Chương 25: Chapter Twenty-Five: Several Terrible Discoveries, In Order

He looked at her for a moment. Something in his face was careful in a way she didn't like. Hyde almost never used her first name. In two months of almost weekly meetings and surgeries and the occasional evening when she'd arrived at his door in a condition that merited it, it had been Miss Darling. Never just Alice. That was what stopped her from speaking. Not his plea.

"I didn't imagine it to go like this," he said quietly.

"Honestly, I'm not certain what I imagined. But not this." He set down a small vial and picked up another.

"This isn't the right time, Miss Darling." Back to Miss Darling so soon?

"Then when is the right time?" she asked. He didn't answer that. He went back to work, and she watched him, and tried to think through the blood loss and the noise in her mind and the pain in her body. The tonics were working at least. She could feel it, not relief exactly, but the situation seemed somewhat more manageable than it had appeared several minutes ago. The same couldn't be said for her mobility. Her eyes strayed to her leg, or the place where her leg had been, and something choked in her chest.

She didn't need to have studied history to know what happened to single disabled women in cities like Londinium, in times like this one. In short, they weren't treated very well. But even if Britannian society wasn't the harsh cesspool of ableism that saw lost limbs as personal sins…

The marsh runs, the income she'd built, the routine she'd established, the fragile independence of a woman who stood at a pitch from seven in the morning and carried a basket home at three, all of that she had done using two legs and the ability to sprint when something in the reed beds moved wrong. She knew that people were remarkably resilient and build whole lives despite losing entire limbs, but… But… The grass was where her knee should be. She could see grass where her knee should be. Alice held back tears.

She looked at Hyde's hands instead. He paused what he was doing. He looked at her face, at the tears she had not been able to stop entirely, and something in his expression shifted toward a reserved sadness.

"I will not harm you," he said.

"Do not worry." She believed him. Why would she ever worry about that? He didn't need to specify– Her thoughts came to a sudden stop. Why would she ever worry about that? When had that sentence ever crossed her mind? Alice believed him. She believed he wouldn't harm her as if it was fact, the way she believed the marsh was cold and iron worked on Boggarts and that two plus two made four. She didn't choose to believe him despite the lies and the insanity she had seen that night. She just did. Why.

She was, by her own honest accounting, a suspicious person. She had spent her professional life studying how people deceived themselves and others. She had spent months in this city cataloguing everyone's potential motives, watching faces for the differences between what people said and what they meant, paranoid at any moment about being found as a fraud and burned at the stake, or whatever they did to aliens.

She was precisely the kind of person who should not believe a statement like I will not harm you from a man who had just burned several hundred demons with magic words and who her best perception skill could not read at all. Even if she had learned to trust him, wouldn't that trust have been broken tonight? Why did she still–? Wait. When did she learn to trust him? There should be one, shouldn't there? Some specific moment where trust had been tested and held, some decision she had made. She could normally do this.

She had an excellent memory, and relationships had architecture. Nothing could be built without foundation. Random acts of kindness. Sharing novels and books. Treating her wounds. The way he said Next Thursday, Miss Darling in a tone that expected compliance without ever issuing a command. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. She could not find the day where it had changed. She trusted him, and she could not think of the moment that made that happen.

He set down a vial. Hyde looked at her for a moment, and Alice's tears dried unshed.

"Everything will be alright," he said, gently.

"There will be little to remember." No.

"What… What have you done to me?" she asked, voice shaking. He was quiet. The silence sat there and was its own answer, and something in her chest went very cold and very still, colder than the bite wounds, colder than the blood loss. When did this become normal? The thought arrived fast and would not stop arriving. Alice looked back at her memories again.

She had noted down in her mind every kindness in the first few weeks, the tea, the food, the loan of his second-best coat, the books, the unhurried Thursday mornings he could have spent on paying patients instead. She remembered thinking of them as debts, deliberately, carefully. This will cost me something. Never let anyone do something for you without knowing the price. When did it happen? When?

She searched again, actively, urgently, lying in the wet grass with her leg gone and her hands shaking, through months of Thursdays for the specific visit where she had stopped counting, and there was no morning where her debts had stopped being debts. She had disliked, her whole life, in both lives, the particular bristle of accepting unearned kindness. She had never managed to talk herself out of it, not even with people she had genuinely loved for years. It had been something she had needed to work on.

She had never felt it with him. How unlike her. When? When? When? She had come from a modern country with free healthcare. The thought of paying for a doctor's visit had always struck her as vaguely barbaric. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that she had been using a private physician in Victorian times, a well-appointed surgery, good equipment, strange magical tonics, regularly, for months, and she had never once asked what it cost.

She who tracked every penny of pitch income, who knew the price of a horn-sided lantern to the halfpenny, who calculated her rent against her week's earnings on the walk home from work every single day. She… She did not even know what Hyde charged. She had never asked. The question had not occurred to her to ask, not once in two months of meetings. This was no longer just about memories. That is not how I am. The thought cut through the haziness like cold water. That is not who I am.

The notification arrived before the thought finished forming. Skill created: [Mental Skill Resistance] She went very still. [Mental Skill Resistance] – Passive.

You are under the effect of an active skill. Source: RESTRICTED. Duration: RESTRICTED.

Skill [Mental Skill Resistance] has leveled up.

Skill [Mental Skill Resistance] has leveled up.

Skill [Mental Skill Resistance] has leveled up. And then, faster than her screen had ever moved, stacked one on top of the next… Main Quest: [Alice's Adventures in Wonderland] advanced.

Sub-Quest: [Find the White Rabbit] advanced.

Sub-Quest: [Off With Her Head] advanced.

Progression threshold met. You have leveled up! Alice did not move. She did not let her face do anything. She felt him watching the same corner of her vision she was reading from. Not her eyes. The empty air just past her shoulder, and his gaze held there still, like someone who knew exactly what was unfolding in that space because he had watched it unfold before. Possibly because he could fucking read her mind. Possibly because he was reading it right now as she was. Neither of them said anything about it.

Alice felt like throwing up.

"You're going to take my memories," she said before she ran out of chances to say anything at all.

"Some of them." He spoke with the same gentle practicality he used for your arm needs a week's rest and take this tonic twice daily with food.

"The ones that would endanger you."

"You can't do this." He looked at her, and his pale blue eyes were warm, which was somehow worse than if they had been cold.

"Miss Darling–""Memories make a person." She heard her own voice go harder than she intended and did not soften it.

"That is not a philosophical position. That is a statement of clinical fact. The continuous thread of autobiographical memory is the substrate of identity. You cannot selectively remove portions of a person's experience and claim you have not damaged them." She was bleeding out. She couldn't move. She couldn't run or escape. The only thing she could do was lecture him, convince him.

"You said you would not harm me. You are a physician. You should know this."

"I know considerably more about the risks you would face if–""That is not your decision," she said, trying to not reveal her fear and anger through her words. She had to appear calm. She had to appear logical, persuasive.

"I am your patient, you are my doctor. That is not your decision." He stopped talking and simply looked her with a rather sad expression, but not for what he was about to do. It was as if… It was as if something about her words was… nostalgic.

"How many times?" she said, forgetting all about calmness and logic in her sudden panic. The expression disappeared as if it had never been there.

"How many times have you done this to me?" Alice asked, voice barely a whisper.