Memento Mori: Mors Immatura

Chapter Six

I blinked, and I was sitting at the table, looking at a bundle of paper stacked neatly before me. Cyrillic handwriting filled the pages and I leafed through them. My right hand felt cramped and sore.

"This is everything?" I met Olena's gaze and she nodded. She was sitting on her hands, looking pensive. I folded the pages, and put them in the envelope that she had written the address on. I picked up the pen, and added 'Ukraine' in English on the envelope.

The clock on the mantelpiece showed that it was eight in the morning. Olena had been in my body most of the night, writing to her parents.

I stretched and yawned, making my jaw crack.

"Let me have a shower, and then we can go to the shop with this," I rolled my neck, feeling a stiffness in my shoulders. Olena must have been a terrible slumper when she was alive.

She looked smaller this morning; the spikey young woman that followed me home seemed more subdued.

"Are you okay?"

She shrugged, and wandered off to look out of the bay window. I let out a long sigh, and headed to the bathroom.

I peeled off my pyjamas, and jumped under the warm water, letting it soothe away the ache of my possessed body being hunched over, writing furiously for most of the night.

I scrubbed myself down and washed my hair quickly. I wrapped myself into the oversized beach towel that I had treated myself to last year, and tied my wet hair up into a bun.

I avoided looking at myself in the mirror; even wrapped in my towel, the tops of my autopsy scars peeked out across my collarbones. No matter what injuries I sustained before I died, they would be completely healed by the time I returned. But for some reason, the scars cut into my corpse by Dr Choi and the others, always remained.

When they discovered that I would always returned from death, I had spent a lot of time being killed in various ways by the Investiture staff, who would then carry out a post-mortem, report the results, wait for me to come back before starting the cycle off again. I'd been the subject of several papers on poisoning, radiation exposure, gunshot wounds, hanging, stabbing, vehicular injuries... The others hadn't been experimented on as much as I had. The parameters of their abilities had been easily established after the first year or so at the Investiture.

"Aren't you going to ask me what it says?" Olena stood in the doorway, hugging herself as I pulled on some clothes. I had an appointment at half past eleven this morning, so I pulled on a black dress and some tights, to prevent chub-rub and to keep my legs warm.

"What you've written to your parents isn't my business," I shoved my feet into my boots, and pulled on my jacket, as she followed me down the stairs.

"Don't you care?" Whatever goodwill I had garnered last night had evaporated.

"It's not that I don't care." I opened the fridge and took out the milk, giving it a sniff. It was acceptable, but I should probably pick up another bottle. "It's private. It's between you and them. It's none of my business what you've written to them about, and I don't want to pry."

She gave me a long, level stare, and finally unfolded her arms.

"If you want to know, I'll tell you."

"And I'll listen," I pulled my bag over my shoulder, and headed out. "But only if you want to tell me."

"I was going to tell them everything," she chewed on her lip. "But that would just upset them."

"Did you tell them that you were dead?"

"No!" She looked at me as if I were an idiot. "That would just confuse and upset them. And, I don't want my letter to tell them that I'm dead. In case it arrives before the police can tell them."