Misha froze solid, shocked more at the fact he had slapped her than at the pain. The room was dead silent.
“If that’s how you feel, then give up on being an apothecary right now. You don’t have the right to take responsibility for other people’s lives,” Ryne said as Misha stared back up at him, hand on her face, before continuing much softer.
“Listen, Misha. I know that in this day and age, people consider dissecting a dead body to be taboo, but there’s so much you can’t know without it. That’s what I taught you, isn’t it?”
When Misha was young, Ryne had come to visit and had caught a number of animals, which he put on a table to teach Misha how to perform an autopsy. They peeled back the skin of animals, then he showed her each of the internal organs, each of the blood vessels, and how they all connected. They also removed those organs, dissected each one individually, and learned the functions and design of each organ. Sometimes they even used drugs to put the animal to sleep before opening it up to see how its heart worked while it was still alive. She had been taught to see which blood vessels being ruptured would lead to the animal’s death, and she practiced stopping the bleeding to save them if that happened.
It was a difficult experience for Misha at that age, but she understood from how serious Ryne was at the time that it was important, so she forced herself to stick with the lessons through the tears. She remembered distinctly how Ryne would offer a prayer for the animal every time before they started and say thank you to it after they were done. She found it strange, and so she asked him why he did that.
“We’re not just eating them to feed ourselves; we’re going to use their lives to learn as much as we can. So we have to be thankful. That knowledge will help us save others in the future.”
“So, it’s thanks for saving other people?” It was the first time she had heard someone put it that way.
Ryne gave her a quiet nod. “Exactly. In the future, you’re going to face many diseases, the likes of which you’ve never seen before. There are some people you won’t be able to save, who will die despite your efforts. When that happens, you need to study them like this. A body that lost the battle to a disease becomes a book that will tell you all about it. You can learn a lot by reading it. Using that knowledge to learn about the disease and discover how to wipe it out is the greatest thing you can do to honor the patient you failed to save. And by saving those who come after, you make it so their death had meaning.”
“Really?”
“Really. They are giving a chance to people who otherwise had no way of winning against that disease. That makes them heroes, don’t you think?”
Back then, Misha had felt moved by those words. After that, Misha stopped crying during their lessons. Instead, she joined Ryne in his short rituals of gratitude before and after each session, vowing to use the precious experience and knowledge these animals gave her to become an apothecary they could be proud of.
Misha’s gaze dropped, unable to respond to Ryne’s words. She was ashamed to realize she had failed to live up to the vow she had made that day.
“At least this time, if you had summoned up the courage and done it, you would have found the cause of this disease right away.”
But what he said next made her eyes snap back to him. She couldn’t believe what he was saying.
Misha wasn’t the only one that had been desperately searching for an answer to this plague. In the years since the Red Eye plague first appeared, the doctors of Redford had failed to find a single clue as to its source. But Ryne had just shown up today, and now he claimed to know the answer already.
“You know the cause of the Red Eye plague?!” Misha blurted out.
Ryne simply shrugged with a small nod. “It’s a unique kind of parasite.”