Give the Dark My Love

by Beth Revis

  “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.

  “You’re hurting it,” Nedra pointed out, still pretending to read.

  Hurting rats was part and parcel of being an alchemist, but the rat inside my crucible seemed to be in agony that far outweighed anything I’d seen before. I was concentrating too hard, struggling to maintain the alchemical connection, but even though I didn’t answer Nedra, my focus was shot. The rat died.

  Nedra pulled my crucible closer to her when I leaned up, peering inside it with a strange look on her face.

  “It’s not fair, what we do to rats,” she said.

  “We should leave our patients in pain when we could relieve them of that much at least?”

  I pulled the crucible away from her and tilted it to its side. The rat flopped onto the table, its claws seized into sharp angles from the pain I had put it through before it died. A twinge of sympathy shot through me. Maybe Nedra had a point.

  She reached over me and picked the rat up as if it were a dear pet.

  “Nedra,” I said. “It’s not ideal. It’s not fair. But the basic principle of alchemy is equivalent exchange. You can’t just make the pain of our patients disappear. It has to go somewhere. And better it goes to a worthless rodent than a human.”

  “You’re just saying that because rats are ugly,” she said, her eyes still on the rodent. “If we had to sacrifice fluffy bunnies or kittens or something, more people would protest. It doesn’t have to be this way,” she told the dead creature in her arms.

  “Alchemy is about equivalent exchange,” I said again, gentler this time.

  Nedra ignored me. She carefully placed the rat’s dead body on the table, as if it were in a casket being laid into the ground. She held her hand out for a scalpel, and, thinking she was going to perform a dissection, I handed it to her. Instead, she carved a rune through the fur and into the skin of the dead animal. Nedra consulted the book she’d been reading and muttered some runes I didn’t recognize.

  “Nedra, is that . . . ?” My stomach dropped.

  “It’s not necromancy,” she said quickly, in a hushed voice.

  “But—”

  “Grey.” She said so much in that one syllable.

  And the rat squeaked back to life. Just a moment, just a tiny little sound, but it was deafening.

  “That’s—” I started, horror growing inside me. She might not have a necromancer’s crucible, she might not be a true necromancer, but using her golden crucible to go past healing into resurrection was absolutely forbidden and the first thing all alchemists were taught not to do. Such twisted use of her golden crucible wouldn’t last, much like animation with a silver crucible failed after moments, but it was still wrong.

  The rat’s snuffling squeaks pitched higher, into a squeal, a pained sound. Its eyes bulged; its body spasmed. In seconds, it was dead again, but this death seemed much more excruciating. The rat’s lips were curled into a snarl, its sharp yellow teeth gouging the table. In moments, its fur started to sizzle, melting away in a grayish-whitish-pinkish blur, filling the room with an acrid stench. Soon there was nothing but sizzling bones.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Nedra said, shock on her face.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen at all!” I roared, throwing back my chair.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said immediately. “I’m still learning—”

  “Learning? Learning?” I snarled. “Nedra, that’s necromancy. You can’t be learning necromancy! This isn’t just against the rules. This is illegal. And . . . wrong.” Wrong on such a deep, fundamental level. That rat had been dead. And then it wasn’t. And now it was again, but much, much worse.

  I stared blindly around the room, at a loss for words. I saw Master Ostrum’s name scribbled on the sign-in sheet at the door. “Is this what Master Ostrum had been teaching you?” I asked.

  “No, no, Grey—it’s not what it looks like.”

  “Really? Because it looks like necromancy.”

  “Not to practice it,” Nedra insisted. “To study it. I think maybe . . . maybe it could help us figure out the plague.”

  “Don’t ever do it again.” My voice was vicious, but I didn’t care. Nedra never thought about the consequences. She could be imprisoned for a dead rat. “Promise me,” I ordered.

  “I—” she started, but then gasped, her hand reaching for her head as if it suddenly pained her. Through her fingers, six long strands of her black tresses turned solid white.

  “This kind of stuff—it’s bad, Nedra. You understand?”

  She nodded, her eyes on her hair.

  “Even if it has something to do with the plague, don’t you get caught up in it.”

  Nedra wound the white strands around her finger and yanked them from her head. She scooped
up the bones of the rat, cradling them as if they still had life, and moved toward the rubbish bin.

