Our Hearts. Chapter Ten. The Alchemy of Blood

The locking wheel of the massive pressure door yielded to Diana’s push with an unhurried, oily mechanical click of the bolt, the echo of which seemed to sink into the very foundation of the bunker.

Slender fingers in impeccably white cuffs applied precisely the effort required to unlock heavy steel latches designed to withstand colossal overpressure. The bolt slid back with a dull thud, releasing an elastic, dense wave of cool, deeply filtered air. This current struck Leo in the face—a sharp, almost painful contrast to the resinous, suffocating inferno of the Congolese noon—dry, bloodless, carrying the chill of ionized oxygen, a faintly discernible trace of ozone, and the bitterish metallic taste of freon settling on the palate.

Hardly had he crossed the high, lead-lined threshold when his body’s internal clock faltered, as if caught in a powerful magnetic field.

In the very depths of his chest, right behind the sternum, a physical shift occurred. His heart rhythm reconfigured: the beat frequency remained the same, but the impulse itself acquired a different, frightening hydraulic force. The heart muscle contracted with double the amplitude; it felt as if a second, more powerful, ancient, and deep resonance had tapped into his own pulse. A beat—and following it, an instantaneous, dense echo rolling through the aorta, the way mercury rolls heavily and inexorably down a glass tube. Imani’s copper bracelet on his right wrist suddenly felt monstrously heavy; it responded with a pinpoint, icy, piercing impulse that sobered his mind for a second. Leo froze for a fraction of a moment, absorbing this double heartbeat, until dark circles momentarily swam before his eyes, pulsating in time with the new blood.

The space beyond the airlock had nothing in common with the damp drifts or mine workings that smelled of raw clay, sweat, and rust. The monolithic concrete walls were tightly sealed with light gray antistatic panels, leaving not even a shadow for bacteria. The acoustic ceiling greedily and entirely absorbed echoes, creating a muffled, padded laboratory silence, broken only by the even, hypnotic rustle of laminar flow hoods and the guttural hum of ultra-low temperature freezers. This was an autonomous BSL-3 biological protection module—a temple of modern science in the middle of a primeval forest. Along the left wall stretched a continuous row of smooth synthetic stone countertops: microscopes with trinocular heads, matte-gleaming microcentrifuges, a DNA sequencer, spectrophotometers. On the opposite side stood shelving units with reagents in dark, light-proof glass vials and refrigerated incubators secured with biometric combination locks.

At the central table, in front of the matte screens of two widescreen monitors, stood an elderly man.

Leo immediately recognized him as Diana’s companion from that morning. Tall, morbidly stooped, wearing the same gray jacket of thick, prickly wool over a blue broadcloth shirt. Three ballpoint pens peeked out of his breast pocket in a neat, pedantic row. A thick, meticulously trimmed white beard framed a narrow, parchment-tinted face crisscrossed with fine wrinkles, and round glasses in thin gold frames refracted the cold light of the diodes, concealing the expression of his gray, deep-set eyes. A laboratory coat lay nearby in a careless white heap on a plastic chair.

“Dr. Gonzales,” Diana stopped slightly behind Leo, folding her slender hands behind her back in a familiar gesture. “Allow me to introduce Dr. Thierry Girard. Virologist, microbiologist. For a long time, he headed research at the Lyon branch of the Pasteur Institute. For the last few years, he has been working with us.”

Girard slowly, as if reluctantly, looked up from the keyboard. His palm—dry, cool, with fingertips noticeably yellowed from prolonged contact with harsh reagents—shook Leo’s hand briefly, without unnecessary pressure, like a man accustomed to saving his hands for delicate work.

“Doctor,” Girard’s voice had a soft, slightly muffled guttural accent characteristic of natives of the south of France, tinged with a slight shortness of breath. “I must confess, I looked at your publications on hemorrhagic fevers in The Lancet. Very precise, I would even say meticulous observations.”

