Darcy Tirrel always wanted to be called “doctor.” “But you have such a pretty face,” her mother would say. “Why muck about getting your hands dirty?” In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire burned miles of the city, but it would be nearly destroyed by something much worse, 140 years later. Dr. Tirrel watched Chicago go down to the ground from a distance, but next time she would be there, beautiful and smart and ambitious, an immigrant chasing the American dream. In the Arctic she stepped off the helicopter and marched toward her destiny in Sorel boots. A man pointed a gun at her; he’s got orders to kill. Dr. Tirrel just laughed—no man would blow off this face. Later, as the mission spiralled out of control, taking untold, unaccounted for, unimportant amounts of human life with it, Dr. Tirrel visited the lab, where the boys ate doughnuts and turned the matter she’d discovered with a gun at her back into things that made them feel like men. A speck of dust clung to the shoulder of her suit, gleaming white. She daintily picked it off, blew it into the air. “Imagine if I got my period right now,” she thought. Dr. Tirrel just laughed.
