Chapter Text
It’s Thursday afternoon and Jayce is currently discovering that Shazam is not an app that does well at recognising classical music. The enamelled music box in front of him with its tiny ballerina finishes the loop of its tinny waltz and starts again, so Jayce turns off the recording device but leaves the box open and playing. It’s been a different piece every time he opens the music box, twenty-three times now, always ballet music. It’s the sort of small miracle that could very easily be technological but Jayce has also, very carefully, disassembled and reassembled the box. There’s nothing in there more advanced than clockwork and the pattern of pins on the cylinder mean it should play Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy every time. The silver-plated ballerina, the size of his thumb, continues to turn and Jayce rests his chin on his hands watching her, listening to a piece that she will likely never play again, before closing the lid and cutting it off.
Comparing Shazam’s suggestions to the recording is tedious work and Jayce wonders vaguely whether he could get Mel to help with this. Yes, she’s funding him and definitely not his assistant, but she also goes to a lot more concerts than he does and he’s sure she has a better ear for music. He thinks this is Waltz of the Dolls from Coppelia but the tinkly sound of the music box is throwing him off compared to the full orchestra recording.
His phone rings and he quickly pauses YouTube to pick it up.
“Hi, this is June at reception,” says the voice on the other end. “You’ve got someone here who wants to make a donation.”
“A donation?” Jayce perks up at once. Mel is his only source of funding and her interests lie in specific areas. The bread and butter of his research into magical items comes from the fact that some people find them unnerving and are happy to feel like they’ve done something good while getting rid of them. “I’ll be right down.”
When Jayce sees the man standing in reception his first impression is that he could be a professor himself, dressed in old-fashioned semi-formal clothes in shades of cream and brown with a cane at his side and a raincoat draped over one arm. His second impression, when he gets close enough to see the patches and seams that make the clothes the closest thing Jayce has ever seen to wearing rags, is that ‘donation’ in this case is likely a euphemism and he’s going to have to buy whatever it is.
“Hi,” Jayce says, smiling and trying not to let either curiosity or nervousness show. “You asked for the Department of Magical Artifacts?”
“Yes.” The accent is Eastern European, and that’s as close as Jayce can get to identifying it. “You are from that department?” The man turns towards Jayce, graceful with his cane but still clearly struggling to keep his weight off his leg. There’s also something wrong with his spine, it sags as he moves. His gaze is sharp, curious, given weight by heavy eyebrows over large eyes that shine golden in the electric light.
“Jayce Talis.” Jayce holds out his hand to shake, catching the sour smell of mildew and rot as he does. The hand placed into his is clean, though, and very pale and smooth, skin not roughened by however this man has been living. Jayce’s grin turns self-deprecating. “I am that department. The whole of it. The University found it a lot cheaper to give me a department name than an assistant.”
“Hmm.” The heavy stare turns unimpressed. “You do have somewhere safe and dry to store your artifacts? I was thinking of making a donation.”
“I do, yes,” Jayce says, nettled. “Where have you been storing it?”
Golden eyes narrow at him. “Why do you think I’m donating? It is a valuable artifact. I want it taken care of.”
Valuable. Jayce doesn’t doubt that the man has an artifact, one of the reasons magic is so frustrating to study is that it happens anywhere, to anyone, without rhyme or reason. Far more likely to happen with rhyme than with reason, in fact. Most of them aren’t really valuable, though. A top from a Christmas cracker that can spin forever, a coin that always lands on heads. Tiny, everyday miracles. ‘Valuable’ either means a valuable object that has become magical or serious magic and this does not look like someone who owns valuable items.
“Thanks to a generous donor we have a temperature controlled storage room,” Jayce says. “I promise you I take the utmost care with every artifact. How many people can say their work lets them hold miracles in the palms of their hands? Even the smallest are absolutely unique.”
