Give the Dark My Love

by Beth Revis

  Finally, after what felt like ages, Nedra stood. She placed her hand in mine. My whole body relaxed, and she laughed at me.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Nedra said, standing up on her tiptoes to whisper in my ear. Her breath made the tiny hairs on the back of my neck stand up, made my heart race, made my body forget that anyone was watching us. “I learned a long time ago that as long as you don’t care what others think of you, you’re much, much happier. And besides, no one ever really cares about anyone but himself.”

  Well, that just wasn’t true. I whirled Nedra around, relishing the feel of her body pressed against mine, then tilted her so she could see the crowd dancing on the roof, and the eyes that watched us.

  “That girl’s staring,” I said in a low voice, nodding subtly to a girl standing by the clockface.

  “Not at us,” Nedra said, her voice much louder. “She’s looking in our direction, sure, but she’s not really thinking about us. She’s wondering if she should dance, too. Her feet are tired and she wants a break, but she’s not sure what others will think if she leaves. And that guy?” She nodded to Ervin, who leaned down to whisper something to his partner as he stared at us. “He’s asking his boyfriend when he thinks they can leave and no one will notice. And her? She’s upset that she didn’t eat more before coming up; her stomach hurts. And he’s worried people will notice the mustard stain on his shirt. No one cares about you, about us, not really. They may use us as words to fill the silence because they can’t think of anything else to say, but we are not their true focus.”

  She wrapped her arm around my neck. “So quit worrying about what others think, Grey,” she said in a soft voice. “Worry about what you want.”

  I’d gotten used to the hard glint in her eyes, her stiff spine, the way she never let herself betray an ounce of emotion in front of others.

  But she had emotion now. There was fire in her eyes.

  A fire for me.

  My body stilled. The whole damn world stilled. Because she had said my name like it meant something to her.

  She looked at me, and it was as if she had only just then realized that she’d let her walls come down for a moment. She stopped dancing, and she glanced around, and she saw that I was right.

  Everyone was watching us.

  She took one step back, and then another. And then she turned around and fled, away from the party, away from the prying eyes of our classmates.

  Away from me.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Nedra

  The letter in my pocket weighed a million pounds. It clattered against my leg, it bruised my skin, it threatened to crush me under its weight.

  I hadn’t been expecting the slim little envelope. The letter from home that came in time for Burial Day had been large enough to sustain me for weeks. But when I’d finally gotten home after such a disastrous day at the hospital, I’d seen my sister’s handwriting, and my heart had surged with hope. I needed her cheerful voice in my head. I needed it to drown out the screams of the mother whose baby had died, the rage of Ronan’s father, the taste of my own blood on my teeth.

  I opened it again now.

  Dearest Nedra, it started, in Ernesta’s almost illegible script. For a page, she talked about small things. How she hoped I was happy, how Mama burned the bread and she and Papa ate it anyway to spare Mama’s feelings, how a new kitten had taken residence in Jojo’s stall.

  Then she said that Kava had died. The shoemaker’s apprentice, the one she planned to flirt with when I left for Yūgen.

  Her fingers turned black, Neddie, she wrote. Withered up like dead sticks. She said it hurt so much, but then she didn’t feel it at all anymore. And then she died.

  She scratched something out after that. Heavy black ink, gouged into the page so hard that it had started to rip.

  Maybe it’s best you’re not here now. Her words bit at me, a wolf nipping at my heels. I worry about Papa all the time. He won’t quit going out with his book cart, even though so many villages are draped in black bunting, warning people not to enter.

  She had crossed through something else then, a little less violently, but not more legible.

  I worry, she wrote instead.

  Nessie never worried. It wasn’t her style. I was supposed to be the twin who worried for the both of us.

  It was too easy here in the city. Too easy to forget about the bustling world beyond the walls of Yūgen. Too easy to believe that I had done enough, that the plague existed in the hospital but not out there. Not where they were.

  Too easy to put an iron circle on the graves, and promise myself it would never be them.

  You! Dannix had roared. It’s all your fault!

  After I read the letter the first time, there had still been about an hour before I needed to go to the party. I washed my skin and imagined the soap could seep into my soul. And then I read the book Master Ostrum had given to me. I read the whole thing, cover to cover, and I was almost late to the party. Every time I heard Dannix’s voice again, I forced more words from The Fourth Alchemy into my head.

  I had tried to pretend the letter didn’t exist, at least for the night. But it had been there the whole time, in my pocket, blacker and heavier than coal. It dragged me down like an anchor, pulling me under the waves until I couldn’t breathe.

  One night, I had promised myself. I would give myself one night to forget.

  Just the one.

  But even that had proven too much.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Grey

  I chased after her. I didn’t care what the others thought, the whispers that tried to follow me as I ran down the steps of the clock tower. I chased after her, and the only thing in my head was the hope I could find her before whatever magic had made her open up to me disappeared.

