To Best the Boys(30)

I hold the lamp up and peer through the tiny bars. Lady’s small body lays stiff as a board with a tiny dribble of blood dried around her mouth. This time I don’t hold in the cry. I let it rip up my throat in a quiet tearing of earth and soul as I slip on a pair of gloves and reach in to pull her out. I check her. Her limbs, her gums, her eyes that are staring lifelessly up at me. She’s dead.

Not just dead—she’s bleeding from the mouth dead. Meaning, not only was our cure worthless, but something’s very wrong. In the past ten months, the disease has never presented with the blood before.

It’s a coincidence. Or maybe there’s another virus going around that just happened to hit here too.

Or . . . the crippling disease could be changing.

Shutting my eyes, I stick Lady’s body back into the cage, then pull away to stare at the room. My own blood begins to boil at the implications.

After a moment I walk to the microscope Da and I were using earlier. He’s set new glass dishes beside it, each with what appear to be fresh blood droplets and labels. I select the one Da marked as Lady’s, taken from a new draw two hours ago, and place it on the tray, then hone in the lens on it. I frown and switch it out for the dish labeled as my mum’s, also dated two hours ago, as a sick sensation rises in my stomach.

Something is off. These samples look different. I shove down the fear and, after a moment, replace her dish with the one containing the tree oil man’s blood from this morning. But I already know what it shows.

I zero the scope in until the cells come into focus. Then again. Then again as horror fills my chest.

According to this, Mum’s and Lady’s diseased blood hasn’t just been accelerating.

It now matches the dead man’s.

Their illness is morphing.

I glance up at the cages, then at the overhead ceiling boards—one of which creaks right where Mum and Da’s room is. And bite back the vomit rising in my throat as the soaring hope I’d felt just hours ago crashes to the floor. I rip off the gloves as my mind spins and the weight of what this means sets in.

It means we’ve failed.

It means the cure I’d hoped we’d finally found was nothing all along.

I turn back to the cage to stare at Lady’s stiff body as the realization hits me. This will be Mum’s fate too. To die quickly. Trapped in an immobile body, suffocated by her own lungs, without the ability to escape.

Trapped.

Just like Lady.

“They’re only doing it because they feel trapped and need to be heard.” Lute’s words flare in the back of my mind.

The fishermen. The rioters.

My mum.

My eyes fly open. I reach for the shelf above the cage and, with a quick shove, swipe its contents on the floor—the books and tins and bones. Then turn around and glare at what else I can destroy, because suddenly I know why the pub’s men were lashing out so recklessly tonight. They’re scared of choices being made for them that will sentence their families to a life—or death—they have no control over.

It’s the same reason I got angry at the Uppers in Uncle Nicholae’s study.

“You’re a lucky girl, Miss Tellur. Not everyone has such an opportunity. I expect to see good things come from it.”

What opportunity? What choices? What life?

We can’t even get anyone to listen to us voicing our needs.

“I rather believe you about the need for varied voices,” that strange Mr. Kellen had said. Then he asked, “And what exactly would you have them do differently?”

I glance at the slab we use to examine the dead. What would I do differently?

I’d stop pretending Da and I will find a cure down here using our rudimentary equipment and my inexperienced skills.

I’d make them listen to our town’s need.

I’d heal my mum.

I’d pursue the real future I want—a future that isn’t just including me in someone else’s plan, but that is for me. I’d—

My gaze catches on the Labyrinth Letter that’s floated lifelessly to the floor from the shelf I shoved the books off of. I pick up the piece of parchment and scan it, even though I’ve had every word memorized since the age of five.



* * *





All gentlepersons of university age (respectively seventeen to nineteen) are cordially invited to test for the esteemed annual scholarship given by Mr. Holm toward one full-ride fellowship at Stemwick Men’s University. Aptitude contenders will appear at nine o’clock in front of Holm Castle’s entrance above the seaside town of Pinsbury Port on the evening of 22 September, during the Festival of the Autumnal Equinox.

For Observers: Party refreshments will be provided at intermittent times. Watering facilities available at all times. Gratitude and genial amusement are expected. (Those who fail to comply will be tossed out at our amusement.)

For Contestants: Those who never risk are doomed never to risk. And those who’ve risked previously will be ousted should they try again.

For All: Mr. Holm and Holm Manor bear no responsibility, liability, or legal obligation for any harm, death, or partial decapitation that may result from entering the examination Labyrinth.

Sincerely,

Holm



* * *





My mind pricks. Something about the letter niggles at me as I return to the opening sentence. “All gentlepersons of university age.”