“I appreciate that.” Jayce’s sincerity seems to have softened his interlocutor but the man still looks doubtful. Jayce wonders what the artifact means to him; magic might be common but Jayce is not the only person for whom it has been salvation. If there had been an artifact and not just a spell, here and gone leaving only the memory of wonder, Jayce does not think he could let go of it.
“Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” he offers.
The doubtful expression intensifies when they pass through Jayce’s lab with papers, books, equipment and Jayce’s forgotten lunch all lying wherever he last used them, but Jayce was telling the truth about caring for his artifacts. The storage room looks like a junk shop, but a very clean and well-organised one. Every artifact is either in a box or set in its own clear area of shelf — in case touching another magic item causes interactions although Jayce’s attempts to cause interactions on purpose in controlled conditions have yielded nothing — and labelled with a number tied on neatly. There’s a filing cabinet by the door with the information on each, donation forms if relevant and the experiments Jayce has run, and one wall is taken up by half a dozen wrapped canvases.
“And those are?” asks the visitor.
“Haunted paintings,” Jayce says, and does not add that they are painted by the person funding him who would very much like to find out why she produces them. Monsters lurking in the shadows of her work does not fit Mel’s image. “The really old and valuable stuff is in the boxes,” he adds, feeling defensive about how many of the things around him are plastic toys or cheap trinkets.“A lot of it is fragile so it’s best for it to have that extra layer of protection.”
“You really do keep your artifacts well. I congratulate you.” The visitor looks sad and the expression makes his features look far more delicate than curiosity and doubt had. Maybe that lost look is him preparing to say goodbye to something that means the world to him.
“You don’t have to donate for me to study it,” Jayce blurts out. “Or for me to store it. Mel… the artist still owns those paintings. They just live here because I’m working with them.”
Jayce finds himself offered a crooked, tentative smile. “Thank you. But under the circumstances…”
“What kind of artifact is it?” Jayce asks. “Do you have it with you?”
“Ah.” The man wrings his hands around the top of his cane. “I’m afraid ‘it’ would be me.”
Jayce stares. Statues being magical items is far from unknown, but they change pose when no one is looking, or they live in manor gardens and bow if a member of the family approaches them, sometimes they weep or laugh for reasons no one can fathom. They do not walk and talk or, if they do, they do not reason, they do not check that a place is safe and dry before attempting to donate themselves. Nor do they look embarrassed to be pinned under someone’s gaze and catalogued — the fair, smooth skin, the little dot of a mole by the mouth, the odd colour of the eyes, the slightly thick texture of the hair, the thin, graceful fingers. It could be a lie. It could be a delusion. It could be real.
Shaking himself out of it, Jayce says, “I can’t tell.”
The visitor snorts a laugh, amused and miserable, before unbuttoning the top three buttons of his shirt. When he pulls it down there’s cotton beneath it, starting at the neck, speckled with mildew and slimier spots of what might be mold. The cotton cinched tight to the head high up on the neck is a design that Jayce has seen a thousand times, every time he’s passed a doll in a junk shop searching for magic items that might have been missed.
“God,” Jayce says. The cotton could have been a costume, but there’s no outline of human muscles beneath it. No collar bones, just lumpy, soggy stuffing. Has he been living on the streets? Soaking in the rain, a wonder rotting away unnoticed? “Why hasn’t anyone been taking care of you?”
That lost, sad look appears for a moment before vanishing beneath a burning determination. “There isn’t anyone. This,” the man’s cane knocks the filing cabinet for emphasis, “is me taking care of myself.”
“I’m not leaving you in a cupboard,” Jayce says.
“Very well. I’m sure my dignity will be much better served mouldering out in the rain.”
“That’s not what I meant. My guest bedroom is also dry and you can sleep in an actual bed instead of being labelled and put on a shelf.” The thought of it is entirely wrong, this vivid personality reduced to an object, shelved for later study. “Do you sleep?”
“I sleep,” the doll hunches over, stifling a cough, back sagging in as he does. “I don’t require a bed.”
