“No ether,” Jane said.
“Without ether, the shock might kill you.”
“With ether, I cannot help you work the spell.”
“It will hurt,” he said, stroking her cheek. “It will be the worst pain you have ever felt. Are you sure?”
Augustine had taken the wall she had started and built it strong. He was a magician, or had been, or believed himself to be now. He might be able to do the working alone.
But she knew herself; the ether would bring up the old panic, no matter how much she trusted him, how much she focused. That panic lived in her bones, emerging smoothly when it thought it might protect her. It could not be reasoned with.
“I am sure,” she said.
Augustine nodded, pressed a quick kiss to her forehead, and went to his bag.
He set out his tools: straps of leather, carefully coiled; scalpels; curved needles and catgut thread; benzoin; laudanum. He left the ether and its sponge inside.
“I will bind you now,” Augustine murmured. His eyes kept darting to their ghostly audience, but he worked quickly, drawing a strap along the underside of the table and buckling it around her wrists. He did the same for her ankles, then across the tops of her thighs.
She reached for her belief, her unerring faith that this was her Augustine, that this would work.
He tightened the final strap holding her shoulders in place and reached for his scalpel.
Steady, Augustine. Steady, Jane.
“I incise the flesh,” Augustine said, words methodical and melodic, the expert tenor of a teacher explaining his next cut. “The flesh is the boundary between the internal world and the external reality.”
The blade cut into her.
She jerked against the leather. She screamed. The pain was blinding, unimaginable. Distantly she could feel his hand steadying her abdomen. It burned where he touched.
Had this been what Renton felt, when he had torn into himself? This pain, all-consuming, all-encompassing? She was ruptured. She was torn asunder. She felt one layer of flesh parting, then the next, and she howled, shutting her eyes against the pain.
Augustine did not stop, though she could hear herself begging, pleading.
Fear suffused her, fear that was not instinct, but something else. Something darker, older, unfamiliar. A fear that was not hers. Elodie, half dead, borne down to the cellar so that her limbs would cool, so that Augustine would have more time to save her, but not comprehending what he was attempting. Elodie, struggling, confused, because she trusted Augustine, but she was afraid.
“The internal world of the body is shaped by the external reality,” he said. She could barely hear his voice over the pain, but she felt the incantation, the words throbbing inside her head. “The correction of a rupture in the workings of the internal world may be used as a map whereupon we fix an aberration in the external world.”
That she could feel Elodie’s fear was evidence that the spell was working, that she had been right. She bore down upon herself, pulling on all her discipline. It lay in her marrow as surely as Elodie’s fear did, as surely as the pain did. His knife was no different from her tightened stays and pricking hairpins in kind, only in intensity.
“I am awake to the Work,” Jane mumbled. “While the world closes its eyes, I remain alert.” She fought to keep her eyes open, to stare at the vault of stone above her and see its architecture, its geometry. It fitted together so smoothly, as if even that had been planned by a magician’s hand.
Her stomach heaved as she felt his fingers slip beneath her skin, into her viscera, searching, pushing, pulling. She pressed down against the stone beneath her, trying to retreat, trying to flee. And then she spasmed against her bonds, as if to fight, the motion drawing another scream from her. The muscles of her belly had been cut, and her tensing had torn them further.
This was impossible. She could not endure this. She heard Augustine curse, felt his hand withdraw. There was no relief, no easing of the pain, not even as he pressed his bloodied hand against her temple as if to soothe her, then fumbled for another tool. He did not have his surgery here, or Mr. Lowell, or her to attend without flinching.
How could he succeed?
Jane’s head lolled back on the stone. The pain never ceased, but it grew faint, distant, along with all the world. Feel it, she demanded of herself. Feel all of it. She could not give in, would not give in. She had to fix this. She had to fix this for all of them. For Elodie, on this table, confused and staggering toward death, only to be hauled back just long enough for horror. For Augustine, his hands inside both his wives, soaked in his own failure. For her, forcing her way upon the world and struggling to pick up the pieces when the world rejected her.