“Thank you. I am merely a co-author,” Leo swept his attentive eyes over the sterile room, noting every detail of the equipment. “I didn’t expect to see a full-fledged research center of this security level at a private mining facility.”

“An unavoidable necessity,” Diana chimed in. “The man the locals found in the forest thicket—his name was Maurice Brunet, and he worked right here. We brought him in from Geneva about a year and a half ago. He possessed a rare, almost supernatural intuition for anomalies of a microbiological nature. A talented guy.”

“Your Maurice died from an acute, devastating form of hemorrhagic fever,” Leo said very carefully, weighing every word, meeting Diana’s unblinking gaze. “Consequently, does your company’s profile include working with high-consequence pathogens?”

“Our profile is much broader than traditional virology,” Diana replied, tilting her head slightly, causing the light to glide across her dark hair. “We mine rare-earth metals… But we do indeed touch upon these matters as well.”

“So he got infected here? Within the walls of this bunker?”

Diana looked at him with the faintly perceptible, restrained smile of someone accustomed to treating the conjecture of others with condescension.

“Leo, are you inclined to trust the folklore and rumors spread through the villages? About IC Waze deliberately infecting the local population to clear territories for the mine’s expansion? We require hundreds of living, healthy working hands every day. Decimating the workforce is a direct threat to our financial balance and logistics. For business, it is senseless and unprofitable.”

She turned smoothly to Girard: “Doctor, show Gonzales what we have here.”

Girard nodded silently. He walked over to the massive double-door freezer module, entered a six-digit code on the touch panel, and pulled the chrome handle. With a quiet hiss, a white, dense cloud of dry ice vapor poured into the opening, washing over them with the icy breath of absolute zero. From the frost-sparkling depths of the chamber, Girard extracted a meticulously polished steel container, set it on the table, and flipped open the hermetic lid. Inside, on a bed of porous black material, lay microscope slides with fixed smears, marked with dark red indices that looked like coagulated blood.

Using fine tweezers, the virologist took the outermost slide, placed it on the microscope stage with a jeweler’s precision, and adjusted the bright LED backlight.

“Take a look at this,” he indicated.

Leo leaned in and pressed against the cold rubber eyecups of the oculars. An illuminated cellular field opened up before him like an alien universe. The structure of the erythrocytes immediately drew his attention with its monstrous, anomalous morphology. Instead of the usual smooth, biconcave discs, the cells had compacted, rigidly defined borders with incredibly high indices of light refraction—they glowed in the solution like broken glass. Inside the cytoplasm, ordered crystalloid inclusions could be seen, arranged in strict, mathematically perfect parallel chains. The cell membranes remained completely intact and elastic, despite the obvious, aggressive presence of viral agents.

“This isn’t human blood,” Leo whispered, without tearing himself away from the optics, feeling a chill run down his spine.

“Absolutely correct,” Girard confirmed dryly. “These samples were taken from bats. Large specimens of the Pteropodidae family, the so-called hammer-headed fruit bats. But here, they don’t live in trees. A colony of these creatures inhabits deep karst washouts and abandoned, water-filled geological shafts a few kilometers from here. The wingspan of certain individuals reaches a meter and a half… But these aren’t from there.”

“This looks very much like what we found in the blood of our patients,” Leo said slowly, straightening up and looking at the biologist. “In the surviving miner. In the stifling hospital tent. In the two girls in the village. The exact same geometrically regular structures. The same architecture of organization. But in the fruit bats, it’s denser. As if…”

“As if the process has gone much further,” Girard finished for him.

“The same crystalloid structures in the cytoplasm. But here, in the fruit bats, the protein organization looks not like a mutation, but like evolution—complete, well-formed.”

“Because in the bats, this process has undergone a full cycle of centuries-long adaptation,” Girard picked up, and for the first time, notes of professional excitement sounded in his voice.