“Come through to the lab and sit down,” Jayce says, watching him catch his weight on the cane. “We can look at the donation paperwork… although I don’t know how we’re going to fill that in. You can’t be both the object donated and the donor.”
“Then you found me,” the man says, with the air of one solving a problem. “Unclaimed by anyone else. Surely you would be allowed to bring something like that in to study?”
“You are a person though,” Jayce insists.
The man looks at him with sharp, ironic eyes. “Let’s not complicate matters. You do want to study me, yes?”
“Of course. I’ve never even heard of anything like you, not outside of fairy tales.” Jayce offers his arm and is surprised when it’s taken. He finds himself supporting a weight that is surprisingly light until he remembers most of it is cotton stuffing, or maybe polyfil. “Studying you is going to be pretty awkward, though. I’ve never had a live subject before, asking you to strip and get up on a lab bench just feels wrong.”
“Paperwork first,” suggests the visitor.
“Okay,” Jayce says, settling him into a chair. “Very first thing, I need to know your name.”
“It’s Viktor.”
A name, good. Jayce feels much better having a name for Viktor, it didn’t matter nearly as much that he hadn’t introduced himself when Jayce had thought he was human. Now he needs to know that Viktor has one, that he’s not an identification number or a description in Jayce’s head or on his paperwork. Except, on the paperwork an identification number is the easiest thing for Viktor to be. An artifact found by Jayce. Property of the university.
“You’re, uh. You’re not legally a person, right?” Jayce asks.
“It has never come up,” Viktor says. “I am quite eager for it not to come up. Especially when I would not have a voice in the debate.”
“If it ever does come up and you’re ruled a person — which you really should be — I’m going to get in so much trouble if I’ve implicated the university in slavery.” Heimerdinger would flip his lid. “Uh. I’d better at least put you down as mine and not belonging to the department.”
“You mentioned earlier that sometimes people retain ownership of artifacts being studied, yes?” Viktor says, thoughtfully. “And as an artifact I will not be identified by name.”
“Okay, yes, perfect,” Jayce says. “Do you have a surname?’
“Orrison. When I need one.”
Jayce fills in the form, ignoring the boxes that require more information about the donor than just a name. He’s ignored them plenty of times before, although never for anyone retaining ownership.“Can I ask about materials?”
“Bisque porcelain and cotton, both fabric and stuffing,” Viktor says. “And glass eyes.”
“What about hair?”
“Ah. Mohair.” Viktor reaches up to touch his unruly hair reflexively.
“I normally ask for a history of the artifact,” Jayce says. “In as much detail as possible.”
Viktor shakes his head. “The, eh, details are private. I can give you a summary.” When Jayce nods and looks encouraging he continues. “I was owned by a young girl who was sick with leukaemia her whole life. When I came into existence she was three, when she died she was ten. In between I was her companion and grew in tandem with her.
“After she died I expected… eh, well, I expected to die too. It seemed logical. If not I would have expected to stop ageing now that I was no longer doing so to remain a suitable companion for her. Instead within the next couple of years I aged rapidly to adulthood.”
“You’re younger than you look?”
“No. After that I stopped ageing and it was years ago. I am a little younger than I appear, but not by so much as you think.”
Jayce writes that down, another little mystery in the way magic behaves. Why did Viktor age suddenly and then stop? But that’s why Jayce gets no funding, he’s studying something illogical and frequently unreplicable.
“Were you staying with her parents?” Jayce asks. “After…?”
“Her father,” Viktor corrects. “He didn’t, eh, kick me out. But neither did he want me there when I was no longer a memento of her.”
“I’m sorry,” Jayce says.
Viktor flicks a hand impatiently, “I was the one who left.”
“I’m sorry she died,” Jayce clarifies softly. “It must have been hard on you.”
