the end of it a person was either alive or not.

Four. Five. Six.

"Come on," she whispered. "Come on, you obstinate child. Come on. You promised."

Seven. Eight.

"You said you would stay."

Nine.

She pressed. She released. She felt the ribs give and spring. She felt, under her palms, the faint flutter of a heart.

Ten.

Vespera coughed.

It was a harsh, convulsive spasm. Her body arched. She flung out an arm, and her eyelids fluttered, and a great shuddering gasp drew into her chest, and she coughed again, and a mass of pink foam came out of her mouth and ran over her chin. Her eyes opened. They were wild and unfocused. They found Thalessa's face.

"Gabriel?" she said.

"No."

"I thought—"

"It's me. Lie still. Breathe."

She breathed. It was a thin harsh whistle, a terrible sound, like a saw in wet wood. But it went in. It went in, and it came out, and went in again. Thalessa sat back on her heels. Her hands were shaking so that she had to clasp them together.

"Don't try to talk," she said.

"I can't—"

"Then don't."

"I can't see."

She froze.

"What do you mean?"

"It's all white." The girl's voice was a thread. "A white cloud. And light. And I can't—" She put up a hand and touched her own eyes, and recoiled. "They hurt."

The gas, thought Thalessa. The eye. The sulfurous acid on the cornea. She seized the nearest of the cloths, and wet it from the flask of brandy, and then thought better of it, and wet it instead from the dish of rock-water. She laid it gently across the girl's closed lids.

"It's the gas," she said. "It burns the surface of the eye. It will pass. Keep them shut."

"Am I blind?"

"No."

"You're sure?"

"I am a toxicologist." She tried to smile, and her lips trembled. "It's the first time in your life you will have been medically blind. I should think you'll find it dull."

And Vespera Haze, who had spent four years pretending to be what she now believed herself to have become, began, silently and helplessly, to laugh.

…

Four minutes.

The fog had thickened beyond belief.

It was no longer a mist. It was a wall. It was a soft, white, shifting wall that filled the vault from end to end, a cloud of fine floating powder in which the lamps glowed like drowned stars. The ammonia bottle was empty. She had poured the last spoonful into the last dish, and even that had sputtered to nothing. Beneath the white, rolling on the floor like a river, she could see the yellow haze rising again.

"Roderick!" she screamed. "Now!"

He had heard.

She saw him against the roof, small and dark, wreathed in drifts of fog. He had pressed his body to the stone, braced his knee in a notch of crystal, and flung back his arm. The revolver gleamed in his fist. He measured the distance. She saw the whole of him tighten.

He threw.

It left his hand with a flick, a small bright bullet of silver spinning in the dim gold light. It flew straight. It flew true. It crossed six feet of vault and struck the lens, dead in the center, where the three cracks met.

For an instant, nothing.

Then the glass sang.

It was a high pure sustained note, such as the crystal makes when a bow is drawn across it, and it rose in pitch, and rose, and rose, until she could hear it in her teeth. A web of light flashed across the disc. And all at once, with a sound like a great breath drawn in, the lens burst.

It burst inward. A shower of green fragments fell, glittering, like emerald rain. And behind it, through the hole, black, round, bottomless, a column of cold air came roaring down.

It struck her like a hand.

It tore at her hair. It snatched at her skirts. It whipped the fog into a wild white spiral and flung it up toward the roof, a whirling pillar of smoke, drawn in a single curve toward the hole, as water is drawn down a drain. The lamps flared. The cloth on the table bellied and cracked. The flames bent flat. Every fragment of haze in the vault, every shred of yellow vapor, every drifting scrap of white, rushed upward, in one great sighing gust, and vanished.

And through the hole, far away, like a pinprick, she saw a star.