Rosalie, Fall 2003

I wore my lab suit. It wasn't necessary, of course, but Alice's obsession with dressing the part had compelled her to make designer lab coats for everyone in 1952 for when we did our research. I had tried to alter the lab coat to make it more flattering, but Alice's commitment to the vision wouldn't be moved. She would have made an excellent pushy film director.

She hadn't counted on my stubbornness, of course, and we had engaged in a war of garment-altering and garment-swapping before Esme had put her foot down, said that being wasteful was a sin, and had made my lab coat herself. Edward had supplied input on mine and Alice's differing visions, pointing out the focal points, and Esme had designed a garment which was a compromise.

And to be fair, I could carry it off. I could carry any garment off and make it look good: I made garments look beautiful, not the other way round.

The lab took up the entire top floor of the house. In each place we lived, Esme had to design and build a place for the lab, which held the latest medical research equipment we could get. Carlisle, of course, had been researching vampirism since the day he'd first fed on a herd of deer, but we'd decided on getting a proper lab and doing serious systematic research in 1938. Our mission: cure vampirism.

Or at least find out as much about it as possible.

We'd made leaps and bounds in the middle of last century, and a few good gains in the nineties, but our work on the biochemistry of venom had ground to a halt. Venom was composed, we knew, of tiny organisms which acted somewhat like a virus, with, as far as we could tell, their own genetic material, except that they interacted with each other. Or at least, we thought they did. Alice and Edward said that they came straight out of Marvel Comics, whatever that meant. Edward was trying to develop some instruments to look more deeply at the venom's molecular structure, but he hadn't finished yet.

Today, we were doing anatomy. Edward had seen my hesitation at being pulled apart so that our flesh could be analysed; these things scarred. So he had immediately volunteered himself. Carlisle and I were dressed in our lab coats, and Edward was wearing a white martial arts robe over his slacks, which he pulled off and hung up, showing a sleeveless top underneath, then positioned himself in the Demolition Zone.

"Ready," he said, and stretched out his left arm sideways. Carlisle nodded, held onto Edward tightly, and braced. He nodded to show when he was ready. I grabbed Edward's outstretched arm, then ripped it off at the shoulder with a twist.

Carlisle let go of Edward and came around to look at the results.

"Ye can see the cross-section of bone and muscle," he noted. (When he was home and didn't have to pretend, Carlisle always spoke like it was still London in the 1630s). And you could see what he was talking about; Edward's arm might have been stone all the way through, but you could clearly see what had once been bone, muscle, skin and ligaments. We'd have to investigate the effect that venom had on different types of tissues, and how they reacted. "Could we open the arm? See if we might separate the bone from the muscle?"

"Go ahead," murmured Edward.

I split the arm in half down the middle. Edward was keeping most of his body still, but vampires whose limbs had been torn off had limited control over the torn limbs. The limbs and the body seemed to want to reattach themselves, and that was their priority. Edward was concentrating hard on keeping his severed arm still, but instinct was making it jumpy, so it took both me and Carlisle to rip the arm in half lengthways to look inside.

The stone flesh was white, of course, and free of pigment. Carlisle put the arm under a microscope and I held it down. We could see the skin (we were still scratching our heads over what it was made of), and the muscle.

"You can still see the fibrous structure," I said. You needed a microscope, but you did. There were no cavities or gaps in the arm that we could see, but what was interesting was that there was a very thin layer of venom between the skin and the muscle, and then beneath the muscle and the bone.

"Move your arm, will you?" I asked Edward. He screwed up his face in effort, and the forearm twitched.

"Fascinating," said Carlisle.

"It started to move like a human arm," I observed. "What's left of the muscle doesn't contract as much as a human's would, but it does contract a little. And it looks like venom's lubricating it."

"That might explain why drinking blood maketh vampires stronger," Carlisle mused. "If blood be transubstantiated into venom, as we suspect, then the lubrication must help with movement, and therefore the power which vampires have."

We had done a Punching Power test back in the sixties at Emmett's request. Inside the door of the lab we had a page put up for research suggestions. Emmett liked to suggest things. Who would beat who in a fight, how powerfully could vampires bite, and so on. If it had been anyone else I would have been furious with the interruptions to our research, but it was hard to get mad at Emmett. Somehow, whenever we planned experiments just out of Emmett's innocent sense of curiosity, it turned into a joy and a labor of love.

We carried on examining Edward's arm for several hours before we stuck it back on. He offered up a leg, but Carlisle said that we'd done enough for one night and he didn't want to put Edward in any more pain.

I went over to Emmett's house tucked behind the Auto Repair shop and we fooled around for a bit in the back garage among the smell of gasoline and engine oil and steel, before I had to double back to make the appearance of going to High School with Alice and Edward.

"Make sure you drop by to see me at lunch," I said with a smile, as I restyled my hair. I did it in the way that I liked, thank you very much. Alice could go on all she liked about modern fashions and stage management, but my hair wasn't for Alice's taking with the hair straightener that she'd modified us. Modern fashions looked terrible; all angles and lines and no softness at all. It was like a streamlined, minimalistic version of the eighties, and I despised minimalism. I was pretty sure that the reason that Alice loved it so much was because it was the only thing that didn't make her look twelve.

Maybe I should drag my wardrobe into 2003, just to show that I could. No matter how terrible this modern minimalism looked (it had the benefit of bright colours and sparkly things at least – I could get a red silk halter top with real diamonds instead of rhinestones for my next date with Emmett, even though Esme would chastise me for Wasting Money when she found out), I was pretty sure I could make it look better.

