Chapter Twelve: Volunteer Test Subject
The explosion happened two floors above my apartment, which was how I met her.
The ceiling shook hard enough to rattle the light fixture and a fine dust of plaster drifted down onto the kitchen counter. Wren looked up from her editing rig, eyes wide.
"Was that an explosion?"
"Sounded like one."
We found out for certain when the fire alarm in the stairwell started shrieking and a girl came barreling down from the fourth floor covered head to toe in something bright purple, hair singed at the ends, cackling in a way that made my own laugh sound restrained by comparison.
"IT WORKED," she was shouting, to absolutely nobody, fists in the air. "IT ACTUALLY WORKED, I JUST NEED TO FIX THE PART WHERE IT ALSO BLOWS UP THE ROOM."
She skidded to a stop when she saw me standing in my doorway, purple dripping off one elbow onto the hallway carpet.
"Oh," she said, blinking. "You're her. You're the clown girl."
"I prefer Laughing Queen, but sure."
"Right, right, obviously, sorry." She wiped purple off her face with the back of her sleeve, which mostly just spread it around. "I'm Reyna. I live upstairs. Well. Lived. I think the landlord's about to have some things to say about the ceiling."
Behind her, the fire alarm finally cut out, replaced by the distant sound of a very unhappy landlord already climbing the stairs.
"You want to come in," I said, "before he finds you?"
Her whole face lit up like I'd offered her something better than sanctuary.
"God, yes."
Reyna's story came out over the next hour in the kind of rapid, tangent heavy monologue that suggested she hadn't had anyone to actually talk to in a while. Formally trained alchemist, top of her cohort at the Academy, until she'd gotten expelled for what she cheerfully described as "a difference of opinion regarding acceptable testing protocols."
"They wanted everything bottled, measured, safe," she said, perched on my counter, still dripping purple in places. "I wanted to know what happens if you push a formula past the point it's supposed to stop working. Turns out that's frowned upon. Who knew."
"What happened?"
"I may have turned a professor's voice permanently squeaky for about six hours during a supervised demonstration. It wore off. Eventually. He didn't see the humor in it the way I did." She shrugged, entirely unbothered. "Kicked out within the week. Been freelancing since. Badly, if the ceiling situation upstairs is any indication."
I liked her immediately, in the specific, dangerous way you like someone who reminds you a little too much of yourself.
"What were you even making," I asked.
Her eyes went bright in a way that made me immediately nervous. "Berserker draught. Theoretically it spikes adrenaline and pain tolerance for about ten minutes, turns you into an absolute wrecking ball. Practically, it's unstable, the last three test batches have all detonated before I could even taste one, and I don't have anyone left willing to volunteer as a test subject since word got around."
"I'll do it."
Wren, silent up until this point, nearly dropped the laptop off her knees. "You'll what?"
"I'll test it." I shrugged. "I already regenerate weird. Whatever it does to me, I'll probably survive it. And honestly," I glanced at Reyna, who was staring at me like I'd just offered to marry her, "I'll swallow pretty much anything at this point. Curiosity's basically my whole personality now."
Reyna looked at me for a long moment, something shifting behind her eyes that wasn't quite excitement and wasn't quite relief, but sat somewhere warm between the two.
"Nobody's ever said yes that fast before," she said quietly.
"Yeah, well." I popped a blowpop into my mouth, already grinning. "Welcome to the club."
We ran the first real test three days later, in a reinforced storage unit Wren rented specifically because my kitchen had, in her words, "already survived one small explosion this month and doesn't need to test its luck twice."
Reyna handed me a small vial, liquid inside it a color that shouldn't have existed in nature, faintly glowing, faintly hissing.
"Small sip," she instructed, actually nervous for the first time since I'd met her. "If your voice starts squeaking, that's normal, that's the adrenaline pathway misfiring, it should pass in a few minutes."
"And if it doesn't pass?"
"Then we learn something new about your regeneration, I guess."
I drank it.
For about four seconds, nothing happened. Then heat bloomed through my whole chest at once, sharp and immediate, and when I tried to say something reassuring, what came out instead was a squeak so high pitched that Wren burst out laughing hard enough she had to sit down on the floor.
"Okay," I said, or tried to, voice cracking into something that sounded like a cartoon chipmunk had taken over my vocal cords entirely. "That's. Unfortunate."
Reyna was scribbling notes so fast her pen nearly tore through the page, delighted in a way that made the whole situation feel less like a medical emergency and more like a science fair project finally paying off.
"Your heart rate's spiking exactly the way the formula's supposed to do it," she said, practically vibrating with excitement. "The voice thing is a side effect, not a failure. This might actually work."
Ten minutes later, right on schedule, the squeaking faded and something else replaced it entirely, a low, humming strength that settled into my limbs like the hammer had settled into my hand back in that dungeon, natural in a way that should have worried me and somehow didn't.
I punched the reinforced wall of the storage unit, mostly to test it.
The wall buckled.
Reyna's scream of pure joy echoed off what remained of the metal siding, and behind her, Wren was already laughing too hard to hold the camera steady, and for the first time since I'd stepped out of that dungeon with two colors of hair and a class nobody had a name for, I felt something that wasn't just survival.
It felt like a team.
A weird, chaotic, occasionally explosive team, but a team.
"Okay," Reyna said, wiping tears of laughter off her face, already reaching for a fresh notebook. "Next batch, I want to try one that makes you taller. Purely theoretical. Purely for science."
"Absolutely not," Wren said.
"I'm listening," I said, at the exact same time, and Reyna's whole face split into a grin that told me this partnership was going to get us all in an enormous amount of trouble, sooner rather than later.
I couldn't wait.