For a moment Viktor’s golden eyes meet his and the look in them is pure, devastating grief, something old and hollow, then Viktor closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Maybe it was meant to settle him but instead he doubles over coughing violently, hand coming up to cover his mouth while his shoulders heave. Jayce puts a hand on Viktor’s back, rubbing circles over lumpy cotton, until Viktor draws in a shuddering breath.
“You okay?” Jayce asks.
“It’s psychosomatic,” Viktor says. “It has to be. It’s a reaction to the mold but I don’t have lungs.”
“Uh. Talking of that,” Jayce says. “Next step would be inspecting, cleaning and stabilising the artifact.”
“Do you have any experience with dolls?”
“No, but there are a couple of stuffed animals in those boxes.”
Viktor raises his eyebrows. “I’m surprised those would be donated.”
“I think one was donated against the owner’s will,” Jayce admits sheepishly. “The parents were freaked out. The other is unsettling enough that even the kid was glad to get rid of it.”
There’s a long awkward silence and then Viktor sighs, stifles a cough at the end of it, and says, “Very well.”
Jayce expected to feel more embarrassed at having Viktor naked on a lab bench. After all, Jayce is not a doctor, he is in no way used to this. It feels less like Viktor is naked, though, than like he’s wearing an old-fashioned bathing costume, cotton fabric stopping just above the knees and elbows. There’s really nothing to see. Viktor, staring furiously at his own knees, does not seem to share this opinion. His fabric is as patched and stitched as his clothes and Jayce has to remind himself that this is Viktor’s body, that Viktor probably feels the same way about it as he would if he were forced to reveal bruises and scars. What is unsettling is the hole in Viktor’s leg. No, hole feels like too small a word for it. The missing patch in the calf of Viktor’s leg, where something has smashed the porcelain away leaving jagged edges and crazed lines, hairline cracks that extend into the shin
Jayce drops to his knees and picks up the damaged leg. It feels like flesh in his hands, like skin moving over muscle, even as he can look through the hole in it to see the clay texture on the inside. “Would it hurt having something inside here?” he asks. “Can you feel pain?”
“Yes, I can feel pain. Not exactly as you would, but my body objects strongly to being further damaged. No, it would not hurt to have something inside my leg unless it put pressure on the cracks.”
“I was thinking of taking pressure off the cracks,” Jayce says. If pressure on them hurts then walking must be agony. “Bracing it. From the inside is probably more effective, although we’d want something wrapped around the outside to protect the edges too.” Plastic, probably, not metal, although that’s what Jayce prefers to work in. Viktor doesn’t weigh very much, putting metal in and around his leg could throw his balance off badly.
“Hmm,” Viktor says. “It could work.”
“I’ll take some measurements.”
Jayce wonders if it would be possible to fix the damaged leg if he hired a sculptor, but what if the clay didn’t change into whatever magic has made of Viktor? If it was just a heavy lump stuck into and pulling at an open wound?
The rest of Viktor’s bisque parts seem to be in good condition, although his feet are chipped. The cotton body has been patched with, at Jayce's best guess, discarded bedsheets, but as a result it’s still pretty sturdy despite the water damage. “Did sewing these on hurt?” he asks.
“No, no, I can barely feel a needle. It just slips between the threads, there’s no damage.”
Jayce gets up and goes over to the lab sink. “I do have mold and mildew remover,” he says. He’s had soft items donated in bad condition before. “But it’s probably not going to get all of it.”
“I know. The mold spores are inside my stuffing. Most videos on doll repair suggest replacing the stuffing completely, but that does hurt.” Jayce, in the process of wetting a cloth, whirls around to stare at Viktor, who taps a four-inch seam over where his heart would be.
“Jesus,” Jayce says, because doing surgery on yourself might not be quite the same for a doll, but even so. He walks over, intending to sit on the lab bench and start wiping Viktor down, only for Viktor to hold his hand out for the cloth. “I’ll have to scrub your back,” Jayce says.
