by Beth Revis
But he didn’t move out of Nedra’s way.
She hefted her bag. I could see the determination turning her bones to steel. She shouldered past Tomus, making a point to knock into his shoulder. His face purpled with rage, and he spun around to stop her again, but I lunged forward, grabbing his shoulder and holding him back.
“You too, Astor?” Tomus said in a low, angry voice. He shook his shoulder free from my grasp and stepped away from me.
As Nedra escaped through the door, the rest of the class dissipated. Without an object for their anger, there was little point staying in the lecture hall.
I stepped away from Tomus, but I hesitated before turning my back on him in order to pick up my bag. When I straightened, we were alone in the lecture hall. He hadn’t moved from his spot where Nedra shoved him.
“It’s not right,” Tomus said, a grim set to his jaw. “She comes in a year behind us, is bumped to the best class, and then steals the professor from us. From the rest of us, I mean.”
“It’s not her fault,” I said. “Nedra doesn’t make Master Ostrum’s decisions for him.”
He watched me for a moment, not speaking, but so intent that I felt too awkward to leave.
“My father hates your father,” he said finally.
“I’m . . . sorry?” I said, confused by the change in conversation.
“He always said Linden Astor was useful because of his connections and power, but that he would use anyone and anything to get ahead. You’re not like him.” He paused. “But you’re still going to get ahead.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“That’s what everything is about.”
I started for the door.
“Are you coming to my party tonight?” Tomus said, holding me back.
“I don’t know,” I said warily. I’d been planning on it, but after this morning . . .
“Come.” Tomus sounded sincere. “Bring your little girlfriend.”
“She’s not my—”
Tomus tensed, as if my denial was a personal insult.
“Come,” he said again, his voice brooking no argument.
* * *
• • •
I found Nedra in the library. She was in the restricted section, where the oldest records were kept.
“Whew,” I said, sitting down beside her.
“What’s wrong?”
“I thought you might be at the hospital and that I’d missed you.” I spoke in a whisper not because we were in the library, but because the books were so ancient looking I worried they would fall apart if I breathed too hard.
Nedra wore white cotton gloves as she carefully turned the page of a book bound in cracked and flaking leather. “I’m going there after lunch,” she said.
I should go with her. I knew I should. I couldn’t recognize the twisting reluctance in my gut to stay on campus. Was it fear? My father’s prejudice rang in my ears: They need soap. I shook my head. Dirt was not a virus.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Research.” Nedra did not look up from her book, but I couldn’t see how there were any answers for a new disease in a book as old as that.
“So,” Nedra said, leaning back from the tome. “Are you going to ask me to Tomus’s party?”
I blinked several times. “I—you know about that?”
“I heard the others talking. Although I doubt Tomus wants me there, not after this morning.”
“He does,” I said slowly. “He said he does.”
“Then he’s either planning something horrible for me, or he wants to suck up to me as he thinks I may be useful to him in the future.”
She seemed to have summed him up rather succinctly. “The latter, I think,” I said. “I’m not sure, but . . .”
Nedra nodded. “It’s more his style.” She paused. “I think I’ll go.”
“Are you sure?”
“I want to show him that he can’t intimidate me.”
I sat down beside her, and she read in silence for a few moments before turning the page.
“Why did you ask for me to stay with Master Ostrum?” I blurted out.
She didn’t try to deny it. “You have to ask?”
I looked down at my hands. I wanted to hear her say it.
“Tonight,” I said slowly. “Would you like to come with me? Together, I mean?”
Her eyes met mine, alight with hope. “Yes,” she said simply.
NINETEEN
Nedra
Grey’s invitation kept me warm as the ferry drew me across the bay—at least until the winds picked up. The days were getting colder; fall was almost as harsh as winter on Lunar Island, with all the wind and cold but none of the snow. I wrapped my cloak tighter around my frame, breathing into the cloth, my breath warming my face. My smile was hidden by my collar as I remembered the way Grey had said together.
My boat docked, and everyone disembarked. I was halfway up the stone steps when I heard the sounds of another boat arriving. I turned, surprised; the ferry couldn’t have returned that soon.
It wasn’t the ferry to Blackdocks. This ferry had come from the north.
I rushed back down the steps. I didn’t recognize the skipper, but she was grateful for the help as I secured the mooring and then helped the people inside the ferry disembark. The ones who could walk got off first, then I called for stretchers for the dozen or so people whose legs were black and twisted. Potion makers and aides rushed down the steps toward me.
“Thank goodness you’re here,” one of the potion makers—Lufti—told me as I helped him load a middle-aged woman onto the stretcher. “We’re so backed up today.”
“Where did this ferry come from?” I asked, looking to the skipper.
“Hart,” she said.
“I’m from the village beyond the ivy gate,” the woman on the stretcher said.
“The ones that can, come to Hart. I take them here.” The skipper started pulling up the moorings now that her boat was empty of passengers.
I helped Lufti carry the woman from the village beyond the ivy gate up the stone steps. It was a perilous climb, and even thought she was strapped to the stretcher, the bindings pulled against her diseased leg. She moaned.