He pulled out the lower section of the refrigerated incubator and extracted a transparent cylindrical container holding a fragment of dark, almost black muscle tissue, fixed in a yellowish formalin solution. Placing the plastic cylinder in front of Leo, Girard took a lightweight portable radiometer with a long immersion probe from a wall cabinet.

The device sprang to life. The quiet, sporadic crackle of clicks from the speaker instantly accelerated, merging into a continuous, menacing hum the moment Girard brought the probe close to the container with the flesh. The needle of the analog indicator jerked and confidently swung to the right, locking dead onto a mark catastrophically exceeding the standard natural background level.

“Five hundred and eighty microroentgens per hour,” Girard noted, turning off the device. The crackling cut off, leaving a ringing silence in its wake. “For brief contact, the value is not dangerous, but for living biological tissue—it is colossal, lethal. The tissues of these creatures contain stable, resilient isotopes of uranium-238 and thorium-232, permanently embedded directly into the mineral matrix of their bones and the cellular structures of their internal organs.”

He straightened his back and sighed heavily, tiredly.

“Imagine that this isotope is built into the DNA itself, into the very foundation of the cellular matrix. The cells are mercilessly bombarded by alpha particles from within every second of their existence. Any other living creature would burn alive from agonizing radiation sickness and multiple sarcomatous cancers in less than a month.”

“Full-fledged, deep bioaccumulation,” Leo murmured quietly, feeling the puzzle in his head beginning to assemble into an impossible picture.

“Yes,” Girard took off his glasses and began methodically wiping the lenses with a flawlessly clean handkerchief. “Generation after generation, the fruit bats inhabit the cavern vaults that intersect the local uranium veins. They drink groundwater heavily saturated with isotopes. They eat wild fruits growing on soils with off-the-charts radioactivity. Their bodies are miniature, living bioreactors. But they do not die. They do not get sick. They have completely adapted to death.”

Leo stared silently at the yellowish solution in which the piece of deadly flesh floated. Inside his head—quickly, feverishly, with terrifying clarity, the way a glass mosaic comes together—a chain was forming: fruit bats—subterranean radiation—anomalously light-refracting cells—protein mutations—virus—pulsating aorta—Mbul Benga—village girls—thick, dark blood—the second, alien rhythm in his own chest.

“Do you think the virus mutations are directly linked to the uranium?” he asked, breaking the silence of the laboratory.

Girard looked at Diana. Diana looked at Leo. In this closed triangle of gazes—one second, two, three—a mute, tense exchange of information took place, the true meaning of which Leo could not fully decipher, but his body deciphered the threat for him: a spasm of tension in his shoulders, a sudden dryness in his mouth, an accelerated, arrhythmic pulse.

Girard maintained an impenetrable silence. Diana took a slow step forward, her dark, bottomless eyes looking at Leo with cold, surgical, investigative attentiveness. She spoke first.

“Gonzales,” her voice sounded even, calm, with that special, velvety yet unyielding hardness that belongs to people accustomed to making fateful decisions single-handedly. “Will you work with us? You possess invaluable clinical observations of the primary phase in humans under field conditions. We possess a powerful fundamental technological base on the primary source.”

Leo hesitated. In his chest, the second pulse continued to hammer out its otherworldly, stubborn, primordial rhythm, resonating with the scaldingly cold metal of the bracelet on his damp wrist.

“I agree,” he gave a curt nod.

Diana smoothly extended her hand to him. The handshake was brief, dry, and extremely precise, like the sealing of a business contract.

“Girard will grant you full, unrestricted access to our archival analysis records. We have no reason to hide the details from you.”

By nine in the evening, the equatorial night had covered Kato-Tombe like a dense, hermetic blanket woven from the suffocating vapors of the jungle and the smell of rotting earth. The halogen floodlights on the four corner towers snatched from the velvety darkness the taut steel rows of the chain-link fence and the meat-red clay between the residential containers, glistening with fallen dew.