“In a minute.” Viktor is frowning, swiping fiercely at his chest and stomach. “Look away while I do this part. It’s hardly dignified.”
Jayce does as he’s told, tidying up the lab for something to do with his hands, although he’s doing more pacing around and moving paper between piles than actually putting anything in its proper place. “We should contact someone who repairs dolls for a living,” he says. “Do they remove the stuffing even with antique dolls?”
“If it’s moldy, yes,” Viktor answers. “At least the ones on YouTube.”
“What about upholstery, people who deal in antiques?” Jayce rambles. “Or will the mold killer work if we just soak you properly? That would get it through all of you, right?”
“Leaving me soaking wet might encourage the mold rather than discourage it,” Viktor answers, distantly. “And my bisque parts are mostly waterproof but still shouldn’t be soaked.” He goes over to the sink to rinse his cloth out and apply more mold killer, Jayce shuffling round to keep his back to him as he does.
It’s a while later before Viktor says, “Jayce, you will have to do the rest.”
Viktor’s body still has splotches of mildew on it, not yet killed by the application of chemicals, but there’s less of it and more yellowed cotton. Jayce scrubs tentatively at the centre of Viktor’s back, where there’s still a grey, powdery area, and winces when the stuffing gives under his touch. “Did that…”
“You will not hurt me by re-arranging my stuffing,” Viktor answers, exasperated. “It is merely difficult to hold steady.”
“Lie down,” Jayce suggests. “On your front.”
Viktor does, face buried in his arms. Tension runs through him, Jayce can even feel it through the cotton, like pressing on a drum skin and it makes him more tentative, more afraid he’s going to tear something or hurt Viktor, especially when he can still feel stuffing being pushed around under his fingers. Then Viktor groans and Jayce jumps back. “Sorry! Sorry, are you all right?”
“Yes.” Viktor buries his face more firmly in his arms. “You did not hurt me. You were breaking up the, eh, lumps. In my stuffing.”
“Wait,” Jayce says. “It helped? I could —”
“No. Just the cleaning, please.”
So Jayce sticks to where he needs to scrub although he pushes a little harder than he had before.
Viktor is left raw and smarting from the scrubbing, although mentally rather than physically. He’s been stripped, all his broken and rotting parts on display to someone else, and now pulling his clothes back on isn’t enough to stop him feeling exposed.
Jayce is messing with his phone and he says, “There’s a dolls’ hospital pretty near here. I wonder whether they’d see you if I made an appointment.”
“No,” Viktor says, sharp. He doesn’t want more people to see him like this. He doesn’t want experts to tell him all the things that are wrong with him, to tell him with perfect knowledge just how bad the damage is. He doesn’t like the sound of a hospital, not when he remembers his best friend/sister/owner Orianna in one, being told how broken her small body was, a body more fragile still than Viktor’s porcelain. She’d held onto him then, arms locked tight around his cotton torso while they did yet another round of blood tests, like any child holding onto a toy, sobbed into his shoulder later when she was sick and exhausted from the chemo. Every second of it he had gone through with her, he won’t go through it again on his own account.
“Why not?” Jayce asks.
“Experts are used to toys they can take apart to repair,” Viktor says. He’s seen the videos.
“Didn’t you try to remove your own stuffing?” Jayce asks.
“I stopped when it hurt.”
“They wouldn’t keep going if you’re suffering. No one’s going to take you apart.” Jayce runs a hand over his face. “But maybe it’s not fair to ask them to see a patient they can hurt. They didn’t go into medicine.”
“Agreed,” Viktor says. Exhaustion is pulling on his limbs and yet things have gone so much better than he could have reasonably expected.
Jayce puts his phone aside and starts sketching into a notepad, drawing a hinged device that might fit inside Viktor’s damaged leg, and there’s a sweet horror to that, a feeling like someone has drawn a piano wire through Viktor’s body and attached the end to Jayce’s hand. It plucks at his insides, at the deepest, least human parts of him, as if scientific interest and good intentions might be something like the feeling a child has when they pick up a lost toy at the park and decide to keep it. Not love, not companionship, not yet, but the faint potential of it is still enough to keep that wire taut and trembling between them.
