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I opened the door.

We blinked in the sunlight, our eyes stinging from the brightness. The bell that had been ringing silenced.

A dozen or so people stood at the gate. They all had masks covering their faces. I did not recognize any of them, and I didn’t care to.

“Just the two of you?” the man called.

I nodded.

“Any sickness on you?” In one hand, he held the bell. In the other, he clutched a gun. I looked past the fence, to the other houses on my street.

Every single one was draped in black cloth.

I held up my bare hands, then lifted my skirt to show my unblemished feet. When no one did anything, I pulled down my shirt, showing that my chest was uninfected.

“And her,” the man said, waving his gun to indicate Ernesta.

She tugged down the front of her tunic, then lifted her feet, first left, then right. She shifted the quilt from hand to hand, turning her wrists to show all sides. She kept her eyes straight ahead, staring at the man.

The man let his bell drop the ground. He aimed his pistol with both hands.

“Back inside,” he said.

I started to scream at him in protest, but then Ernesta held up her hand to stop me.

And I saw the blackness leaking from her fingertips into her right palm.

FORTY-THREE

Nedra

Back inside thehouse, I paced up and down the hallway.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demanded, not stopping.

Ernesta sat in a chair by the door, her shoulders slouched. “I didn’t notice.”

“You didn’t notice!”

But I hadn’t noticed either. I’d let Nessie lie in bed, clutching the quilt, while I read and read and read. I had believed I might find answers to the plague in either Master Ostrum’s old book or my father’s, but they had proven woefully inadequate.

I snatched up her hand and squinted in the dim light at the darkness leaking through her skin. “It’s not that bad,” I said. “I’ve seen worse.”

“You can stop it?”

I froze for a moment.

Yes.

I knew how to stop it from spreading.

“We have to get you to the city,” I said. “To real medical alchemists. To a... to a surgeon.”

“A surgeon?” she asked.

Then her fingers curled over her palm. She understood. She wasn’t naïve. She’d heard Papa’s stories about the plague; she knew what I did at the quarantine hospital in the city.

Amputation.