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“Why have you shown me this?” she asked him in awe.

“Because I believe this is the final piece you need. To understand how to be rid of the Plague.”

Atta started. “Me?”

”Yes, you. There is something we’re missing and I believe the secret is in the flora. We both know this isn’t natural. Lungs and hearts and other organs don’t sprout flowers. They don’t grow things foreign to our”—he moved his hands, pacing back and forth in front of a woody, perennial plant—“ourplanet.”

Atta’s pulse beat strong in her palms, her throat, her chest.

“I’m no botanist, but I know these aren’t natural. That fresh graves don’t bloom like this and push bodies up from the depths of the soil when they've been buriedproperly. Atta—” He ran his hand over his jaw, then his hair, making it stand up in places. “What if—” He stopped again.

“Say it, Sonder.”

He paused his pacing. Looked her dead in the eye. “What if the Plague victims aren’t infected?”

“What do you mean?” She’d toyed with mad ideas, of course she had. But they were just that—mad.

“There’s something more to this. It doesn’t follow how viruses and diseases work. It isn’t contagious, it selects humans seemingly at random. What if it’s not an infection or disease at all? But something else?”

“These are the ravings of a madman, Dr Frankenstein.”

“Of course they are. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

It did.Jesus, it really did.

“Sonder, where did you get the cadavers for this?”

“This is the part where you may run for the hills. Have me arrested. Hell,committed.”

“They’re your parents, aren’t they?”

He nodded somberly. “They are.”

Her heart broke for him. For his parents. For all the beauty their deaths caused. Because it was nothing but Juliet’s kiss, Macbeth’s decapitation, the murder of Desdemona. Achilles mourning Patroclus. “Sonder, I’m so sorry.”

A gale howled outside. He sank onto a stool, looking older and yet somehow younger. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’ve never shown this to anyone before.”

Atta approached him and slipped her hand into his. Immediately, he clasped his fingers around her palm like a lifeline. “Let’s go back to the main house,” she said.

A bit rattled, he led her through the grounds, the wind whipping her hair until it stung her face. Back inside the drafty house, he still held onto her hand and led her to a room that made her heart ache even more. If she thought his Trinity office was a severe, academic haven that encapsulated him, his study at home was downright draconian. It was a living memoriam of Sonder Murdoch with its black, panelled walls, masculine leather and dark wood furniture, and a full wall of specimen jars, various organs floating in ethyl alcohol.

Sonder squeezed her hand once, then let it drop. He poured two glasses of whiskey at the sideboard and sank into a worn leather chair, holding one of them and handing Atta the other. She took it but abandoned it on a side table to light a fire in the hearth, realising they’d been so engrossed all day that they’d only lit the one in the library.

When the fire was roaring, illuminating all the angles of Sonder’s face, she came to sit on the coffee table in front of him. “Tell me what happened.”

He tipped the dregs of his whiskey into his mouth and unbuttoned his collar.

“I was living in County Cork, preparing to return to Dublin. I’d just gotten the position as Professor of Morbid Anatomy after I presented the board with an embalming fluid of my own design that preserves the body for a few days longer.” He rubbed at his eyes with thumb and forefinger. “It provided anatomists and pathologists with more time to perform an autopsy, that’s all.”

After refilling his drink, he went on. “This was a little over six years ago. I planned to return to Trinity and begin my career, but then I received a call from my father. He wanted me to move back here to Murdoch Manor. My mother was ill, and he was worried about her. She wanted me here. Naturally, this terrified me. My strong-willed, brilliant mother, who’d all but shoved me out the front door to explore the world, to find a life that made me happy, was asking me to be by her side—under the same roof again.

“I told the Trinity Provost and the Dean of Medicine, Lynch, that I would be living outside Dublin proper rather than in the rooms set aside for me in the city, and they agreed. By the time I made it from Cork to Dublin—” He took Atta’s untouched glass of whiskey and drained it, setting it back on the table with a crack. “I’d never seen a live person appear dead before. One look at my mother, and I knew she had days left, if that. I stayed by her side constantly. I tried to save her, I?—”

Atta squeezed his hand, her heart sinking becausethiswas probably why he hated being called ‘Dr Murdoch.’

“She woke twice. Once to tell me she was glad to see me, that she loved me and my father. The next time, she was terrified. Unrecognisable.Wewere unrecognisable to her.” He ran a finger around the rim of his glass. “That night, she passed.” He cleared his throat. “I came downstairs to call the coroner. When I went back up, I found my father dead next to her, tears still on his cheeks. He’d drunk a vial of my new embalming fluid.” His voice hitched on the last word, and Atta wrapped his hand in both of hers. “It killed him instantly.”

She didn’t think words would suffice. There was nothing for her to say. Nothing that could make such an unspeakable pain feel less of a burden. So she stayed silent, holding his hand, and he let her.