Leo sat on the edge of the narrow, hard cot in his ascetic living module. The air conditioner beneath the ceiling panel emitted a steady, lulling, monotonous hum. Fanned out on the white plastic table before him lay printouts of the most complex genomic sequences provided by Girard, but his thoughts persistently circled back to that strange, physical sensation of a hydraulic shift that had arisen upon entering the concrete bunker.

A quiet, surprisingly neat knock on the metal door made him stand up. Diana stood on the threshold. In place of her austere silk blouse, she wore a simple, form-fitting purple t-shirt that accentuated even more the unnatural, almost porcelain pallor of her skin for these latitudes. In her right hand, she held a cardboard carrier with four stout glass bottles of strong Belgian lager, completely covered in large, dripping beads of icy condensation.

“May I?” she asked.

Leo silently stepped aside. Diana walked into the cramped module, gracefully leaned against the edge of the table, and used a small metal keychain bottle opener to uncap both bottles. She handed one of the frosted, bitingly cold glass cylinders to him.

“Hard liquor within the perimeter is under absolute, strict prohibition,” she said, taking a first small sip. “But an ice-cold beer in these equatorial latitudes is the only saving grace to maintain one’s sanity and clarity of thought.”

Leo also took a sip. The tart, rich barley taste with a pronounced, astringent hoppy undertone pleasantly burned his parched throat, washing away the aftertaste of laboratory freon. Diana looked at the bracelet, and then unhurriedly raised her gaze to the unbuttoned collar of his faded camouflage shirt, where a silver cross gleamed dully on a sturdy chain.

“Are you Catholic, Leo?” she asked, giving a slight, almost imperceptible nod toward his chest.

Leo automatically touched his neck. Beneath the damp fabric of his shirt, on a thin chain, hung the cross—a small, time-darkened silver cross with a slightly worn crucifix. His father had given it to him at the age of eight, on the bright day of his First Communion, in the cool Boston parish of the Holy Cross. “Yes,” he answered curtly.

“I am not,” Diana took another sip, looking over the top of the bottle. “But I grew up in a country where sincere faith and deep-seated superstition are essentially the same thing. Romania, Doctor. There, in the Carpathians, they will tell you about ghosts and the restless dead with the same impenetrably serious face with which Londoners discuss the weather.”

Leo gave a slight, faint smile with only his lips. “You know, Leo, what we are currently seeing on those microscope slides is not new at all. It is simply deeply and securely forgotten,” she said, thoughtfully studying the droplets running down the bottle.

“Have you ever heard of Erzsébet Báthory?” Diana asked without altering her casual tone in the slightest—exactly the way one asks about a distant mutual acquaintance, rather than a bloody character from a medieval legend. “Countess Báthory. The ‘Blood Countess.’ Or perhaps, of Prince Vlad Țepeș? Dracula?”

“I’ve read about them. Who hasn’t.”

“Good. Then you know from popular literature that Báthory supposedly bathed in the hot blood of virgins to preserve her youth, and Țepeș impaled his enemies on stakes by the thousands. Commonplaces. Clichés from history textbooks. Cheap Hollywood.” She smiled slightly, and in that fleeting smile, there was a glimpse of a strange, warm memory of a completely different, long-vanished life.

“During my time as a young chemistry student at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, by a funny coincidence, I attended an evening elective on history. It was taught by a very remarkable man—Professor of Theology Stefan Radu. It sounds ridiculous—the Faculty of Roman Catholic Theology—but with a fanatical gleam in his eyes, he lectured a course on the history of ancient Transylvanian cults.” Diana paused, shrugged her shoulders, and slowly rolled her head, as if stretching her neck.

“A crazy old man. Short, thin as a rail, with knotty fingers perpetually stained with blue ink. He wore the exact same worn suede jacket year-round, smelled of old paper, and constantly drank strong tea from a dented tin flask. Like whiskey.” She smiled, looking somewhere through the wall of the living module, over Leo’s shoulder.

“This old man spent many years like a mole in the dusty archives of the diocesan administration in Sibiu and in the closed monastic libraries of Bistrița, studying original historical documents.”