"And you see that you pick me up at the end of the school day as well," I instructed Emmett. We were playing out a thrilling, sexy high school romance: the gorgeous, no-nonsense senior (thank you, nineties feminism for making the Bitch so likeable and sexy), and the fun, older, handsome young auto-mechanic who was courting her.

"Sure thing, Rose. Shall I bring the pickup truck?"

I imagined it. Emmett, pulling up in the biggest, most muscular car he'd rented . . .

"Yeah. Go real thick on that macho working-class boy," I told him affectionately. "Denim, flannel, riding in the back of the truck and leaping out while Jasper drives you up . . ."

"Woo! I'm looking forward to it, baby!"

I laughed and kissed Emmett before I went back to the main house.

Dear Emmett, I thought. You could always have fun with him. He was sweet and fun-loving and innocent in a way which I wasn't, which I could never be. That was why I needed him. I laughed a little as I ran home. It wasn't much of a life, what we had, and I would go back to humanity in a second if I could, but he brought joy in this life, and made it bearable.

I got home and slipped into the driver's seat of the Volvo and backed out of the driveway into the rain. Edward and Jasper were in the back seat, running through lesson plans for one of their students (why even bother? It wasn't like the kid in question was ever going to live anywhere that wasn't an institution); Alice was in the seat beside me telling me about the latest news about the Democratic primaries and speculating about the outcomes.

We parked and split up: the boys off to their ridiculous volunteering project; we girls to class. Emmett came to see me at lunch, as he promised, and we made a show of holding hands and kissing on the sidewalk (we were working up to a big proposal) for the benefit of the student body.

And we had quite a lot of fun while we were at it, too, even if we couldn't go too far.

Emmett made his required sweep-by pickup after school, dressed in a red flannel shirt and a baseball cap put on backwards. Jasper dropped us at an abandoned stretch in the roadside, and we ran off into the mountains to have some fun.

It was more than a little bit annoying to have to stop, but Carlisle and Edward were waiting for me, and I had to get back. Emmett was even more reluctant to stop than me.

"One more go, babe!" he whined.

"Absolutely not."

"Aw, come on!"

"Dream on, Gomez Addams."

"Gomez, huh? We could speak French, Tish!"

I rolled my eyes and placed my finger on his lips to stop him. "Research now, French later," I said, doing my best Morticia Addams impression. Esme had gotten us all into sitcoms in the fifties. Jasper still missed Roseanne.

I kissed my husband goodbye, and snuck down the mountain back to the house. When I got into the lab, Alice had already torn off Edward's arm for us. We got down to the business of examining and comparing the cell structure of Edward's bone (we chipped out a piece. We would put it back once the experiment was over) and muscle (same procedure). Myself, Carlisle, and Edward all knew what healthy bone and muscle tissue were supposed to look like, so we compared them.

"Tis' all calcified," Carlisle murmured.

"The original cellular structures are definitely there, though. Look, you can see . . ."

"If everything's calcified," said Edward, "Could we do some research on fossils? Look at the molecular structure of petrified wood, perhaps, in comparison to live wood?"

"Tis' an idea most intriguing . . ."

"We should get some tissues from the lab," I said. "Do a test on how venom affects human tissues in isolation."

We spent the rest of the night planning. And three weeks later, Carlisle came home with three tissue samples: muscle, skin, and bone marrow.

We decided to start with the muscle tissue first, since that would be the most standard of our tissues. Venom had a very specific effect on the skin which it didn't seem to have in the rest of the body, and Carlisle was very interested to see how it would react to bone marrow.

We weighed the tissue and measured out one millilitre of Carlisle's venom, then put the dish under the electron microscope. We added the venom to the muscle tissue, and looked to see what would happen.

"I can see chemical changes in the cells . . . wait! The nuclei – "

"Quick, I think the venom's genetic matter is – it's binding onto the cell's genetic matter – "

"It's inserting itself into one of the chromosomes! It's not just adding an extra pair like we thought it did . . ."

"Of course it's changing the biochemistry of the cells . . ."

"Those cells are taking on an awful lot of the characteristics of the venomous bodies and virus cells . . ."

We did the experiment twenty-one times, of course. Three times with the venom of every vampire in the house.

Then we did it again on skin and bone marrow tissue, and I offered to write things down to keep my hands busy. This . . . gene-editing of the venom's was even worse than we thought it would be. I didn't have any desire to study anything with Edward and Carlisle, even as they clustered around the electron microscope and the spectroscopes and talked out loud for my benefit. I just wrote things down numbly.

Emmett could see how upset I was, and suggested we go for a walk. So we ran for eight miles down the Calawah River, where he hugged me tight and kissed me. He took it slowly; Emmett was a far more sensitive and perceptive person than a lot of people gave him credit for. It was I who insisted we go quickly. I was desperate to escape that feeling of fear and helplessness that knawed inside me again, worse than it had been for a long time.

But then the sun came up, and it was time to face the music.

I looked at the running river in front of me, and sat up. Emmett sat up beside me, and put his arm around my shoulders. I leaned into him. I could see my reflection in the water. Even tear-stained, it looked absolutely gorgeous. I took some comfort from that.

"Well," I said shakily, looking at my beautiful reflection to steady myself, "There's always genetic engineering."

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