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“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 waitingfor 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 Yugen.

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?”

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.