Okay. I could do this.

  I’d had Zanshe’s excellent cooking twice now—she had only our small and limited human-sized kitchen, not her big and well-stocked one at home, but she still concocted meals to savour, not just to keep us going. I’d had an abundance of healing. I’d slept again. There’d been time to rex and just let go of tension and anxiety.

  I had my own workroom to do this in, a space designed for me to be my felid alchemist self.

  I finally had all the components I needed.

  I also had only one shot at this.

  Then again, that was true of a lot of things I’d done in the course of my job. Some things you can’t take a second run at.

  I wasn’t exactly an alchemy expert. I could consistently get potions of decent quality, but perfect ones turned up irregurly; I was getting better, but under normal conditions, I’d rather get a lot more practice before even considering anything advanced. If it weren’t for that tantalizing possibility of a Purification potion, I wouldn’t be doing this. It wasn’t like I was good enough to actually make any of the advanced potions.

  I’d brought a mug of catsear tea and a couple of cookies upstairs with me, leaving them safely on the desk and out of the way. A closer look had made it clear that many of the long list of components had no immediate location in the diagram I could see, which suggested that this was probably going to be a multi-stage process. I might need the refreshment, if not during then after.

  Before anything else, I washed my hands in the compact upstairs sink, using the soap I’d been given in Coppersands. After so many years of training that emphasized washing my hands and, when possible, wearing gloves, it had become a personal routine whenever I was working up here. Terenei said alchemists had invented Cleanse potions to reduce contamination when experimenting, and I’d asked him earlier whether I should for this, but he’d assured me that even with experiments, they did that only on complex ones, and for pretty much anything else soap and water was fine.

  Hands clean, I id my tray on the counter. Near-white ceramic with a pink tint, it looked like it belonged on the pink-veined white marble. I set my mortar and pestle, which could have been the same stone, beside it, and my cutting board, which was the same pale wood as the cabinets, and my marble-handled knife.

  Someone had intended all of this to match, and to reflect my rosy-coloured HUD when in my felid form. There was no way that was an accident.

  I arranged all my components, checking that I had everything on the list in the right amounts. There were a lot of them. Pure sand was different from regur sand, but I’d found that underwater; I put separate handfuls into mugs normally used for tea. The aleksite and the morning star crystal. More common stones, and pnt components. All in all, they took up a lot of space. I made certain the ones I would need first were the closest.

  All the minerals had to be washed in water that had been Sterilized, which I’d created downstairs in my aquian form where I had room to do that, and the pnts had to be diced, except for seeds that had to be ground as fine as the sand...

  Let’s just say it was a process, and not a fast one. I tried to keep my attention on each step in turn, not jumping ahead. I couldn’t afford to miss anything.

  Finally, I arranged everything so far on the tray and compared that to the instructions in my dispy and the diagram.

  It looked right.

  I read back through the instructions once more, to make sure I’d done absolutely everything. This could make the difference in how safe my friends were after I’d reached the Axis. It was as vital as any life-saving procedure, even though it wasn’t one I had any experience in.

  Having the luxury of time to triple-check every detail was good but eventually, you just had to do it.

  I took a deep breath, held a hand over my tray, and fttened the other against the centre of the wheel.

  Light fshed, and I closed my eyes involuntarily, wincing. I tried forcing one open, just a crack, hoping that the felid slit pupils would also help, and found that the light was actually swirling. It was uncomfortable, so I closed that open eye again.

  The rising hum was no better, and neither was the tangle of scents forming a vortex on the counter.

  Ears ft, I gripped my worry-stone neckce and tried to remember what Heket had told me about keeping anxiety and overloads at bay, but I finally just retreated to my comfortable chair and curled myself into it with my back to the counter, waiting with my head tucked down for the light and noise and smells to ease up.

  It probably wasn’t all that long, but it felt like it was.

  The humming had stopped, and I couldn’t smell anything out of pce anymore. Cautiously, I took a chance on opening an eye, and the lighting was normal.

  I uncoiled and went over to the counter to check.

  My tray still y there. Sort of.

  It was lying on and in a rger one, this one octagonal instead of circur, but the same pink-tinged ceramic.

  The mortar and pestle and the cutting board and knife remained the same, however.

  I moved the first tray so I could see the one below. It had colours and designs reminiscent of my familiar tray, but with differences, including the addition of new colours.

  When I brought up my dispy, it had a new set of instructions for upgrading, with the diagram now depicting an octagonal tray.

  Okay. So far, so good.

  I took a deep breath, had half a cookie and a swallow of tea, washed my hands again, and got back to work.