  By the time my feet hit the grass, she was gone. I thought I saw her near the statue of Bennum Wellebourne, so I ran down the quad, but she wasn’t there.

  The clock on top of the administration building tolled the time—midnight. Echoing across the bay, the clock in the quarantine hospital rang.

  And suddenly, I knew where Nedra had gone.

  It was late, but not too late for the ferries.

  * * *

  • • •

  The hospital at this hour was a different creature than when I had visited during Master Ostrum’s morning lectures. With each new day, there was hope. But a hospital at night was a desolate place. Families gathered in small clusters in the foyer, praying for the dark to last forever because they knew this would be the last night with the person they loved still in this world. Mini tragedies played out on the edges of the hospital—a couple holding each other near the door, a family with three small, tired children, pulling chairs into a row to make a bed for the young ones to sleep on while the adults whispered among themselves.

  I approached the receptionist. “Who are you here to see?” she asked, pulling the patient registry closer to her.

  I opened my mouth, unsure of how to answer. “Er—” I started. “Not a patient. Someone who volunteers here? Her name is Nedra Bryss—”

  “Oh, she went up the clock tower,” the receptionist said, pointing to the spiral staircase. Her eyes narrowed at me.

  “Nedra’s here?” a potion maker asked, leaning over. “That girl is so sweet.”

  The receptionist still seemed skeptical of me. “She looked upset,” she said.

  The potion maker bristled.

  “We’re friends,” I promised, holding my hands up defensively.

  The receptionist jerked her thumb to the stairs, dismissing me. My legs ached by the time I reached the top. While the clock tower at the administration building opened onto the roof, the stairs at the hospital brought me to a small platform behind the large clockface. Time was shown in reverse through milky glass, and the giant gears and hanging pendulums churned behind the s
teps. Two small doors stood on either side, enabling people to step out onto a small observation platform and walk across, like the little mechanical dolls on clocks from Doisha that marched out every hour on the hour.

  I half expected Nedra to be outside, on the platform, watching the city illuminated by oil lamps and starlight. But she wasn’t. She sat under the clockface, her head leaning back against the large number six, her eyes watching the gears whirl, tick-tick-ticking away the time.

  The easy openness from the party was gone. Whatever whimsy had infected her had now melted into pensiveness. She stared at the clock mechanics with morose sadness.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Her eyes remained fixed on the clock’s gears, whirring, ticking, moving inexorably forward, one second at a time.

  I didn’t know what else to say, so I sat down beside her. She leaned her head down onto my shoulder, and a wave of warmth washed over me.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said in a whisper.

  “For what?” I asked.

  She didn’t look at me when she answered. “For you.”

  Her head pressed gently against my shoulder. Her whole body leaned into me; if I moved, she’d fall.

  I wanted to wrap my arms around her, to pull her close, but this moment was so fragile that I was afraid moving would break it.

  Just thinking it, though, must have been too much, because Nedra pulled away. She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees, and still she watched the gears tick away. “I don’t have time for this,” she repeated, a little louder now, with a little more conviction.

  I couldn’t rip my eyes away from her. “The plague isn’t your fault, and it’s not your responsibility.”

  Nedra didn’t answer for a long time. “I wanted to escape my village,” she said finally. “I wanted to see what else was out there. I knew there was a sickness spreading, and I wanted to help with that, I did, but I also wanted to escape.” She watched the gears tick by. “But I always thought I would go back.”

  My heart sank at that. It was impossible for me to envision Nedra in some obscure, nameless village.

  Her head dropped onto her knees. “My father is a bookseller,” she said, her voice so low I could barely hear her. “He has a wagon and he goes from village to village, selling books. Some written by us, some written by people on the mainland, some even from different nations in the Empire. Everyone knows him.” She sighed. “The very best books—the oldest, rarest books—he keeps those in the house. And my sister and I, we’d read them every night when he was on the road. She always liked the fairy tales. I always read the textbooks.”

  “No wonder you like the library so much,” I said, half joking, but she didn’t smile.

  “He told me about the plague first—not that he called it that. Papa saw the sick. Some of the villages in the far north hung black flags, warning people not to come. Papa started carrying around news and potions, along with his books.” She dared a glance at me. “It’s only a matter of time before he falls ill. He’s trying to help; he won’t quit. ‘If I don’t bring them books, they won’t have books,’” she said, lowering her voice to sound like her father. “He’s distributing potions, too, and whatever else he can get from Hart to help the sick. But he thinks books are the most important thing in the world.”

  “He’s not wrong,” I said gently. “It was his books that brought you to me.”

  She bit her lip but didn’t say anything for a long moment.

  “I have one year,” she finally said. “One year to learn as much as I can. That’s all the scholarship I was given allows for. Maybe I’ll get another one, maybe not—I’m not sure. But I have to make this one year count. I have to learn all I can, so I can do . . . something. Help. Somehow.”

