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They get out of the way and I walk over. The device looks like an upside-down spider with brass legs holding the lenses that swing in and out of the way. I have to move the top one around to get a sharp view.
It’s no surprise that I’m staring down into a dark blob of black milk. The smell of the stuff fills the room. What’s weird is that there’s something twitching and moving through the muck like a hairy electric eel. Tiny blue sparks glow along its edges.
I nod.
“Very pretty. Was the wiggler in there already or is it a new pet?”
“We added it just before you came in,” says Vidocq.
Allegra stands close to me so she can look through the lenses too.
“This isn’t an ordinary microscope,” she says.
“No shit.”
“It doesn’t just see the form of an object, but other characteristics, like its life force. That’s what the blue glow along the sample is. It indicates that it’s alive.”
“But what is it?”
“The leg of a dead roach we found outside,” she says. “We put it in a tiny amount of black milk and it sort of woke up. If you look closer, you can even see that where we cut the leg off has healed itself.”
I stand up and look at them both.
“You’re telling me that angels are using this stuff to reanimate bugs?”
“No,” says Vidocq. “Look again.”
I watch the roach leg happily swimming through the stinking milk, kicking up sparks. Allegra gets an eyedropper and adds a tiny speck more milk to the mess.
The leg begins to spasm like it’s having a seizure. It goes on like that for a few seconds more before it stops moving and the sparks along its edges disappear.
“You murdered it, you fiends.”
“Yes, we did,” says Vidocq.
“Eugène showed me the bacon you reanimated,” says Allegra. “We’ve been testing different things in the milk all night.”
She points at the device.
“Look at the leg now.”
I look through the lens. The leg isn’t there.
“Where did it go?”
Allegra says, “It dissolved. That’s the strange thing about this stuff. In tiny amounts it has restorative powers.”
“But if you add just a touch too much, it destroys the tissue. Any kind,” says Vidocq.
“It happened with the bacon too. It was still wiggling around when I got home. Then we added a little more milk, and the strips dissolved into a black sludge like the roach leg.”
I glance back at the stuff in the device.
“That’s all swell, but what is it?”
“We don’t know.”
“But we have some ideas,” says Vidocq. “While Allegra studied the milk itself, I spent the night with my books and papers. I found references to something like it in a twelfth-century treatise on rare hermetic poisons. The document had been suppressed because it references various heretical biblical gospels. It definitely identifies the substance as angelic in origin and said that it’s been seen on Earth before. Athanasius Reuchlin, a German mystic, was said to have been given a small amount by a divine spirit and told to guard it. That’s not so different from what happened to you, is it?”