  The yout was harder on the new tray, unsurprisingly. Not only was it more complicated, it was also unfamiliar.

  The processing steps were essentially the same, though.

  There were still components left when I finished. I rechecked, step by step, and I hadn’t missed anything. There must be another step after this one. That looked about right: I’d estimate I went through about two-thirds of the collected components by now.

  So I did the thing.

  The light and humming and scents chased me back to my chair again.

  When they stopped and I investigated, there was a new item on the counter, not one I expected: an old-fashioned bance scale. Each of the slightly-scooped pans, one pearly white and one glossy bck, could probably hold a little more than one of my handfuls of sand, and they hung from the ends of the beam via fine chains that all met at a hook that fed through a small triangur hole—other holes suggested that they could be moved inwards, presumably affecting the way it all banced. The beam rested on a pivot barely rger than the point of a pen, in a narrow-bottomed groove, with a simir structure pointing upwards as an indicator against an arc behind it that showed multiple rows of markings. Graduated weights, quite a lot of them, rested in sockets built in a spiral around the base, the heaviest ones at the bottom.

  The scale base and beam were made of, or at least pted with, rose gold, with several glittery rose and indigo stones that were at least probably just decorative. The metal weights ran repeatedly through a whole rainbow of colours, red through violet, that would probably, with practice, be easier than having to check the delicately-etched numbers on each.

  All right. So I had a new tool, one that presumably was necessary for advanced alchemy. Cool. I was one step closer.

  Of course, when I brought up my instructions list, it included measuring some things in units that I really wasn’t at all confident about. It would be awfully easy to mess that up.

  Nothing said that I had to do this alone, right? That hadn’t been anywhere on the list of instructions, and no one had ever said that alchemy had to be done solo. In fact, Terenei had mentioned hands-on teaching.

  And there was someone downstairs who probably knew how to use this scale properly.

  I wavered only briefly before I went to the railing and leaned over. “Terenei? You have a minute?”

  “Coming!”

  While I waited, I had another half a cookie and some of my tea, then did what I could to sort through my instructions, putting things that needed to be measured on one side, things I knew how to process on the other.

  Not that it took him long to join me.

  “What... oh, that’s a beautifully-made scale.”

  “I have no idea how to use it. Well, I could figure out some basics, but these are complicated measurements that... honestly, I’m lost.”

  “Lucky I’m here, then. I’ve been helping my grandfather for years. Measuring can be finicky and take time, and if I measure while he does the rest, he can get things done much more quickly.” He pulled his sweater off over his head and left it over the back of the desk chair, so he was in short sleeves, before he washed his hands. “It’ll be a little slower if I can’t see the formu for myself, but we can work around that.”

  “Thanks. I’ve gotten this far, I’m pretty sure this is the st step. Having to give up because I can’t figure out how to use one of the new tools I just got would be frustrating.”

  He fshed me a smile. “It would, but won’t be. What do you need?”

  In the interests of just finishing this, I didn’t ask him what he was doing or how he was getting the extremely precise amounts that were listed in the formu, just trusted him to handle that while I took care of the rest of it.

  We got it all together and id out properly; I did my usual obsessively-careful check back through everything, reading it off so Terenei could also verify as much as possible without actually being able to see the diagram. There were no components left. This had used up the st of them.

  “I think that’s it,” I said, and took a deep breath. “I really hope this works.”

  “It will.”

  “The st two times, it got really bright and loud and smelly. Brace yourself.”

  He tilted his head, puzzled. “We didn’t see or hear anything downstairs, and Heket said nothing about smelling anything.”

  “So it might be just me. Well, that’s fun.” I held my hand over the tray, brought up the dispy, and fttened my other hand on the wheel.

  Yep. Light. Humming. So many smells. I felt my ears ftten, and I backed away.

  Terenei id a hand on my shoulder. I thought he said something, but I couldn’t make it out past the humming. I just perched on the edge of my footstool with my eyes closed, hand around my worry stone, and waited. He sat in the chair next to me, his hand on my shoulder again, which was reassuring.

  As before, it passed. I inhaled, exhaled, and opened my eyes.

  “Okay. All gone. That bit, I really don’t like.”

  “It’s an odd effect, but now and then magic does peculiar things at unique times, and an upgrade like this is unique. You have one more new tool, and probably access to new formus.”

  “Another new tool?” I got up to look.

  This one was a clear gss vessel, I guessed the capacity around three to four cups, with multiple sets of graduated markings down the sides, each set in a different colour—vivid rose, indigo blue, deep golden-yellow. The columns of numbers were on thin frosted stripes in the gss, the rest of it transparent, but the lines indicating the level extended past that, which was a nice touch that should make it easier to read. The base was either not gss, or it was gss fused into a yer of rose gold, or something like that.

