Chương 2: Chapter 1 - Small Rituals

March came and went. April came. There were rumors that spring would be coming with it, but as far as I was concerned, they weren't reliable rumors. The snow might have stopped falling, but it didn't look like it was in the mood to melt. I had pointed that out to Conrad while we were on one of our walks through the forest that surrounded the mansion. He let out one of his patented one-breath chuff laughs.

"It's already spring," he said.

"You wouldn't know from looking around," I said.

"You don't see spring. You feel it in the longer days." He raised his muzzle.

"You smell it." He was walking along with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. It would've been an unassuming pose if he hadn't been so freaking big. I had to tilt my head back to see his profile. By that time, I was used to hanging out with a wolfman; the shape of his face didn't even strike me as odd. All I saw was the elegance of his wolf head, with his speckled gray-white fur, and his black nose reaching for the blue sky. He only needed to start howling to complete the scenic picture.

Not that he would. He never howled. Once upon a time, I had asked him about it. He reminded me that he wasn't a wolf. When I asked if he could howl—you know, theoretically— he wouldn't tell me.

"Why not?" I'd said.

"I don't like how you're grinning."

"Oh, come on!"

"I refuse to play into your stereotypes."

"What if I promise I'll try to eat your brains?"

"Good luck with that." I didn't mind the lingering snow. I got outside most days, and Igor kept his homemade hot chocolate mix stocked for me. I figured that spring would come when it was ready, and if it dragged its feet too long, then summer would come crashing in around June, whether we were ready or not. At least, that's what I assumed. I'd spent my first life living in cities and suburbs. That's how the seasons went: fall, winter, slush, summer.

Maybe it was different when you lived on the outskirts of a small town tucked into the mountains. Or maybe the wolfman was right, and I didn't know what spring was. Since I couldn't smell spring coming, and I didn't have a job that forced me to pay attention to what day of the week it was, the only way I had to keep track of time was the monthly appointments I had with Iset where she asked me roughly seven billion questions about my body.

If anyone else had tried it, it would've come across as a medical student's version of the Spanish Inquisition, but being around Iset was relaxing. Her manner was mellow, and her voice was beautiful.

"What about your fingernails?" she asked.

"Have they started growing yet?" We were in the library. In a weird way—a very weird way—this was a special ritual for the two of us. Olivia kept herself busy, and the one time that Darius had interrupted, Iset had stood up and shooed him away before he could get two feet into the room. No one was allowed in without my permission. Not even Dr. Belliston. Iset was behind her desk, and I was sitting in a chair close by. There were some medical gadgets next to Iset's laptop.

We'd done all the tests to check my heart rate, oxygen levels, temperature, and blood pressure. She'd asked me about my digestion, reproductive cycles, how I slept, if there'd been a change in how I healed—all that stuff. Now we were down to the details. Kappa was sitting in my lap, burbling to himself in what I thought of as "bog-monster dialect." It was similar to toddler-ese.

I gave him permission to be there because he couldn't care less about the secrets of my revived body, and he wouldn't have understood what was going on even if he did care. He was too absorbed in playing with my hands. I had to extract one of them to look at my nails.

"Maybe?" I sighed and lowered my hand.

"Or maybe I'm being optimistic." Iset stopped typing and raised her bandaged head.

"Emerra, if one of them chips or cracks, we can get you fake nails."

"No, I know. It's just…" I tried to tease out why I felt so antsy and bashful.

"I never thought of myself as the kind of girl who'd get fake nails." Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! The mummy shut the lid to her laptop. She did things like that without thinking about it. The notes were important—we wouldn't be taking them if they weren't—but whenever we were talking casually, she'd close the computer to listen. I basked in her unconscious kindness.

"Is there a reason why?" she asked. One of my shoulders lifted in a squirmy shrug.

"I've heard they're expensive, and it's not like I'm a fancy or feminine person."

"Is that because you don't want to be, or because you've never had the opportunity to be?" I groaned.

"I don't know! I like sundresses. I know that. Does that count as feminine?" Iset sounded amused: "Certainly."

"But getting your nails done is something that other people do."

"I wouldn't normally make an issue of someone's style choices, but in this case, it's less about vanity and more about practicality. Your nails protect your fingertips. If one of them breaks and we aren't sure if it'll grow back, we'll have to replace it."

"Yeah, yeah," I grumbled.

"And you can make the replacement as feminine as you like." Iset opened her laptop again.

"Anything new with your hair?"

"Nope! I'm still a cue ball."