Diana slowly turned the bottle in her hands, wiping away the beaded icy moisture with her finger, as if drawing something.

She took a sip and continued: “Radu paid close attention to those bureaucratic details that modern historians usually arrogantly ignore as insignificant. In the meticulous investigative materials on Báthory’s case, compiled by Palatine György Thurzó, as well as in the dry judicial records of Brașov regarding Țepeș’s raids, the geography of the victims’ origins was always clearly recorded. Báthory never, under any circumstances, took girls from her own vast estates in Csejte. Maids were specially brought to her under the cover of night from specific, remote villages in the Mecsek mountains, located near the city of Pécs. And Vlad Țepeș, orchestrating his demonstrative punitive campaigns, took captives exclusively from certain counties—predominantly from the mountainous Bihor region, from the western rocky foothills of the Apuseni.”

“Other counties,” Leo murmured, trying to grasp the cold logic of her story. “Yes. Exactly. Other counties. A completely different soil, a fundamentally different hydrology. The professor argued, frothing at the mouth, that these historical figures did not act under the influence of blind sadistic madness. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were relying on a specific, lost layer of early medieval knowledge that was of a strictly alchemical nature.”

She took another swallow of lager, savoring the bitterness of the hops.

“So he spoke of those alchemists,” and, holding a theatrical pause, continued: “The soil of the Mecsek mountains and the rocky foothills of Bihor has long been known for anomalously high concentrations of rare mineral salts and heavy elements. In both places, uranium was mined for years…”

She fell silent again. Leo waited. Patiently, not daring to shatter the tension hanging in the room, thick as the Congolese night.

“The professor believed: both Báthory and Țepeș purposefully sought the blood of people whose bodies had been shaped from early childhood under the conditions of this specific, harsh geochemical background. They firmly believed that the composition of such isotope-saturated blood was capable of physically altering the properties of human tissues—halting cellular decay, granting absolute immunity to disease and aging.”

Diana finished her beer and set the empty glass bottle on the plastic table with a light clack.

“Radu was predictably deemed a lunatic heretic and forced into retirement. But here, in Africa, Brunet—our late, brilliant biologist—conducted the most precise spectral analysis of samples taken from bats discovered by chance during deep geological exploration, and…”

She paused briefly, looking Leo directly in the eyes with her unblinking dark gaze.

“According to microscopic bone slices and the isotopic spectrum of their tooth enamel, the biological age of individual bats from this colony, unknown to us is no less than eighty years. Against a normal physiological lifespan for these species of a maximum of fifteen to twenty years. Thirty at best… Their bodies have found a scientifically impossible way to use the destructive radiation wear of the strata for continuous, cyclical cellular regeneration.”

Leo suddenly felt the coolness of the air-conditioned air turn icy, piercing him to the very bones.

“Even if Maurice conclusively established this fact… Where and how did he get infected? If he knew the draconian rules of working in a BSL-3 protocols by heart, he simply physically could not have made an accidental, fatal mistake.”

Diana calmly, with a kind of otherworldly grace, walked to the exit. Her narrow hand rested on the shiny door handle. “He observed the safety protocols flawlessly,” Diana cracked open the front door. The saturated night air—hot, damp, intoxicatingly smelling of rotting jungle foliage and raw earth—quickly flooded into the chilled room.

“But protocols, Leo,” she adjusted a strand of hair that had fallen on her face with a light motion, “protect exclusively against accidental infection. And Maurice—I am absolutely certain of this—did not get infected by accident. He was looking for something.” “What?” “I don’t know. Perhaps, that very legendary source of eternal life,” she smiled into the darkness with the corners of her lips. “Or, at the very least, its biological prototype. The mechanism of absolute regeneration.”

The metal door quietly clicked shut behind her, leaving Leo alone with his unfinished beer—in a hollow silence broken only by the monotonous, indifferent noise of the air conditioner.

Chapter Eleven. The Shaft →
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