Page 40 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Twenty-Four

I leave La Vita a ghost. I must stride with such purpose, such an air of determination, that the other scholars in the square avoid me, a few even shivering when I cross their paths.

My stomach gnaws with its familiar, aching hunger, but I ignore it.

I feel faint. Sick. Heavy and light at the same time.

“Is the toxicity catching?” I asked the doctor before leaving the lower lab. I think of it, already, as the Tombs because that is what the cages remind me of. Petaccia gave me a look filled with curiosity. I added, “Is that why the vine died?”

I was thinking of Olea, of the bird, and the way my own skin seems hot and crackling to the touch sometimes, but it was her own hands Petaccia looked at. I didn’t wonder until now if that meant she has spent more time in the garden than she is willing to admit.

“I had never considered that any of the plants’ toxicity could be transferred outside the garden by a carrier such as yourself,” she said simply. “But perhaps now I will think on it.”

As I walk back to my rooms, I stare at my hands.

The nail beds are faintly blue-black, as if I’ve bruised each one.

There is a sore inside my mouth, at the corner of my lips, and I worry at it, opening the wound so that my tongue floods with the iron tang of blood.

My skin feels scorching in the sunlight, a low-grade fever burning at my very core.

I wonder, just for a second, if I might be dying.

The thought is so maudlin, so extreme, that it shocks me to stillness.

I reach my rooms, driven there by the desperate need to escape the heat, the blinding brightness filling my vision.

Sweat curls my upper lip, my mouth claggy with blood, my trousers rub the skin between my legs raw, and my shirt sticks to every exposed part of skin.

I tumble into my rooms, throwing the shutters closed against the daylight—and the garden.

The thought of it makes me sick. Sicker than I have ever been.

It is not nausea, rather a squirming oily tide that crashes like the roll of an ocean and then falls into hollowness with each hammering breath.

I strip the clothes from my body, ripping and tearing until there is nothing left but anaemic skin, bruises upon bruises on my arms and legs and stomach.

I don’t know where any of them came from.

I glance down, seeing the faint imprint of Olea’s fingers carved in blue-green on my left breast. I know where those are from.

The sight of them is too much. The memory of her hurts like an ache—I toss myself onto the bed and lie, arms outstretched, until the heat leaches from my bones and the sickness stops its crashing inside me.

How much of what I feel for Olea is real?

How much of it is the natural, unnatural magic of the garden?

I am drawn to her like bees to pollen, but how much of the enchantment is mine and how much is hers?

Am I only an addict, rooting for my next fix?

More hours pass. I roll on my side and read more from the book I stole from the library.

Whereas before I chose my favourite chapter, now I read from the beginning, as I once did in secret in my husband’s house, determined to purge myself of all thoughts of Petaccia and Olea and their unnatural, incredible science.

I must become myself again—I must start anew.

I don’t know how long it takes. Hours. Days.

At first Olea is all I see, in the curl of the book’s text, in the shadows of the darkened room.

Her lips, her eyes—and then her panic as the bird fell, dead.

The sun and moon become the tick of my clock as I lie in sweating silence, waves of fever rolling over me, a withdrawal I never expected I’d have to endure.

I finish the book, the first time skipping the scenes inside I know will make me ache for Olea—the second time reading them, touching myself, crying for her anyway.

More than once I consider dragging myself to the garden, to her. But I don’t.

A new week begins and I do not consider the lectures I must be missing. They seem so paltry in comparison to this. Nor does Petaccia chase me for my presence. I am a ghost—she, lost in new potential discovery, and I merely a distant memory. That suits me well.

The fourth afternoon, I think, I’m roused by the flutter of a note underneath my door.

I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling cracks, feeling the gently receding heat of the day creeping around the edges of my shuttered window.

My mouth is dry and a little cracked but no longer caked in blood; my eyes don’t hurt when I move them, and neither do my limbs.

I stumble unevenly to the stove to make tea, a pit of hunger in my belly but no more than would be normal after days without food and with little water. I drink a pint of the stuff, tepid and metallic, and shiver with relief as my hunger abates.

It is only then that I remember the note under the door. I open it warily, half expecting a letter terminating my scholarship with the doctor—a ridiculous thought, given what I now know about her research, but one that I realise still terrifies me—but it is from Leonardo.

Thora. Forgive my intrusion, I knocked but received no answer. I am worried about you. Ignore me elsewise if you like, but please, please just let me know that you are all right. You know where to find me. As you said, you still need to eat.

Yours,

Leo

I turn the note over, searching for… what?

I don’t know. The warmth I feel at seeing his handwriting surprises me, and I realise with a jolt that I miss him.

I miss the familiarity of his face. A pang of guilt swiftly follows.

He has been kind to me since we met. I would be a fool to let his kindness go unappreciated.

But now… I think of the ring Olea buried in the garden—for I’m sure now that’s what it was—and the thought plays in spinning golden circles in my mind.

If the ring was Clara’s, or given to Olea by Clara at least, that signals more than a short friendship gone awry. And if Clara treated Olea so badly, stealing the plants that belonged safely in the garden… Why did Olea keep the ring, and why bury it only after I asked what happened between them?

And, perhaps more importantly, how much did Clara know—about Petaccia’s research, about the garden, about Olea…? And how much does Leo know still? His warning tugs at me, a suggestion that if he does not know the truth, then he at least suspects it.

I can’t sit and ponder any more; I feel as if I am going mad.

I dress in one of Aurelio’s gowns, soft peach silk, which I hope will hide the new pallor of my skin.

