Page 46 of The Cannibal

“You’re right. If you were, maybe you’d listen,” Luka said.

I crossed my arms as I leaned back in the new armchair. I now had a small section by the window with a couch, chair, coffee table, and new rug to pull it all together. Slowly, the room was becoming my own. At first I thought it was a nice gesture, but now I understood it was to keep me entertained like a zoo animal.

“Everything you could possibly need for a few hours is right here. All the new publications, books, pens, and paper,” Luka stressed, scraping his fingers over his scalp as he looked around. “This should be all the reading material from your old lab. You shouldn’t be in need of much else.”

“I don’t have food or water,” I countered.

“You don’t eat food anymore.” He reached in his pocket, tossing me something.

It was a cloth wrapping tied with a pink ribbon. It smelled like cookies, but it was rather rough.

“Phoebe made bitter-brittle,” Luka said. “Is that all?”

I didn’t really have any more complaints, but I sure tried to dig around my brain for more.

“I know this is inconvenient. Please just stay put,” Luka pleaded with prayer hands. If his brows creased any more, they may become permanent on his face.

“I’m starting to think this isn’t going to be as temporary as you say.”

“It’s a nuisance to me as much as it is for you,” he scoffed. “Just a little longer and we can tell him you’ve woken. That gives you a couple days to feed and figure out what’s wrong with you.”

I rolled my eyes, moving around the table to the back.

“Alina,” he sighed, “please don’t take that the wrong way.”

I waved my hand at him, slouching into the chair sideways after gathering a bound study from the coffee table.

“I’ll send Phoebe to see you later,” he offered.

My response was the simple sound of unfurling pages, then wetting the pad of my finger with my tongue to flip to the index.

His counter was the sound of receding footsteps and the click of the door, the turn of a key in the lock.

Let the lockdown begin.

The welcoming festivities were almost to an end. Today they were having a nice breakfast before moving on to Appraisal preparations for our foreign visitors. Optics were important right now, Phoebe said. I believed them, but I also had some festering emotions about being treated like a liability. They say it’s because of Silas, but I have no way of knowing if that’s an excuse.

Similar feelings from before, back in Buffalo, rose to the surface. The feeling of thinking you were respected, only to descend into the necessary sacrifice.

I swallowed the thought and turned the page, but the name that jumped out at me didn’t help.

Jacek Aleksander Lis

Department of Physiology, King’s College

Another relic comes back to haunt me.

But this wasn’t a paper I recognized. I had copies of some of my father’s papers, namely the exploratory paper about the Vipera species. As far as I knew, he’d had a rudimentary understanding of the species already. He didn’t have enough time to finish any of it, much less publish them. But this drew into question exactly how much he knew.

Witnessing Evolution:

Sexual Selection and Reproductive Efficiency of the Vipera

If my body could run colder than dead, it would have after my eyes left the words on the page. But this was not a first draft by any means. It was typewritten, loosely bound. If he did not intend to publish, then who was funding these studies?

I riffled through the pages, pressing my nail into them as they snapped to the end. I dragged my finger over the tiny typeset, following them down to the acknowledgments, then funding: Levi Astor.

It was dated twenty years ago.