The War of Elevens| Book 1 of the Space Thief Chronicles

Chapter 32| The Angry, In-Love Chemist

Zhou Mill, Té Shezekia

Alec Illuminaire had never been poetic.

When he spoke, the words felt like a heart attack or a drunk man who lost his temper in a bar fight. He could never spin words to make them sound like they'd come from an old classic tucked away in some beautiful ancient library with dust in the pages and beauty between the covers.

He wasn't exactly beautiful between the covers, either. 

That was alright with him. 

Rather than poetic or beautiful between the covers, Alec was angry. It was the sort of anger that rubbed against his bones and could have ground his skin to the very membranes that made it up if anger was a tangible noun of its own volition. It was anger that pulsed and seethed and burned the lining of his throat whenever he swallowed. 

For the past two weeks since his failure to destroy the magical dimension, his anger towards everything morphed into an absolute lack of ambition, motivation, or hope. He grieved his loss the way parents grieved dead children: hopelessness gripped him hard. 

Today, he was able to work in the lab. 

He had avoided the lab ever since he'd gotten back to his home at the Zhou Mill on the northeastern edge of Té Shezekia. He'd walk past it and the glasses waiting to be filled with precious stolen liquids seemed to glare at him. He'd stop in his lab's doorway, watch the frosted glass doors leading out to the balcony glitter as snow swirled around in silver clouds outside, feeling utterly disgusted that snow existed. 

He knew he needed to get back to work—the others counted on him to create a plausible way to knock the Shifter World out of existence. Now it was late afternoon and he'd decided that he was angry because he'd been angry for so long, and that anger was simply too exhausting to bear any longer. He walked into his lab, freshly showered and clean-shaven, rubbed his scarred knuckles against each other, and shoved down his sense of failure long enough to succumb to the childlike wonder that spawned from working. 

Not even fifteen minutes later, his revulsion and failure lay forgotten in the dregs of the past, and he was lost in the experiments and botany and alchemy, watching colors explode beneath his creative fingers. 

It was raining outside. The sky's belly growled with thunder. The corners of the room had grown dark. An hour into his work, placed candles along the base of the large windows, at the edge of the doors leading out to the balcony, and atop the old tables he pushed to the side to make room for the twelve-foot-long banquet table he used as his lab. The candles threw a warm flickering yellow glow over everything and sent delightful waves of heat wafting over his skin. 

The door slid open behind him. Alec looked up from his scalpel as Aleena poked her head in. "Are you working on anything that could potentially take my head off?"

"It's safe." Alec gestured for her to come in while slicing open some dried orchids. "Have you ever wondered what would happen if you put dried orchid parts into papersmoke?"

Aleena was now on the far side of the table, her hands raised in mock-caution. "You said this wasn't going to be dangerous."

"I said it wasn't going to take your head off." Alec grinned. "Toss me that bottle—the one with the mermaid painted on the side."

"Tossing things across a table full of smoking beakers and odd liquids and plants isn't dangerous at all," Aleena said sarcastically, but she tossed him the bottle anyway. 

"I'm glad to see you back here. The others thought you'd given up alchemy." 

 "If Isaac makes a joke about escaping explosive butterflies, I'll cut out his tongue." Alec popped the lid off the bottle. White steam hissed out, and ribbon-tendrils tangled to form a web of papersmoke above him. He tossed the orchid petals into the bottle, gave the contents and good hard shake, and set the bottle back on the table. Aleena ducked as if a ball of fire was going to explode out of Alec's end of the table.