  “Someone will see it there,” I said. “Here.” I thrust out my copper crucible to her. She dropped the remains and her hair inside, and I sealed the crucible, hiding the evidence of Nedra’s first necromancy experiment gone wrong.

  We didn’t speak again as we left the lab. The other rats watched us, their beady eyes focused on Nedra as I turned off the lights and darkness swept over us.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Nedra

  I was waiting at the iron gates before the sun rose the next morning.

  “You’re up early,” the gatekeeper said. He was friendlier than he had been when I first met him, so many months ago with my trunk and my ideals and my ignorance.

  He moved in aching slowness. I knew Grey would be waiting for me at my dormitory, expecting another day at the hospital. But I couldn’t see him, not today.

  I slipped through the door before it was fully open. Heading downhill, I chased the sunrise. Behind me, long streams of sunlight spilled onto the street, but in front of me it was still dark, the oil lamps flickering. I ran to the shadows.

  Blackdocks was not quite awake yet, but a few ferries cut through the hazy water. I found a bench overlooking the main dock. My eyes went north, to home, where my family waited for me to finish an education I was no longer sure I wanted.

  The sun finally caught up with me.

  Light spilled over the water first, twinkling up through the caps of the small waves in the bay before turning the air golden, burning away the fog.

  The housing units uphill seemed to wake all at once, people pouring from the buildings and heading to the factories along the waterfront. It was particularly cruel, I thought, that the workers resided uphill, giving them an easy walk to work, but a harder climb to get back home after they were tired and broken.

  Younger boys and girls started walking up and down the streets, shouting the headlines of the news sheets they sold for a copper coin. “Wasting Death claims life of government officials! Epidemic growing!” a girl said, her voice pitched low but loud. She stood on the top of a stack of news sheets and waved one around emphatically. “Governor Adelaide shows signs of illness after recent hospital visits!”

  I couldn’t afford to spend a copper, but I did it anyway, tossing the girl a coin and taking the news sheet from her hand. I scanned the top stories. Lord Anton’s infection was worsening, and he wasn’t expected to make it. Other politicians—notably a handful that were close to Anton—were also infected or dead.

  Governor Adelaide’s photograph from her coronation with the Emperor dominated the front page, along with a story detailing all the work she’d done for the sick since the plague first hit Lunar Island. She’d spent her own personal funds supporting the hospital, pled in the council for stricter governing of the factory owners, and often visited the sick.

  The Emperor was distinctly left out of the article, save for a single line that read only, “His Imperial Majesty currently resides in the castle but has distanced himself from Governor Adelaide after her personal alchemist declared her too ill to continue with her charitable works.”

  I turned to the back of the news sheet and saw a map of Lunar Island. It was larger than the one Master Ostrum and I had hung in the school lab, and it had more details on the northern villages. A list of names ran down the side, and I scanned for my parents, for my sister, for anyone from my village, but my eyes blurred. There were too many names to keep count.

  “Make way!” A large cart parted an ocean of people walking toward the factories. Two draft horses pulled the wagon, and a driver sat on a raised seat. “Make way, make way,” he shouted impatiently. He finally broke through the crowd of people, and the empty wagon rattled on the cobblestones toward one of the factories.

  It stopped at a three-story-tall warehouse with black draped over the windows. The man bellowed for someone to hurry up, and the doors opened.

  I watched as people dragged bodies from the factory. They were thrown haphazardly onto the back of the cart, arms and legs spread wide, ashen faces staring in all directions with unblinking eyes. As soon as the wagon was full, the driver turned the cart around, driving it straight to a large ferry that had no seats or benches.

  I watched from the road as the skipper and the driver dumped the bodies from the wagon and onto the boat. They were nearly done by the time I reached the dock. The skipper pushed off from the dock, his boat cutting through the water like a knife. I watched until I couldn’t see it anymore, even though I knew where it was going: the field Dilada had helped clear, the new grave where victims would be out of sight and out of mind. I wondered how many hundreds were there already, how many had been so swiftly forgotten.

  Grey sat down beside me.

  “Nedra?” he asked, leaning over to brush my hair from my face. “I thought you were going to wait for me at Yūgen, that we would walk down here together.”

  “Sorry,” I said hollowly. “I needed some time to think.”