A girl bursts through the door, blue hair whipping around her, a maelstrom of smudged eyeshadow and torn clothes. She moves more like a child than like the teenager she is, all thin limbs and large eyes and unselfconscious motion. “Heeey, Jaybird,” she carols.
“Jinx,” Jayce says. “This is Viktor. Viktor, Jinx.”
Suddenly she’s in Viktor’s space, face so close he can see the faint freckles over her nose. Trying to lean away from her upsets his already precarious balance and he has to grab the lab bench to stay upright. “Hello, Miss Jinx,” he says. “May I assume you are a student here?”
“Coooool,” she says, leaning sideways to inspect his ear. “None of my dolls can do that.”
How can she tell?
“That’s because Viktor’s magical not mechanical,” Jayce says. He walks over and blocks off Jinx just enough that Viktor has space to retreat. “Did you need me for something?”
“You already know what I’m here for,” she says. “I want to play cards.”
Jayce sighs. “You’re not giving me useable data.”
“I’m giving you the best data. You’ve learned all sorts of things, Jaybird.”
“You change too many variables when I’m still trying to establish the baseline. If you’ll just play, normally, for an hour I’d be happy to play cards. If you keep trying to cheat against the lucky charm you’re wasting both our time.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she grabs Jayce’s hand between both of hers and swings it. “You’re just as curious as me to know if I can beat it.”
“Fine,” Jayce says. “Guess I don’t have another volunteer right now. Let me fetch it.”
Jinx drops into a swivel chair and starts to spin. Viktor takes a seat himself and says, “You often come here for this?”
“Yeah, gotta come fight my nemesis.”
Viktor raises an eyebrow. “Jayce?”
“Nah, that fuzzy little bastard dice. We could’ve been friends, I’d have stolen it by now, if it cared about anything but money.”
Jayce re-enters with a pack of cards, a stopwatch, a fuzzy dice keychain, and a few hundred pounds in cash.
“Jayce,” Viktor says. “I thought Miss Jinx was a volunteer.”
“Right,” says Jayce, taking a seat opposite Jinx and setting everything on the table between them. “This thing,” he holds up the dice, “means I’m really consistent in winning all my funding back. But it doesn’t trigger unless there’s real money really on the line, and it doesn’t trigger reliably for low amounts of money. If Jinx wins she gets to keep the money. But she won’t win.”
“One day I will,” Jinx says, cheerfully. She takes the cards and starts to riffle-shuffle them, clever hands moving like a magician’s.
“One hour of poker,” Jayce says. “Winner at the end of that hour keeps their winnings. Experiment will not be entered into the experiment log due to unnecessary amounts of sleight of hand.” He presses the stopwatch. “Go.”
Poker faces are not much in evidence during the game, and yet you could hardly say either player had a bad one. Jayce’s thoughts show on his face like they’ve been projected there but he bluffs anyway, his confidence seeming as sincere and genuine with a pair of twos as with three queens. Jinx’s emotions are sharp and vivid but barely related to her cards and not all of them are real. One moment she seems on the verge of tears only to throw her cards down with a cackle when called. Despite Jayce’s insistence this isn’t usable data he still stops at the end of every hand to write down the cards and the play. There are ups and downs. At one point Jayce loses nearly all of his hundred pounds, but as the hour draws to its end he wins more and more consistently despite Jinx’s flashing hands becoming less and less subtle as they shift cards to where she wants them. When the stopwatch goes Jayce has just won the whole pot.
“Fascinating,” Viktor says, picking up Jayce’s notes on the play. “It does not simply win from the start. I suppose for the sake of not making it obvious to the opponent that magic is in play?”