  I studied medicinal alchemy because I wasn’t good enough at math to study transactional alchemy, and government work bored me, and I wanted to avoid politics in an effort to purge any remnant of my father from my future. I liked the idea of being a top alchemist at the Governor’s Hospital. I liked the prestige and the gold that came from it. I’d chosen my area of studies for myself.

  I lowered my head. I couldn’t be more different from Nedra.

  “It’s not on you,” I said finally. “Maybe we were slow to recognize the problem, but the top alchemists in the city are working on the Wasting Death now. You don’t have to do it all yourself.”

  Nedra just shook her head, her chin bumping along her knees. “They don’t really care,” she muttered. “The only sick people are those this city doesn’t mind disposing of anyway.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’ll help,” I said. “You’ve been volunteering here during almost all of your free time, and I haven’t pulled my weight. Let’s work together. I’ll come with you. I’ll volunteer, too.”

  “I’m going with Master Ostrum to the factories tomorrow,” she said.

  “I’ll be there.”

  Nedra turned to me. I tried to read her eyes. Did I see hope? Or defeat? Or . . . or something else? I could feel the tension coiling between us, the questions unasked.

  I leaned forward, giving her time to pull away.

  She didn’t.

  My lips pressed against hers, hesitant, wary. She reached up, her body turning toward mine, her hand snaking up my arm, around my shoulder, to my neck, pulling me closer. Our kiss deepened. My fingers tangled in her braids; hers grappled at my back.

  And then she broke away, turning her face, struggling to stand up and move away from me. She wrapped her arms around her body, facing the wall.

  I stood, too. When I touched her shoulder, she jerked away from me. “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “You said before that the people of your village don’t dance like we do,” I said, trying to sound casual, as if her words hadn’t just sliced me open. “Show me.”

  She looked back at me, a hint of a smile on her face.

  “It’s just a dance,” I added, but we both knew this was the moment where everything would change.

  She held out her hand to me, and I took it. We had no music, just the ticking of the clock, moonlight streaming through the milky glass. She showed me the careful, rhythmic steps, guiding my body so it was perfectly timed with hers. She spun away, then back again, my arms encircling her.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Nedra

  “Are you waiting for someone?” Master Ostrum asked as I lingered by the iron-clad statue of Bennum Wellebourne the next morning. The sun had barely risen, and everything seemed cast in gold.

  I looked back at the boys’ dormitory, but the door didn’t open. “No,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Master Ostrum was not one to talk in the morning. Instead, he chewed on coffee beans and walked too fast. I thought about asking for some, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle the bitter taste.

  Last night had been long.

  The anger of the other students, the ones Master Ostrum had dropped, felt a million years away. So did my day at the hospital, where everything had gone wrong and everyone I touched seemed only to hurt more. And the party. And the letter. It all felt blurred, pushed aside by something else. Grey. Dancing under the illuminated clockface, dancing along the edge of a choice I wasn’t prepared to make.

  I pushed it all out of my mind. I had work to do today.

  Almost all of the workers at Berrywine’s furniture factory had fallen ill, so it made more sense for a handful of potion makers, aides, and an alchemist to go to them rather than find another ferry to cart all the workers to the hospital.

  “Have you had a chance to read the book I gave you?” Master Ostrum asked when we were several blocks downhill from Yūgen.

  I noticed he didn’t speak the title aloud.

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  For a few paces, he left it at that. But then he said, “And?”
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  I thought about what I’d read. “It is . . . dangerous,” I finally said.

  “Mm,” Master Ostrum grunted. But I didn’t think he understood what I meant. The book wasn’t dangerous just because it was about necromancy—it was dangerous because it was giving me ideas.

  Master Ostrum didn’t speak again, and soon we arrived at the factory.

  The smell hit me first. A foul, sour stench mixed with the mustiness of sawdust and a sickly sweet odor too close to rot. I recognized potion makers from the quarantine hospital, rushing from cot to cot to distribute painkillers or offer comfort, but there were no alchemists other than Master Ostrum and me.

  Berrywine’s factory was mercifully small. Only one level, with about thirty or thirty-five workers. A dozen or so were partitioned off to one side—they showed only moderate signs of illness, the early stages of the plague. Fatigue, headaches, sore muscles. They huddled on the floor, their eyes wide and scared.

  More than twenty other workers were laid out on cots and makeshift beds. Curtains had been raised in some sections to give a semblance of privacy, but it was plain to see that these people were in pain. Pant legs and shirts had been cut to expose infected limbs, and I counted fifteen with black on their hands or legs. Three had inky stains on their chests, over their hearts—there was little I could do for them.

  A handful of workers were already dead, a green film covering their unblinking eyes.

  “All this in less than twenty-four hours?” I muttered to Master Ostrum.

  “The disease is spreading faster. It’s getting more aggressive,” he said.

  He paused. “I’m going to investigate the grounds and question the workers who are still able to speak to me. If there’s any common link, I’ll find it.”