I help her stand. She follows meekly beside me as I lead her to the door of the Recorder Hall. “Go back to your grandfather. Go back to your other home. I will be the Recorder now.”
She doesn’t look back as she descends the stairs. I knew she wouldn’t. That’s what Phydus does. It makes you easy to control.
I stand in the shadow of the Recorder Hall, watching her go. I will stay here. I will be the Recorder. The Hall is rarely used, and I can stay in the shadows. As long as there’s no more trouble, Eldest won’t bother to come down here again. He hates to be reminded of the world outside his empire of steel.
And meanwhile, I will learn every single last secret that Eldest has.
When the time is ready, I will make my move.
It might be years. A decade or more. But while I wait, I will construct a plan so foolproof that, even if I die, the revolution—the freedom—Mag wants will still be ensured.
If I loved Mag the way she thought I did, I would have stood beside her and died a ridiculous, noble death.
But love is a choice.
And I can choose not to love her.
Miasma
by Carrie Ryan
THERE WAS A time when men had cures for things like the disease that swept through Portlay that summer. That was before the cities grew sick and crumbled into themselves, before the waters rose and the swamps swallowed what was left of civilization.
For a while divers took to the waters trying to salvage scraps of the old world, but they always came to the surface sickened and weak. The mortality rate became alarmingly high, and eventually people stopped pining after what came before.
What they didn’t expect was that generations of toxic soup would eventually belch up diseases that wafted through the air like a stench with no way for a body to defend against it. And without medicine, civilization turned to darker ways of handling outbreaks of the fever: doctors with beaks like birds and their plague-eating beasts.
Once the beaked doctors were invited in to quash sickness in a town, their rule became absolute and their decisions unquestionable. They bred monsters who lived off disease, and then they starved them, sending them into the streets to sniff out their next meal.
If you had any money, you could pay off the doctors to pass by, or, if you were wealthy, you could pay for a private room at the hospital and a chance at recovery. Unless your tears ran red; by then it was too late. That meant the walls that held the inside bits of your body separate from one another had already begun to crumble and disintegrate. Your lungs had begun melting into your heart, and your stomach into your intestines, until you became nothing more than a jumbled mass of deteriorated cells barely held together by yellow-tinged flesh.
The moment you cried red, they took your body to the hidden tunnels underground and left you to the plague eaters.
Someone started a rumor that the plague hadn’t come to Portlay until the beaked doctors arrived—that they were the ones to unleash the fever in order to feed their monsters—but Frankie knew that wasn’t the case. She saw them come riding into town. She’d been hiding in the cemetery during the darkest hours of the night on a dare from her friends Cecily and Bardost. They’d told her that in the silences between the midnight chimes, you could hear the dead shift in their coffins, but Frankie didn’t believe them and aimed to prove them wrong.
Except that when the bells tolled the middle night, she did hear something. At first she was afraid it might be the dead, and her heart stormed against her rib cage. Then the noise resolved into the pattern of hooves and carriage wheels, and that was when she caught a glimpse of the first doctor.
Growing up, she’d been told stories about them—every kid in Portlay had heard
The first doctor was tall and straight, broad-shouldered with large hands cloaked in thick gloves. He wore black from head to foot, every possible hint of skin covered and covered again. But the face . . . that was exactly what Frankie had pictured: a bone-white mask with a long curved beak stretching an arm’s length beyond where his nose and mouth would be. Two holes were drilled in the tip of it, and a thin trail of gray smoke wafted from the holes to mix with the midnight mist.
It should have been impossible for the doctor to see any-thing through the thick black lenses of his goggles, but he turned his head as he passed the cemetery, and Frankie could feel his eyes on her. She should have ducked behind a headstone or raced back to the shadows of the trees, but she just stood there, bare toes curling against the fecund dirt of the dead.
Stacked neatly in the cart trailing behind the horse were groupings of cages draped in black cloth. Frankie thought the sight of the doctors would be enough to send her heart tripping hard for hours, but it was the cages that truly sent the fire of fear through her.
She’d never seen a plague eater before, and most people got quiet if the topic was ever mentioned. Some things were too terrifying for even whispers. A few years ago a kid down the block had found the skeleton of a ferret and tried to trick up the bones to look like the doctors’ pets, but it hadn’t fooled anyone for long, and he’d regretted it after the beating he’d gotten from his father.
Frankie found herself staring after the cages as the cart rolled toward the hospital in the center of town. She wondered if reality could ever be as horrid as her own imagination. There was a tiny part of her that wanted to sneak after the cart and lift one of those blankets and peek inside the cage. She just wanted to
But Frankie was smarter than that. Instead she faded back toward her home along the edge of the swamp, enjoying her last night of freedom out in the midnight air. If the beaked doctors were here, everything in Portlay was about to change.
A few hours later, the beaked doctors knocked on their door, and her mother let them in. As one of them entered their tiny shack of a house, he didn’t utter a word, just loosened the leash attached to his beast and let it approach each of them in turn: Frankie, Cathy, and their mother. The beast was smaller than Frankie had imagined, with a long, thin, ferret-like body covered in mangy patches of fur.
Its nose was narrow and pointed, barely concealing sharp teeth. Its forked tongue slithered out, raking against Frankie’s flesh before moving on to her sister. It let out hisses and growls—until it reached her mother. Then, it grew agitated and began to screech.
Frankie tried not to be mesmerized by the thing, this nightmare made flesh, but she couldn’t help it. Here was the threat that had always hovered unspoken over Portlay. They’d known that eventually the swamp would drain, and the miasma would run thick. They’d known the fevers would come, and with them the beaked doctors and plague eaters.
They should have been prepared. They weren’t. Frankie didn’t even realize her mother was sick and should have said she’d seen the beaked doctors riding into town, but she hadn’t wanted to get in trouble for sneaking out. And now the doctors were here, in her house, with their plague eaters howling.
Her mother tried to swat at the creature, but the gesture was useless. The beast had talon-like claws that it used to climb her body, ripping her skirt and tearing into the skin of her legs.
Cathy started wailing, and Frankie reached for a log from the pile by the fire, brandishing it like a weapon. The doctor swung to face her, long white beak breathing smoke, eyes empty disks of glass. He towered over her, larger than any human being had a right to be. With one swipe of his arm he could knock her unconscious. He raised his walking stick in a warning.
Her mother pulled out a ragged purse and dug through it for money—offering out everything they had. It
