Tasha Wanderer's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Tasha Wanderer had been searching for the key to eternal life for sixty years, and this morning she found a tent pitched on top of it. Her house had walked her to the edge of Reyvyn Marsh before dawn. It settled on its four crooked legs in the reeds and refused to move further. Tasha climbed down the ladder with her staff and her satchel. She was old enough to know when the house was telling her something. She was also old enough to feel her knees when she landed. The tent sat where the house wanted to sit. Bottles hung from its ceiling on strings, catching the marsh light in blue and green. Notes fluttered on the canvas walls. A pressed plant lay on the table beside a mug of cold tea. Tasha stepped inside without asking. "You can't be in here." The woman behind the table did not look up. She held a pair of tweezers over a plant Tasha had crossed three continents to find. Its leaves glowed. Its petals moved without wind. The self-healing bloom she had read about in a dying scholar's letter, the plant said to hold the answer she had chased her whole life. "You found it," Tasha said. "I found it four months ago." The woman adjusted her round glasses and finally looked up. Dr. Avery Thornwood was half Tasha's height and a quarter her age. Her lab coat had a smear of mud on one sleeve. "You're standing on my soil samples." Tasha stepped sideways. "I need the plant." "For what." "To live longer." Avery blinked at her. "Oh. No. It doesn't do that." Tasha set her staff against the table. She had prepared for a fight, a bargain, a theft. She had not prepared for that sentence. "Explain." Avery pointed the tweezers at the bloom. "It heals itself. The tissue regrows. I cut a petal off on Tuesday. It came back Wednesday." She spoke faster now, hands moving. "But the sap is toxic to animals. I fed it to a marsh rat. The rat died in nine minutes. I fed a smaller dose to a frog. The frog died in four." Tasha looked at the plant. It glowed back at her, indifferent. Sixty years. A letter from a dying man. Three continents. A dead frog. "You're certain," Tasha said. "I've run it forty-two times." Avery pushed a notebook across the table. The pages were full of small, neat writing. "It won't work on a person. It was never going to." Tasha sat down on a crate of jars. Her knees were grateful. Her chest was not. She watched the young woman return to her tweezers, muttering to the plant as if it might answer. Avery did not know she was being watched. She did not know she was good. Tasha reached into her satchel and pulled out the letter. She set it face down on the table. "I need to ask you something else," she said.