“It will be okay,” I promised her, trying not to jostle the stretcher too much.
Her laugh was bitter. “No, it won’t,” she said, and I didn’t have the heart to lie to her again.
When we reached the heavy mahogany doors, another aide took over for me. I was left in the foyer, my arms aching, trying to catch my breath. My mind swirled. The ivy gate was just a half day’s ride from my own village. Papa went there often.
I shook myself. There was no time to worry.
I had work to do.
I checked in with the front desk and was sent immediately to help process the new patients. They were sick and scared and overwhelmed and far from home, and at least my accent matched theirs. Mentally, I tracked the villages. None closer to home than the village beyond the ivy gate. I tried to tell them that they were safe now, that the best alchemists in the land were here.
The first person to die that day was a baby.
The mother had fallen sick when she was close to giving birth. She’d hoped it was late enough in the pregnancy to save her child, but the little girl had been born with black swirls over her heart. The mother had given birth just the day before, rushing straight from her labor bed to the boat in Hart. She was still bleeding from the pregnancy, her skin ashen, her eyes sunken. She held her baby with one arm—her other was dead and black and twisted, the fingers useless.
Her scream ripped through the hospital, long and loud and filled with such pure anguish that everyone turned to witness the manifested sorrow.
I rushed over with the other potion makers and Alchemist Addrina. Addrina tried to get the mother t
o let go of the little bundle in her arms, but she finally had to pry the child from the woman’s hands. The alchemist passed the baby to me. Her flesh was cold to the touch. She had been dead for some time, probably since the ferry ride, and the mother had somehow been able to deceive herself until that moment in the crowded hospital hallway.
“She’s mine!” the woman screamed, snatching the baby from me, clutching the tiny body to her chest, choking back dry sobs. The woman dropped to the floor, cradling her child against her.
Addrina injected something into the woman’s neck, and in a few minutes her body grew slack. It looked as if she were sleeping. As if they both were.
Monkswort, I thought, looking at the syringe. A mild sedative. It allowed the aides to come and take the baby away, put the woman on a gurney, and find her a room.
But she will still wake up eventually, I thought, tears pricking my eyes.
“Nedra!” Alchemist Addrina barked at me. I’d only worked with her a handful of times before, but she was always kind, respectful of my work with Master Ostrum. She’d trained under him, too. “There’s work to do,” she said, her shoulders stiff. Addrina had never been so abrupt before.
This life was wearing on us all.
I nodded tightly, clutching my golden crucible. “Bring me a cart,” I told the nearest potion maker. “I’ll make surgical relief rounds.”
The potion maker went running, meeting me in the hall with a cart full of rats. I went from bed to bed, siphoning off pain from those recovering from recent amputation, pouring the pain into the rats. The work was hard, and I began seeing spots in the edges of my vision, but I forced myself to continue.
“It’s you.”
I looked into the face of the boy on the bed. His arm was gone just above his elbow. I knew him. My mind struggled to find his name, the connection of who he was.
And then a man roared at me. He lunged over the boy’s bed, his hands grappling for my throat. “You!” he screamed, his voice raw and ragged.
I scrambled back, dropping my crucible with an audible crash on the tile floor. There was nowhere to run—the room was crowded with beds. I fell against the bed of a sleeping girl whose leg had been amputated, jostling her so roughly that she woke up screaming. The man’s eyes were wild as he pushed aside the nearest bed. His fingers wrapped around my arm, digging into my flesh. “You, you!” he raged at me.
Others had realized something was wrong, and two large boys who worked as aides were trying to get through the maze of beds to come help me.
The man still held on to my arm, so when he raised his other hand and slammed it, open, against my jaw, I couldn’t pull away, and I took the full force of the teeth-clacking blow. My vision blackened, and I tasted the sharp metallic sting of blood on my lips.
“Hey!” one of the aides shouted. “Let her go!”
The man did—but so abruptly that I fell. He dropped on top of me, one of his knees pinning my arm. I tried to scoot away, but he leaned over, pressing his weight against me. “Your fault,” he snarled. “It’s all your fault.” He punctuated each word with snapping teeth, drawing closer to me until he was just millimeters from my face.
Finally—finally—the aides arrived. One knocked the man away. I rolled under the nearest bed, my body trembling, as the other aide held down the man’s arm. He kicked and thrashed, bucking his body, his head smacking the tile floor so loudly that it sounded like pottery cracking.
“Get help!” one of the aides shouted.
A potion maker arrived as if from thin air, holding a bottle of tincture of blue ivy.
“Not that,” I croaked. That medicine was too expensive, too hard to come by. The patients needed it.
The man’s body stilled. He wasn’t knocked out, but his pupils grew large, and his twisted rage melted into a placid expression.
“He didn’t mean it!” the boy on the bed called as the aides dragged him away. “He’s just—” His father was already gone from the room. The boy’s eyes fell on me. “Angry. He’s just angry.”
I stood, trembling. The potion maker helped me up. “Are you okay?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“I can give you some to help calm you—” She held the bottle to me.
