I watched dispassionately as they brought in the body. Ifalna was dead. It was a shame, of course; there were certain experiments I simply couldn’t do with a dead body. They had failed to retrieve Aeris as well. A Turk assured me that they were questioning people and would find her shortly. It occurred to me that I probably should know his name, but I had no interest in it.
“Leave her be for now,” I told him.
He looked at me in surprise. “All that running around and now you don’t want her?”
“She’s only half Cetran. I’ll need to restructure the experiments, and I don’t want her to do something foolish like get herself killed by a panicky Turk trying to retrieve her. Give her a little while to get comfortable. Keep an eye on her. Make sure I can fetch her whenever I want.” I shooed him out of my office, waving dismissively without looking up. He probably thought I didn’t hear him grumbling.
Ifalna was dead. The reality sunk in as I prepared the body for autopsy. This wasn’t just a specimen, after all. I was now the last surviving member of the Jenova Project. No one else knew of my lovely Lucrecia’s role. No one else knew about the Turk’s body, locked in the basement.
I cut away Ifalna’s clothing and rinsed the body with a sponge. I’d sent the lab techs away. This was one analysis I felt I should do myself. I supposed I owed Ifalna the dignity, if nothing else. I turned on the audio and began inspecting the body.
“Specimen Green-1 of the Promised Land Project, prepared for autopsy. Subject escaped at 3.12 this morning with specimen green-2, her daughter. Body was retrieved by the Turks at approximately 6.30 PM. No signs of blunt force trauma or resistance. No signs of violence at all. Looks like Ifalna simply didn’t take me seriously when I told her leaving the building would be fatal.”
I used a fresh scalpel to open the skin on her chest, then set about opening the rib cage. I had a pretty good idea what the cause of death had been, but it would be careless and shortsighted not to do a full autopsy. I remembered slicing Vincent open in a similar way, playing with his organs as I saw fit.
The tape continued running as I dictated my efforts. There was no need to play with Ifalna. The state of her liver and stomach confirmed that she’d simply died from withdrawal. I knew there were risks in creating the chemical dependency, but it had served its role. Ifalna had obediently stayed put for years, allowing me unlimited access to herself and her daughter.
As I carefully labeled vials of her blood and pieces of her organs, I thought it funny that in running, she had put herself entirely at my disposal.
I paused before her face. She had begun to show her age, locked in the labs of the Shinra building. I suspected it came from her poor attitude. She could have made much more of her time, but she chose to spend it raging at me. Such a shame, I thought as I delicately sliced her first eyelid, making it possible to cut loose her eye and drop it into a beaker of formaldehyde. Those eyes had watched Sephiroth born, cried when Lucrecia passed, glared when the Turk disappeared. Now they were nothing more than tissue in a jar.
I suddenly felt very old. I held her second eye in my hand, thinking of the way her green eyes had seemed to glow softly. The same way Lucrecia’s had, in their icy blue way, before she died. Even if Jenova wasn’t an Ancient, there were similar symptoms of exposure. Surely there had to be some kind of correlation? I looked over to the shelf where Lucrecia’s eyes sat, sealed tightly in a jar, next to hair and blood samples and our wedding photo.
There would be time later to determine whether her “sixth sense” had been the result of anatomical differences in the eye that allowed it to sense such things as “auras” or whether it was something processed in the mind alone. For now, I dropped the eye into the beaker and moved on to the next step.
With only the slightest hint of a sigh, I reached for the scissors. I had to trim her long, thick hair and pull the skin back before I could think about opening her skull. With her brain at my disposal, I would at least be able to determine whether the Cetran talents had a biological basis. If they were not, Ifalna could console herself that she had taken them to her grave along with the memories of the Jenova Project.
It had gotten dark while I worked. The lab was silent, and the shrill scream of the bone saw echoed. It set my jaw on edge. I walked back to the lab table and tried not to think about Sephiroth, away, fighting, if they might have to bring his body back to me like this. If I might have to cut him open that one last time. An experiment in creating someone who wouldn’t leave me, I don’t want it to fail.
The skullcap hit the floor and jarred me out of my thoughts.
I remembered Ifalna telling me how her soul would go back to the planet when she died, and rest, and be reborn. I told her that was ridiculous. Equating death and sleep was what you told five year olds so they would stop asking uncomfortable questions after their mothers died. Removing the brain was a delicate process, and I kept thinking that Ifalna would wake up, open eyeless lids, scream without lungs.
Clearly it was time to retire for the evening.
I placed the brain carefully in a second specimen jar, adjusted the formaldehyde level, and sealed it. Then I closed the body bag they’d brought Ifalna in, marking it for the cleaning staff to pick up in the morning.
I thought of Ifalna, asleep in the planet. Perhaps Gast was with her. Vincent, his life suspended down to the component cells, wasting away in the basement of the mansion. Lucrecia, cold and silent and still and staring at the crystalline ceiling of her mausoleum. Jenova, broken and poisoned, still humming to me but too tired for words.
I was also too tired for words. I turned off the tape recorder and left the lab, not bothering to remove the bloodied lab coat. It tended to keep the riff raff away on the trains. I didn’t want to deal with anyone tonight. I just wanted to go home and sleep.
