Mag-log inEMBER’S POVHer voice makes the sight of her even more disturbing. It is still Hale’s usual calm, level voice, except now it is coming from a face that looks decades older than the one I saw downstairs.“Hale—”“What are you doing in my room!” Her eyes drop to my hands, and her whole expression changes. “Put that down!”“What the fuck happened to you?”“Put it down!”She crosses the room so quickly that I barely have time to pull the book back.She tears it out of my hands hard enough to scrape the skin from my thumb, then clutches it against her chest with both arms. By the time she steps away from me, she is breathing hard.“Get out of my room!” she shouts. “Get out! Get out!”“Hale, look at yourself-”“Don’t you dare!”“Look at your hands!”“Get out!”She screams it, and the sound tears straight out of her chest.In weeks, I have never heard Hale raise her voice above that soft, controlled murmur of hers, and now she is standing in front of me shrieking, both arms locked around the
EMBER’S POVQueenie slips inside before I can even turn around.“Ember, you need to be quick—”“Look at this!”“What?”“Look!” I’m pointing at the page with my whole hand flat. “That’s my name! She’s got my name circled, and she’s written special child, and she knows about Caelora, and she’s asking whether her grandmother’s alive, and here, look, this is the tunnels, she’s drawn the service tunnels, all of them, she’s drawn the one where I found-”Queenie is staring at me now, her eyes shifting from the book to my face and back again, her brows pulling together in confusion.“Ember,” she says carefully. “What am I looking at?”“The book!”“It’s blank.”For a second, I can only stare at her.“It’s not blank.”“Ember, it is.” Queenie takes the book from me and turns it toward herself, frowning as she looks over the page. Then she flips to the next one, and the next, her confusion slowly giving way to something much more uneasy. “There’s nothing here. These pages are completely blank.”“
EMBER’S POVMove the things that mattered.I look around the room again, this time paying attention to what Hale might have touched after Knox’s men left.The shelves are dusty, but the search has disturbed most of that dust. Books and ornaments have been lifted, shifted and put back badly enough that I can tell where hands have been.Then I see the second shelf.There is a clean rectangle in the dust about the size of a shoebox. The ornaments on either side are packed closely together, with years of grey dust around their bases, but the space between them is almost clean.Something had been sitting there until very recently.I glance at the boxes stacked against the wall. All eleven are already taped shut, and the stack is packed tightly enough.My eyes move to the mantel.There is another clean mark there, this one circular.Two things.Knox’s men searched this room thoroughly, and sometime after they left, Hale removed two things.A chill moves over my skin.Whatever those things w
EMBER’S POVQueenie is waiting near the stairs, pretending very badly to have suddenly developed an interest in the linen cupboard.The second I turn the corner, she grabs my arm, pulls me two doors down into the empty blue room, and shuts the door behind us.“Well?”“She’s in there.”“No!”“Sleeves up, ordering people about, she’s sent a girl for paleos root.”“She actually went for it?”“She went for it in about ninety seconds.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “Goddess. Dear goddess. My heart’s pounding, I think I’m going to be sick, I screamed at those poor nurses like a lunatic-”“You screamed at them like a woman whose friend just dropped,” Queenie says. “Which is the only reason it worked, so don’t start.” She’s still holding the door. “Is she alright, though? Rayana. Actually?”“She’s fine.”“Ember.”“She is fine, Queenie; you were standing right there when we did it!” I pull my hands away from my face. “You saw how much. It was barely anything.”And it was.Over th
EMBER’S POV“I understand that, and I’m telling you I’m not—”“You said you had nothing to do with it.”Hale goes still.A few of the women behind her do too, and I feel every eye in the corridor turn toward us. I tighten my grip on her hand and look up at her through the tears.“Yesterday,” I say. “You stood in your room with your things all over the floor and told my boyfriend you’d never harmed anyone in this house. You said you stayed up with those girls because that’s just who you are. You know your herbs, Hale. You keep telling everyone you’re this good person who helps people.” I’m gripping her hand with both of mine now. “So help me. Please. Help her right now. I can’t lose one more woman in this house. I can’t, I’ll go mad, I’ll actually go mad-”“That’s not fair, Ember,” Hale breathes, and for once she actually sounds caught off guard.“I know it’s not fair!”“You are asking me in a corridor full of-”“I’m asking you because there’s nobody else!” I tighten my grip on her han
EMBER’S POVRayana goes down at nine-twenty in the morning.The first warning is a small, wet cough that shakes her whole body.Before I can ask if she’s okay, her head falls back against the chair and keeps tipping until her neck bends at an angle that looks wrong.One arm slips from the armrest and hangs loose at her side.“Rayana.”The blanket slides off her lap onto the floor.“Rayana! Rayana!”I’m on my knees before I even realise I’ve moved.I put both hands on her face, trying to make her look at me, but her skin is cool under my palms, and her half-open eyes stare past me, seeing nothing.Her mouth hangs slightly open, a thin line of spit gathering at one corner, and no matter how hard I look, I can’t see her chest moving.That sight sends every fear I’ve carried for the last few weeks rushing through me at once.I’ve spent too many nights waking at three in the morning and creeping into her room just to make sure her chest is still moving, and now she’s limp in my hands.My f







