4.70: Skin Deep

I took Malas up on his offer to drop by any time for training the very next day. I didn’t know how old Malas was, exactly, but he’d worked in a service job for the school for a really, really long time. Since Alania was a student, at the very least, and she was old enough to be my grandma. He had to have a really good idea of how the school worked by now. He had to know a lot about the janitors no matter how polite it was to ignore them. I just needed to glean information in the most casual, nonsuspicious way possible.

Very, very carefully. After the janitors had found us in the Labyrinth of Dreams, they’d brought us to Malas, like they would for anyone who needed emergency care. Either they’d wiped our memories, or he had. Maybe they’d worked together on it. Malas knew about most of our suspicious exploits because he’d patched us up after them, and he’d probably wiped our memories, and he more than anyone else in the school had a vested interest in keeping Refujeyo intact. I couldn’t afford to let him get suspicious at all.

I reminded myself to be careful. I told myself that I probably wouldn’t be able to get information right away. This wasn’t the kind of thing I could be impulsive on, or take risks with. This was not time to play around. (Ugh, I was the absolute last person who should be doing this kind of stealthy info-gathering work.)

Malas was delighted to see me so soon. “You’ll want to put these on,” he said, retrieving a set of brown robes from under his desk that were in my exact size; he’d had them on hand just in case, apparently.

“I’m not officially your apprentice for another month,” I reminded him.

“I know, but I want to give you a tour of the work and supply areas today, and they’re alarmed. You’ll need the proper accredited robes to get through the doors without causing a fuss.”

Huh. I was glad I’d never tried to go through Malas’ stuff. I stepped into the bathroom and quickly got changed.

Malas lead me to a couple of plain, locked doors on the opposite side of the room to the hospital beds, produced a ring of keys, and unlocked them. I’d always assumed they lead to medical equipment storage or something, and turned out to be largely right. The one labelled MEDIKAMENTO lead to a well lit room filled with bottles and boxes of medication, syringes and gloves, all on clean, well-labelled shelves.

“You’re not expected to know what any of these do,” he assured me, probably catching sight of my overwhelmed expression. “You won’t be prescribing anything for at least a few years, probably longer. But you will be asked to fetch things from here occasionally, so let me show you how the layout and record systems work.” He quickly ran me through the basics of how to find specific medications, whose locations were recorded alphabetically in a large binder. “You’re not expected to be an expert on the system right away,” he assured me, but it seemed simple enough. Know the name of the medication, look it up, read where it is, get it, mark in the records that you’re taking it from the room. No problem.

The second room was labelled SANIGADO, and lead… to something I didn’t expect.

It was a giant janitor’s closet. Mops, towels, a frankly boggling array of cleaning products, and a big shelf of bedding, robes and other cloth materials, all in individual sterile bags.

“You’re going to start out doing a lot of cleaning,” Malas informed me. “A lotof cleaning. All of my apprentices spend several hours a week cleaning, more when they’re just starting out. This is because proper sanitation practices are your most important skill as a healthcare professional. The most useful and important skill in medicine is not diagnostics or surgery or bedside manner, it is sanitation. A garbage man is a thousand times more important to public health than a surgeon; a proper sewer system is more important than antibiotics. If you’re going to be successful in any field of physical medicine, extremely high standards of cleanliness, and the skill to achieve them, must be ingrained into your very nature.”

“Isn’t it weird then that we wear brown, instead of white or pale blue like normal doctors?” I asked. “I mean, it’s easy to see that those are clean, but brown…”

“I know,” Malas sighed. “It’s not the most reassuring colour for a doctor to wear. Unfortunately the colour standards of Refujeyo predate me and there’s nothing I can do about them. The students and teachers wear the rainbow, security wears pink, and service staff wears brown. If it were up to me, I would’ve put service staff in white, but people can be stubbornly traditional over the most ridiculous things.”

“You should wear blue, to match your magic.”

“Believe me, everyone sees enough of that already. Come on, let me take you through the supplies in the ward desk.” Malas carefully locked the supply rooms and lead me to his desk. The huge desk full of drawers was a familiar sight, but I’d never had a chance to see inside the drawers before.

They turned out to be boring. Tongue depressors, scalpels, pulse monitors, one of those old blood pressure cuffs that you pump by hand. Pens and paper, of course, although I’d never seen Malas fill out a form by hand; that’s what the school tablets were for.

“Hey,” I cut in while Malas showed me his drawer of boxes of sterile nitrile gloves in every size, “can I ask you a personal question?”

“I can hardly stop you.”

“People say that you’d die if you ever left your locus.”

“People are correct.”