"What about body hair?"

"I haven't noticed any changes." I raised a hand to my eyebrow ridge and ran my fingertips over the thin, stringy line of hair. It wasn't much, but I was grateful they'd survived the chemotherapy as well as they had. Especially since it seemed like I'd be stuck with them like that for a while. Iset sighed and leaned back in her chair.

"I think that's everything. Maybe one of these days we'll be able to figure out your immune system." She paused, then cocked her head.

"That might be important enough that we should talk to Dr. Belliston about doing some tests." A curl of ice wound through my stomach. I didn't like tests, and I especially didn't like medical tests. I'd failed too many of them.

"Do you think so?" I said.

"I think it's better than finding out your immune system isn't working after you catch a cold." I shivered.

"Shall I call and talk to him?" Iset asked. I gave her a reluctant nod. Iset leaned forward again. As she typed, I stroked the fins on the sides of Kappa's head. He made a chirping noise deep in his throat.

"Iset," I said, "am I normal?" The mummy stopped typing. She turned her whole body to me and closed the lid of her laptop with one hand.

"Normal?"

"I mean, for a revived person. Is it normal for only some of my body to…" I struggled to find a way to express my thoughts. The words came out stunted and hesitant.

"…come back online?" At first, Iset didn't answer. During the brief hiatus, Kappa made an oooohhh noise as he curled and uncurled my hand. He raised my hand to his face to sniff at the space between my fingers. No doubt he was trying to figure out what had happened to my webbing. And, hey! Why not have webbing between my fingers? It made about as much sense as anything else. When Iset spoke, her voice was unusually gentle.

"Emerra, there's no normal when it comes to a revived body. There are so few of us, and every one of us is different." Us. I kept forgetting that Iset was a revived. Like me. Well, of course, not like me. Not really. We were so different that it was almost excusable that I'd forget. Iset's body didn't function like a normal body at all; it was more like an object that her soul occupied. I had some idea that she could "see," but it wasn't with her eyes. Those were under the bandages.

She couldn't eat, she didn't sleep—she only "rested"—and her body didn't age or change. Except for things like my hair, nails, and menstrual cycles, I… seemed to be normal. I was even gaining weight! If I kept eating Igor's food and training with Conrad, I might hit a very bruised one hundred pounds before the summer was over. That should've been assuring, and I'm not normally the kind of girl to go around asking existential questions, but a few things had occurred to me. Was I going to age? Could I die?

Big Jacky had said no, I couldn't die—and he would know because he is death—but when I'd pressed him for more details, I learned that it was a jargon game. I could never die because—get this—I already had. A month later, I still had to resist the urge to smack my forehead.

"When you returned to your body," Jacky had said, "it created a new form of life, but you weren't born to it—""What if I get run over by a truck tomorrow?"

"I've already told you that your body can be destroyed."

"So my body would cease functioning?"

"That should be obvious. It would be in pieces."

"And when I almost got hypothermia?" Jacky hesitated. I could see it in the lines of his blank skull. Maybe the Eyes of the Sphinx allowed me to read his nonexistent expressions. Or maybe I was getting to know him really well.

"I'm not sure," he said. Not sure. That's what bothered me. Not sure if I'd get older. Not sure if I could get sick. Not sure how careful I had to be. Not sure if my hair would ever start growing again, or if I'd ever get another period. And nobody knew if I'd get the answers to any of these questions tomorrow or seven hundred years from now—which I might still be around for, but we weren't sure. I laced my fingers together. Kappa let out another oooohh noise and tried to imitate me. The webbing got in the way.

"Iset, did you make a journal like this about your body?" I asked.

"Not at first," she said.

"Not for a long time. It was over a thousand years after my revival when I started keeping track. There was another revived being. I don't know the circumstances, but something happened to them, and a friend of theirs was traveling to every Torr in the world, trying to learn what they could about revived bodies, to see if there was anything that could be done. That was when I realized the power of information, and what a tragedy it was that I had none to offer.

The next day I started my journal and wrote down as much as I could remember." I did some more basking. Iset's superpower was being able to take something as tedious as talking about fingernails and show you how much it mattered.

"Thank you for helping me keep a record," I said. There was real humility in that statement. God knew, I didn't have enough discipline to do it myself.

"I'm happy to do it," Iset said.

"Like you, I'm curious about other revived. And I have plenty of time." I smiled at my three-thousand-year-old friend.

"Shall we talk about your powers now or another day?" Iset asked. I groaned again. Louder.