  Beside it was a round disk of pink-marbled white stone, and embedded in that was a disk of rose gold the same size as the base of the vessel. It had a lid, too, of pink gss with a rose-gold handle.

  And in an arc behind it were six very small cups of pink-tinted ceramic, in three different sizes.

  “Should I even ask what that does?”

  “If you put them together and put something inside, it will heat it. Basic alchemy uses only dry ingredients, but some of the advanced and expert formus involve melting something or dissolving it or other liquid forms, and the cups will fit onto the tray in the right pces. It can also dry things, which is sometimes necessary.”

  “Got it.” A closer look at the tray showed several small circur spots that would be just the right size for those little cups. “Okay. Let’s see what I have.”

  I brought up my dispy, and started scrolling.

  “Splitting potions into multiple doses. That would be helpful if I thought I could actually do it right. Hardcure. Softcure. Proper Recovery potions. Other combinations. Splints. Oh. There it is. Purification. Topical formu. Can you toss me my book and pen out of my bag?”

  He obeyed with acrity.

  The easiest way to do this was at my desk, pushing my cooling tea and remaining cookie aside. One hand keeping the dispy open, I started reproducing what I could see onto a bnk page of my book. Writing down the list of components was easy, and the instructions were straightforward text even if they were long. When it came to the diagram, I made mistakes, had to scribble things out and redraw them, and that made me wince, but I ended up finally with something that resembled what I could see—at least to me. I let the dispy close and began to re-draw it more cleanly.

  How Terenei was able to wait quietly, in my comfy chair, I had no idea. I would not have been able to.

  I stood up and offered him a hand to help him up, then gave him the book, open to the clean version.

  “That’s what comes up for the Purification potion I see. Ingredients and instructions are two pages back, and that’s how they’re id out.”

  He took it and gazed at it for a moment.

  Then he grabbed me for a ferocious hug that left me breathless. And grateful for the effects of all those potions on my injuries.

  “I’ll copy it and mail the actual page to my grandfather, since I can’t send an image in a message. He’ll be able to read it.”

  “Better see if there’s a way to get a couple of those morning star crystals to send along with it. And it needs aleksite, which is going to be a problem.”

  “I’ll ask Serru to describe where the cave is. He’ll find someone who can look. For this, that won’t be hard.”

  “I hope so. And I hope it works.”

  “I’m not an alchemist, but I’m not seeing anything on this that’s incompatible with what I do know. Come downstairs. You should eat something more than cookies. You look a bit frayed around the edges.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute. I need to just sit down. That was a bit nerve-wracking.”

  “All right. I think you’d better be prepared for hugs from more than just me.” He grinned at me as he let go. “It’s not hard to get hugs from me, but others have other thresholds.”

  “Oh yes, and they’re all so very averse to touch. I’ll be right down.”

  Alone, I leaned back in my chair, at my own desk that was part of my own counter in my own workshop.

  No one would argue that this room was mine. I wanted it to be mine. I wanted to live in my own little house and make potions that would help people and experiment with new ones. I wanted to have conversations with people like Terenei’s grandfather over what had been done, like an online game community trying to find all the solutions that the devs had included, but actually making lives better for real. I wanted to make sure that the power of the Moss Queen and the Zombie King was broken forever, and no one had to fear them anymore because there were healers and potions and me.

  I wanted to wander the roads with Serru and Terenei and see how much more there was to this world and gather fascinating things and visit music festivals and read Aryennos’ book when he finished it and see what cards Terenei made for Heket and listen to the stories she told with them and cuddle Myu and, well, get to know Zanshe better.

  I needed to get home to my parents and my sister and Grace, to my often-thankless and usually-difficult job because someone had to care enough to do it, even though it was going to mean some incredibly awkward conversations about where I’d been and even though it meant losing everything here.

  I hated this conflict. Why did I have to choose?

  Downstairs, I heard raised voices, happy cheering ones, ecstatic that they had a formu that just might, if it worked, drive back The Worst Thing That Could Happen. At least I’d leave knowing they were safer.

  I pushed away the mencholy as best I could, and got up.

  I wasn’t going to spoil the celebration downstairs by dragging my own chaotic feelings into it. I honestly was pleased and relieved. I just needed to keep the other feelings back. Fortunately, I had some experience in choosing which aspect of something to focus on and which ones to push away into the shadowy hidden recesses in the back of my mind.

  I picked up my remaining tea and cookie and went downstairs to join the party.