“I’m fine, Gella,” I said again, shaking her hands off me. My nerves were shot, but I wouldn’t take blue ivy from the patients.
She looked concerned, but finally shrugged and walked away.
My hands trembled as I reached down and picked up the golden crucible. I put it back on the table. I could feel the other patients’ eyes on me.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said.
And I recognized him, finally. “Ronan.”
The boy smiled weakly. When I had met him and his family, he’d had his other arm. And he’d had a mother and a brother.
“They didn’t—?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I had known the mother wouldn’t live, but I’d hoped the younger brother might . . . but now they both were gone, and Ronan’s father, Dannix, blamed me.
“It’s okay,” Ronan told me as I dropped a rat into the crucible. “It’s not too bad. You don’t have to help me; go to one of the others . . .”
I placed one hand on his residual limb and held the golden crucible with the other. I chanted the runes, focusing on them as they burned white. I took as much of the boy’s pain as I could, but I knew it wasn’t enough.
It was never enough.
Alchemist Addrina came in to relieve me of duty soon after. No doubt, from her worried gaze, someone had told her about the man who’d attacked me.
“Go home,” she told me in a low voice.
“I can do more,” I started.
She shook her head. “Go home,” she said again. “That’s an order.”
I swallowed. The inside of my cheek was still raw from where my teeth had smashed into it, but I’d siphoned some of my own pain into the rat while I’d worked on Ronan. I hoped my jaw wouldn’t bruise. All around me, people were coming to terms with amputated limbs, lost loved ones, or a doomed foretelling of their own death, and here I was worried about looking pretty for my party.
“I can—” I started, but Addrina whirled around on me.
“I’m not saying it again.”
I ducked my head and muttered my thanks to her. I trudged down the hall, trying to block the sounds of the patients—crying, bargaining to keep their dead limbs, praying for a salvation that wouldn’t come. I couldn’t bear to look at the silent patients, the ones who had already given up.
Before I left, I paused at the desk. I needed a friendly face.
“Where is Mrs. Rodham?” I asked the receptionist. She had been the one who’d brought me to Ronan and his family; she would understand.
The receptionist’s eyes watered with pity. “Oh, Nedra,” she said. “Didn’t anyone tell you? Last night. It—her eyes turned green, and—” A green film over the eyes meant the plague was in the brain. There was no cure. It was certain death.
I walked away, unwilling to hear anything else.
TWENTY
Grey
“Greggori Astor,” Tomus called as soon as I pushed open the door and stepped onto the administration building’s flat roof. Tiny oil lamps decorated the rooftop, and someone had brought a gramophone to play music until enough musicians arrived to put together a band.
“Tomus,” I said, by way of greeting.
Tomus snorted. His breath stank of ale, and there was a pale brown stain of liquid on the front of his shirt. He’d started celebrating early, it seemed, but I knew him well enough to know when his drinking was for fun and when he used it to drown his anger.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” I said. “Professor Pushnil is every bit as respected as Master Ostrum, and—”
“Easy for you to say,” Tomus growled, but
then his face cleared. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I may be an ass, but I’m an honest ass. Your father is in politics. You’re moving up the ranks. I’m not going to toss you out.” He leaned in closer, his eyes struggling to focus on mine. “Truce. For you and the slummer. But just you remember this,” he said. “I’ve done you a favor.”
A favor? Him? I owed him nothing just because he decided I was too valuable to pick a fight with.
“And there she is!” Tomus shouted, tipping his mug as Nedra stepped onto the roof. I rushed to her, ignoring Tomus.
“Don’t let them see any fear,” I whispered, taking her elbow and steering her near the gramophone, where people wouldn’t be able to overhear us.
She shot me a look I couldn’t quite place. “I never do,” she said. Then she shook me off her arm and moved to the edge of the party. Her body was stiff, her face too schooled. Something was wrong—something more than Tomus being an ass.
“Wounded puppy, you are.” I hadn’t realized Tomus had approached me again; the gramophone was louder than I’d thought.
Soon, the band started up, and the real party began. It was a whirl of ale and noise and furious motion as we all spun atop the roof. The entire world was at our feet, or so it felt, and we were a storm about to be unleashed upon it.
Except Nedra. Nedra sat on the edge of the roof, her feet dangling over dangerously. The bright glow of Yūgen’s clock tower illuminated the rooftop dance floor, but Nedra’s eyes were on a different clock, one halfway across the bay.
“Come dance,” I said, holding out my hand to her.
She shook her head. “This isn’t the kind of dancing I’m used to,” she said.
“Not much dancing in your village?”
She smiled. “Not this kind, anyway.”
“What kind of dancing did you do?” I asked.
If she noticed my flirting, she ignored it, turning back to look out toward the bay, to the clock tower in the distance and the quarantine hospital beneath it.
“Dance with me?” I asked again, more urgency in my voice.
I could feel the others watching us. I was starting to get used to the way people looked at us, the way their eyes slid from me to Nedra, a question never spoken but always present about why we were together. But we weren’t together, not like that, not yet, even if . . .