“Who knows why magic does the things it does? I’m still trying to figure out what it does do,” Jayce says, stroking the dice reverently with one thumb. “Jinx, could you fill in where you tried to cheat?”
“Okay, gimme,” she snatches the notes out of Viktor’s hands and pulls a neon pink gel pen out of her pocket.
“So, if the luck charm doesn’t make your wins obviously suspicious and your department lacks funding, could you not go out for an evening to attend a casino and gain all the funding you require?” Viktor asks.
Jayce grins at him. “Tempting, but Jinx’s dad owns all the casinos around here. She’d rat me out.”
“Damn straight,” Jinx says, dropping the notes and throwing her head as far over the back of the chair as it will go. Then she flings herself forward, out of the chair and onto her feet. “See you, Jaybird. Vikki.”
She’s gone as fast as she arrived.
Jayce rolls his shoulders and looks at his phone. “I’ve got one more experiment to run in about half an hour and then we can head home and get you settled in,” he says. “Do you need us to stop off anywhere to pick your stuff up?”
Viktor shakes his head and tries not to look embarrassed. “I’m afraid I have no, uh, stuff. I have very few needs.”
“We could stop off at a supermarket then,” Jayce says, no longer casual but attempting to be. “Get you some more clothes.”
“I like these clothes.” Despite their tattered state it’s true. Orianna didn’t pick these clothes for him, the ones she picked no longer fit, but they were bought by her father and regardless of everything between him and Viktor that matters.
“They’re nice,” Jayce says. “But couldn’t you do with at least one other set and some pyjamas?”
“Perhaps.” Viktor feels caught between shame and desire, confused by the idea of how nice it would feel to have someone buy him clothes again after so long. He shakes his head. “What kind of experiment do you have running?”
Jayce opens something on his phone and hands it to Viktor, showing a webcam image of a glazed pottery bowl, decorated in red and black triangles, sitting in a rough mechanical claw. “It’s always filled with fresh rice,” Jayce says.
“No, it isn’t,” says Viktor, looking at the empty bowl.
“It always is if someone is near it,” Jayce says. “Figuring out it could be empty if no one was in the room was the first discovery. Now I’m charting how quickly it fills up as I approach against how long it’s been since I’ve last eaten. There’s a definite correlation.”
“That sounds like a remarkably useful magic item,” Viktor says.
“Miraculous,” Jayce says, softly. “It fed a whole family during the Great Depression. If I could harness and reproduce that think how many families could be fed then.”
Viktor meets Jayce’s eyes and sees the fervour there, the look of a man with the light of a dream reflected in his eyes. Behind Viktor’s own eyes unfurl memories of homeless people, those he’s lived among, starving when he couldn’t. Teenagers, old men and women, the lost and vulnerable, what it could mean to any of them to have food in abundance. “Can I see it?” he asks. “I cannot feel hunger, nor am I human, I doubt I will affect the experiment.”
“You can see it,” Jayce says. “If it fills up I can use my phone to tip it out so it’s empty when I approach. If it doesn’t, you could be really useful for studying it. An observer that doesn’t affect the thing observed. I mean, if you wanted to study it.”
“I’d like to help,” Viktor says, soft.
From close up Viktor can see that the bowl has been broken before and carefully mended. A pottery thing touched by magic but not preserved by it. Like him. Far more like him than he is like Jayce or any other human.
He touches the edge of the bowl gently, almost guiltily. It has not filled up in response to him. Hunger activates it as the desire for money activates the dice. As the desire for companionship activates Viktor. A bowl is made to feed others. A doll is made to be loved.
Scientific interest had been meant to fill in for that, a pale imitation of the interest Viktor wants, but Jayce is friendly, quick to like others, far too eager for them to like him, and, in this department full of tiny wonders chasing a dream no one else believes in, at least a little lonely. Already Viktor is filling with the desire to support and befriend him as helplessly as the bowl will fill with rice at his approach.