Give the Dark My Love(56)

The back of my heel touched the ladder leading back up to the lab. How long had Master Ostrum suspected necromancy? How much of our shared laboratory time had been wasted with him already knowing the answer?

Dilada flashed through my mind. Had he sent me to the factories, to the hospital, hoping I would eventually push myself that far, that deep into the arms of Death?

My stomach twisted.

“I have to go,” I said, one foot on the first rung.

“Nedra, wait,” Master Ostrum said. “I know this is a lot, but—”

I shook my head, climbing a few more steps up. “I have to go,” I repeated. “I have to . . . I have to think about this. I have to . . .” But I didn’t finish. I was already back up in the lab. I crossed the small room quickly, throwing open the door, running out of the building. I didn’t slow down until I reached the center of the quad, until Bennum Wellebourne’s iron-encased statue loomed over me.





THIRTY-FOUR


    Grey



When nedra stopped going to the hospital as often, my initial reaction was relief and hope that she would finally start taking care of herself. Instead, she went from treating patients to working day and night in the laboratory hall.

I joined her, helping where I could. “Did you and Master Ostrum have a breakthrough?” I asked, hoping this nightmare of a plague would soon be over.

“Maybe,” Nedra said slowly. “But I have to be absolutely, entirely sure.”

“Why aren’t you working in his lab?” I asked.

She opened her mouth to answer, then her brow furrowed into a frown. “It’s better this way,” she said finally.

Master Ostrum had blocked off a lab in the main hall just for Nedra. One wall held a row of cabinets that were all closed, many of them with locks. The other wall held a locker full of rats, each in its own cage.

“So what is this big theory of Master Ostrum’s?” I asked as Nedra pulled slides of samples from a box and lined them up with the microscope.

She bent over the microscope, analyzing the contents of the slide. But her eye wasn’t focused through the lens; her gaze kept drifting. She leaned back and pulled her bag closer to her. Through the open top, I could see a book. Not a textbook—something old, the title worn away.

She sighed as if she were making a decision, one she wasn’t sure about in the least. Then she turned her full attention to me, staring at me intently. “Grey,” she said, “there’s been no cure for the plague. Nothing has worked.”

“But you have a theory?”

“We . . . we do.” She said the words like they were a confession, a sin to be absolved of. She opened the book in front of her.

“What’s that?”

“My papa says . . .” She paused. “‘A good book will give you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.’” She opened the book, the thin pages brown and dull under the bright light of the lab. “‘A great book will give you questions to answers you thought you knew.’”

Even the rats in the cages seemed to be listening to her.

“I don’t think I understand,” I said. My throat was tight; the way she was looking at me and speaking made this feel more momentous than a simple conversation. I felt like she was testing me.

I leaned over her to look at the text, but it was written in a florid font, difficult to discern.

Nedra slowly turned the pages, her mouth silently forming the words within. It felt like a dismissal, so I moved to the back of the lab and opened one of the cages, selecting a rat and dropping it into my golden crucible. I had my own experiments to try.

My eyes drifted to the paper pasted on the back of the door, a map of Lunar Island that had been reprinted in a news sheet. Marks indicated where the plague had struck, along with numbers—the death toll. The northern villages were mostly a collection of question marks; it was harder to collect information from there. The factories and poor district of Northface Harbor were so heavily inked that it was nearly impossible to discern any of the writing. I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would still agree to take a factory job.

I turned back to the work table, the rat inside my crucible peering up at me. It scratched at the gold as I activated the runes.

“What’re you doing?” Nedra asked.

“Did you read Professor Xhamee’s brief?”

She shrugged. Nedra had no intention of following any of the professors’ experiments; she was using the lab for her own theories. The only professor whose opinion she cared about was Master Ostrum.

“His theory is that he can draw out infection with the pain transference,” I said. “He’s come up with a different rune combination—”

Nedra’s head jerked up. “Really? Let me see.”

I shifted my crucible, showing her the sequence of runes lit up along the side. She squinted in thought as she read them, but then she shook her head.

“It won’t work.”

It was true that, although the theory was promising, Professor Xhamee had not yet been able to get the right rune sequence to create a working alchemical exchange. But a theory couldn’t be proven until the experiment worked, and I wasn’t going to dismiss it just because we’d run into some obstacles.

Nedra continued reading her book, but she watched me out of the corner of her eye. I set up the experiment, focusing on the alchemy. The rat inside the crucible clawed at the edges, its squeaks turning frantic as the crucible’s energy boiled around it. Rats couldn’t carry the plague, but if I could draw out a minor wound infection already festering on this rodent, it would be one step closer to proving Professor Xhamee’s theory.