I’ve lost so much weight that it hangs off me, but I’m right about the colour.

My hair has grown past my ears in places and the peach makes it look burnished, like gold.

I almost cackle at my reflection, wondering what Aurelio would make of me now.

I arrive at the dining hall just as the server is seating Leo at our usual window table. He sees me instantly and the relief melts across his face like butter, a reaction he doesn’t even try to hide.

Part of me is wary. This is where our friendship risks the kind of familiarity I can’t afford, and relief could so easily turn to more.

I’ve not forgotten my revelation about the truth of his romantic feelings towards his wife, but I’d be a fool to assume he doesn’t still long for the kind of stability that another marriage could provide.

I must tread carefully. Still, whatever his intentions, he is always kind, and I have so few friends. I’m pleased to see him.

“What,” he says thickly, waiting for me to be seated before pouring us both a glass of the dark red wine already on the table. “No trousers?”

“Not today.” I don’t have the energy to muster a witty comeback.

We order our food and I sip at the wine, but it is bitter and ashy.

I almost miss the way things tasted when I was visiting the garden.

It was as if food was hollow and I was ravenous, but when I ate—oh, even stale bread was glorious.

I know the way I feel tonight is closer to normal , so why does it pale so in comparison to the hunger?

“Are you…” Leo leans in when the server has gone, his dark eyes earnest behind his glasses. He’s had a haircut since the last time I saw him. How long ago was that? A week? Without the lectures to mark my days I’ve lost all sense of time.

“I’m fine,” I say. It comes out with a caustic edge I don’t intend, but I try to soften it. “Honestly. I’m sorry.”

Leonardo’s gaze indicates he’s not so sure. He takes in the new cut of my cheekbones, the jut of my collarbones under the soft silk of my dress.

“I haven’t been well,” I explain hesitantly. I want, desperately, to tell him everything—about Olea, her kisses and her poisons, about Clara’s ring, about the doctor’s groundbreaking, impossible work—but…

Leo is my friend. He is kind and caring.

I open my mouth and then stop myself. He might be my friend, but he is still a rival scientist and—a man.

A vision of Aurelio comes instantly to me, his face, the book, the library.

Fuck. I can’t tell Leo about Olea, can’t ask him what he knows without opening up about everything.

I will not be vulnerable to a man like that again.

“I think I caught something last week. And then with running the lab, I guess I was exhausted. I’m feeling a lot better now. I just needed to sleep.”

“You slept for nearly a week?” Leonardo raises an eyebrow. “I was worried when you missed your classes. Did you need help? Why didn’t you send a note? Did you at least see a doctor?” He peppers questions at me as though he can’t help himself.

“I saw Florencia—Petaccia.” I shrug. “She’s a doctor.”

“Sure, of academic medicine. She’s not a physician.” Leo’s lips thin.

I’ve never noticed before, but I see it now clear as day.

Leonardo does not like to talk about Dr. Petaccia.

He applauds her achievements, but he doesn’t respect her.

He’s just like the others, grousing about her as if she got where she did by accident, not design.

Last week I would have been angry, but now…

part of me—only a very small part, a tiny speck of doubt at the back of my mind—wonders if the scholars are at least a little bit right.

Petaccia is a genius, she is , but I know there’s a fine line between genius and madness, and her secret research treads it with one foot on either side.

“It’s fine,” I say, impatience just beneath the surface. I didn’t come here to be grilled like some common criminal. Why did I come? “I feel much better.”

“Are you sure? It’s just… you seem different.”

Am I different? What I felt in the garden, what I have felt since… Have these feelings changed me? Or have they made me more of who I already was, who I’ve always been, the very wife Aurelio sought to twist into submission?

“Do I? You said that before.”

And then it hits me. I miss Olea, I miss her with such fire it licks at my bones, but I miss the garden too.

Not as a person misses their friends, or their loved ones even, during a short separation—no, this is more like the grief after death.

I miss them like I would miss breathing, with an ache so sharp it maims. Despite the illness, despite everything I have learned about Olea, I long to be amongst the quiet greenery—to study alongside her.

I don’t want to be in this crowded dining hall; I don’t want to be here justifying myself to Leo.

Olea is toxic to the touch. I wasn’t sure, before, how I felt about that—but now I am.

It isn’t her fault. It can’t be. I remember the way she avoided my question when I asked if the catalogue and the tower, her time in the garden, were her choice.

What a question , she’d said. Well, that wasn’t an answer.

Whether the doctor knows or not what sickness has developed in her ward doesn’t really matter.

Olea must know about her condition, understand it a little; that is why she wouldn’t let me into the garden at first, why she let our friendship unfold slowly, and at a distance, just as she bade me keep away from the plants until I’d acclimatised to them. It’s all about tolerance.

She is lonely. And sad. And resigned. What kind of a life is it?

Beholden to science whether she likes it or not?

But—I think with a jolt—Petaccia’s antidote research could save her.

I wonder if this is part of the doctor’s plan.

Whatever toxins flow in Olea’s blood, whatever sickness locks her in her poison paradise, a cure for all—it could fix everything. For her—and for me.

Only then will I know how much of myself, and my feelings for Olea, are real—and how much is the seduction of the garden itself.

I look Leonardo directly in his eyes and fix a gentle but firm smile on my lips. He doesn’t know it, and I’m sure he would hate it if he did, but he has helped me to decide.

“I promise, I’m fine,” I say. “Now, let’s eat before the food gets cold. Tell me about your week, I’m sorry I missed it.”

I am going back to the garden. To Olea. I am going to find that cure.