  He saw the news sheet in my hand. “I read about that this morning. Everyone’s talking about how the governor is sick. Tomus was going on and on about how the Emperor will take over if she dies.”

  This is why citizens accused Governor Adelaide of being negligent for not appointing a Lord Commander, a second-in-command to run the government if she was incapacitated. I wondered what would happen if the Emperor took control. The girls in the history study group probably would say this would be the tipping point toward revolution.

  What did it matter, though?

  “Is everything okay?” Grey asked.

  I looked him in the eyes. “No,” I said.

  He frowned, but I could see he didn’t want to talk about what had happened at the lab. He leaned down, bumping his forehead against mine, and we stayed there for several long moments, willing the world to not exist outside our touch.

  “What do we do when everything falls apart?” I asked, still not opening my eyes.

  Grey wrapped his hands around my face, drawing my gaze. “We do what we can,” he said. “I learned that from you.”

  I nodded and took a deep breath. My blood is made of iron, I reminded myself, and the thought did not disgust me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I was surprised to discover that Master Ostrum was at the quarantine hospital when Grey and I arrived. The receptionist directed us to a suite where he was working, assuming he was waiting for us. He did not seem pleased by our interruption, blocking the door and the patient inside when we knocked. He stepped into the hall.

  “I thought you were focusing on research, not patients,” I muttered to him.

  Master Ostrum ignored me. “Greggori,” he said, “go find the head potion maker and see how much tincture of blue ivy is left.”

  Grey shot me a worried look, but he turned back down the hall, toward the foyer. I hesitated, but my curiosity overcame me; I followed Master Ostrum into the suite.

  Lord Anton lay in the same bed as before, but his skin was sallow, his breathing slow. The blackness of the disease had spread to both legs. His right arm had already been amputated, bloody gauze covering the wound.

  Master Ostrum greeted Lord Anton like a friend, but all I could do was stand and stare. When I had last seen Lord Anton, he had barely a shadow of the illness. It had spread enormously through his body since then.

  “She’ll be happy I can’t vote against her anymore,” Lord Anton said weakly, lifting up his residual limb.

  “You’ll have to vote with your other arm,” Master Ostrum said. He busied himself inspecting his patient, tilting Lord Anton’s head to the light, lifting his eyelids. My attention focused on the hazy green film, barely visible, over Lord Anton’s dark brown eyes. Master Ostrum looked at me. We both knew what that meant.

  Rather than move on to other
patients, patients that could actually survive, Master Ostrum sat down on the edge of Lord Anton’s bed.

  “You have to continue,” Lord Anton said in a weak voice. He glanced at me.

  “Nedra is safe,” Master Ostrum said. “You can speak freely in front of her.”

  “What’s to say?” Lord Anton’s voice was bitter. “Everyone knows I would have torn Lunar Island from the Empire if given half a chance. Lucky for the child Emperor that Adelaide took the castle, not me.” His lips snarled bitterly. “Not luck. He controls everything, doesn’t he, in the end?”

  I blinked several times but knew enough to keep my mouth shut. Lord Anton might have politically opposed Governor Adelaide, but I for one hadn’t known he was so against the Emperor himself.

  “This land should be free and independent,” Lord Anton continued, turning to Master Ostrum. “Don’t let the movement die with me.”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  The clock chimed noon, the sound reverberating throughout the hospital. In between the bells, I thought of what Lord Anton’s words meant, of how large the movement must be, and how hidden. I thought of Governor Adelaide, kind and good—but loyal to the Emperor.

  * * *

  • • •

  Master Ostrum disappeared soon after Lord Anton died, returning to his lab. I was bone weary by the time Grey and I got off the ferry at Blackdocks. The temperature had unexpectedly dropped. Before, I’d chased the shadows going down the hill to the docks; now the sun sank at our ankles, oil lamps sputtering on in our wake.

  The gates were already closed, but the gatekeeper stood in front of the iron bars. His eyes looked anxiously behind us. “You’re the last of the lot,” he said, opening the gate. “Hurry, hurry.” As soon as we stepped through, the gate locked, despite the fact that curfew wasn’t for another hour.

  “What’s going on?” I tried to ask, but he was already walking away from us.

  “Come on,” Grey said. “Master Ostrum will know what’s happening.”