“But are you sure? I mean, I’m sure it wouldn’t be great – I know you don’t have, y’know, real eyes, and I don’t know what the rest of your organs… I mean. If something did happen, if you were forced to leave your locus for some reason, are you sure you’d actually die? Medical science is great these days. They have machines that – ”

I stopped talking. I stopped because, while I’d been talking, Malas had taken a scalpel out of its drawer and tore off the protective packaging. With neither hesitation nor any hint of pain, he stabbed it into his left forearm as deep as it would go and dragged it all the way down, then held the wound out for me to see.

No blood leaked from the wound. I could see a little blood inside it, a pink film coating muscle and a small section of exposed white bone.

Apart from blood, bone, and skin, almost everything was blue.

If I looked closely, I thought I could make out some strands of pink muscle, but most of it glowed blue with Malas’ magic. I stared.

“I could show you some more critical organs if you like, but I’d need a bigger knife,” he said.

“N-no. No, I… I get the point.” How much human tissue did he have left? His skin, teeth, tongue and hair were normal, the bone looked normal, the little blood that was present looked normal, but…

“Great, then it’s time for your first task.” He pushed a binder into my hands. “See if you can remember how to record the use of one disposable scalpel.”

Half an hour later, I returned to my room, having learned nothing yet about janitors and only things about Malas that I didn’t want to know. I’d been sort of hoping that when we destroyed the Child, and most likely Malas’ locus with him, that there’s be a way to save him. But if the rest of his body was as ruined as his arm, that just wasn’t going to be possible.

“Check your messages,” Kylie called from her bed as I walked into our room.

“Anything bad?” I asked.

“Nope. Emergency Coven meeting. Cheryl’s on campus. Apparently her master has some Politikala event or meeting or something.”

“Oh, great!” It had been a while since I’d seen Cheryl. It would be a refreshing break to talk to somebody so completely outside of… well, everything.

“Message says to dress nice,” Kylie added.

“Why?”

She shrugged. "Maybe something cool happened and she wants to celebrate it?”

“Maybe it’s someone’s birthday.”

“Maybe.”

I put on my second nicest robes (I’d spilled gravy on my nicest ones during our Extremely Long Lunch Stakeout) and killed time doing some magical history homework. After about ten minutes of looking up dates, I realised I was being an idiot, and stopped. I didn’t have to do my magical history homework. It didn’t matter how well I did in magical history. I didn’t even have to pretend to care how well I did in magical history. I had an apprenticeship lined up.

So I played tetris on my tablet instead.

It always surprised me a little, how big our little coven had gotten. Usually, meetings were between me, Kylie, Talbot and Hua, so just seeing Cheryl pace restlessly among the usual crowd in the small meeting room she’d booked already made the group feel a lot bigger. But the with initiates were present too, surprisingly, making the little room feel crowded.

“It’s positively bursting with curses in here,” Kylie mumbled as we walked in.

“Bursting with Curses would make a great band name,” Helen said with a small grin. She’d become a lot more confident over the semester, less unsure, more comfortable in her monochrome robes. Jamil and Alan looked a lot more generally comfortable, too.

Over the semester. Their initiation semester was almost over, wasn’t it? Points, that semester had felt like such a long time when I was doing it, but it felt like these kids had arrived at the school just last week. And in less than a month, they’d be undergoing the initiation, should they choose to take it. I hoped they all survived. Or just didn’t take it. Either way.

“Great,” Cheryl said, rubbing her hands together with a kind of manic energy. She looked really tired and somewhat apprehensive; whatever she had for us, she must have worked hard on it. Then again, Holly would be, what, three or four years old now, probably? Maybe that was just the Single Mother To A Toddler tiredness. “We’re all here. Let’s get going, or we’ll be late.”

“Late for what?” Kylie asked.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see soon enough,” Alan said.

“You’re in on this too?” I asked him.

“They won’t answer any questions,” Talbot said. “Believe me, I tried.”

“And you’re fantastic at suspicious questions!”

“I know!”

“It’s way better if this is a surprise,” Helen assured us. “Trust me. But you might want to try to look, um… stoic?”

“Stoic?” Jamil snorted.

“You know what I mean! Just, not nervous, okay?”

“How can they possibly not look nervous?” Jamil asked.

“I’m definitely feeling extremely nervous right now,” I pointed out.

“Join the club,” Hua said.

Kylie glared at the unfamiliar walls around us. At some point, we’d moved out of the familiar tunnels we traversed regularly between classes. “For the record, I’m not joining any clubs until someone explains exactly what we – ” She stopped walking suddenly, and Talbot walked right into her. He swore.

“Sorry,” Kylie said, but she didn’t turn around. She was staring straight ahead. I stared, too. At the end of the corridor stood a large, elaborately carved wooden door, guarded by two pink-robed guards. We’d seen it before.

It was the room where we’d been brought before the High Council. Where we’d been told that we were going to Fionnrath. Where I’d been placed under a geas.

“Fantastic,” Cheryl said. “We’re exactly on time. Get ready, everyone! It’s time to see the Council!”