“Morgan!” He catches me under my arms. He calls for my mother, but of course she doesn’t hear him, lost in her dreams under tree roots and in old colorings of children she’s never met.
I double forward onto my hands. Something is happening. Something is very wrong. The floorboards are blurring and my stomach is all knives, organs bleeding into my lungs.
“I’m taking you to the callbox,” Basil says. It’s a machine in every building that can be used to contact the hospital in an emergency.
I can barely get the breath to say, “No. Take me to Lex.” My brother could fix anything—stings and scrapes and odd afflictions were his specialty before he began sewing quilts. We always knew he’d go into medicine; as a child he was fascinated with healing.
When Basil lifts me into his arms, I cry out in pain. He has never moved so fast. I blink and we’re at my brother’s door, and Basil is kicking at it because it’s locked, and I want to tell him not to make such a commotion —what has possessed him?—but the motion has made me too dizzy to speak.
The door swings open, and Alice greets us with her hair done up high on her head, woven into and into itself like the pages from Lex’s transcriber.
They’re saying words I can’t catch as Basil hurries me through the kitchen. I see the unlit candles and the dishes laid out sparkling clean, before they’re pushed away with a chorus of awful shattering sounds, and then Basil is laying me down on the table. There’s the warm smell of something cooking, and all I can think is that on one of the rare nights when Alice has cooked dinner, I’ve ruined it. But she doesn’t care. She’s kicking the shards out of the way to get to me, and yelling for Lex.
I close my eyes, but then Basil says, “No, Morgan. Look at me,” and I do. Somehow I know that this is important.
“What’s happening to me?” I say.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know, but we’ll fix it.”
Time is playing out before me like the scope slides we’re shown in class. One image, blackness, then another.
In the next slide, Lex is standing over me and his face is serious, detached. He presses his fingers against my neck to take my pulse. Alice tells him the things he cannot see. “Her skin is flushed but not sweaty. Her lips and tongue are pale. Her pupils are dilated.”
He touches my forehead. “Get the storage container that’s under the water room sink,” he tells her. “It’s full of corked vials.” His voice is short, almost angry.
She’s gone.
“Morgan?” He’s leaning over me now. There’s a little of the blue that was in his eyes before the edge faded them to gray. “Tell me where it hurts,” he says. My answer is a shuddering whimper when he kneads into my stomach.
Alice is back with the vials and she sets them on the counter and says, “Tell me what to do.” Her voice is steady. Her eyes are red.
“I need to know what I’m dealing with before anyone does anything,” he says. “Talk to me, Little Sister. I need your voice. Describe what you’re feeling.”
“I don’t know,” I manage. “It’s like my stomach is burning, and everything is spinning a little.”
“She said she didn’t eat anything today,” Basil offers.
Lex pushes into my stomach again. He’s in medic mode; he would have to be in order to touch me. Some months into his blindness, he began shirking away if my arm so much as brushed his. Alice said I was at the age when girls change overnight, and it made him feel that I was a stranger. I was no longer as he’d last seen me. I had barely noticed the differences in myself until she said it. It took a lot of insistence to reacquaint him with my hands. He didn’t know how to trust what he couldn’t see.
“Did you have anything at all?” he says.
“My pill,” I say, cringing.
“New prescription?”
“No,” I say. “And tea. At lunch.”
I hesitate for only a beat, but Basil knows what I’m thinking. Recognition and anger fill his eyes. “You were with that specialist at lunch,” he says.
“Basil,” I snap.
“Could she have done this to you?”
“Specialist?” Lex says. “You’ve been talking with a specialist?”
I hesitate.
“Tell him,” Basil says.
“Her name is Ms. Harlan,” I say. “She’s been asking me things, mostly about our family; I didn’t tell her anything. I swear.”
I expect my brother to be angry—he hates when anyone who works for the king starts nosing into our affairs—but he doesn’t ask me to elaborate. Something about that name has made a crumble in his calm veneer, and there’s a quiver in his voice when he tells Alice, “There’s an orange liquid and a blue. Do you see them?”
“Yes.”
“And a measuring bottle.”
“Have that.”
“Lex?” I say. “Do you know her? Who is she?”
“No one you should be dealing with. Alice, I need you to measure something out for me.”
My brother may have abandoned his trade, but his trade has clearly not abandoned him. He has all those bottles memorized. Alice is his eyes, quickly reading the names on the labels he touches, measuring the exact amounts he tells her to.
“Is there something I can do?” Basil asks.
“Just keep holding her hand,” Alice says. “You did good bringing her here; she wouldn’t have made it to the hospital.”
The train speeds past and I feel as though I’m going to fall from the table as the vibration rattles it.
Basil will never be allowed to love another girl if he loses me now. It’s forbidden. You get one partner and it’s your job to take care of each other. Loners are loners for life.
I don’t want to leave him. I don’t want him to be broken the way that Judas is broken.
“I don’t want you to be charged with my murder,” I say.
Basil touches my cheek. “You aren’t going to die,” he says.
Lex says, “You’re delirious, Sister.”
“I’m not,” I say, although the ceiling is blurring. “Pen is right. You’re forever picking on me.”
“Talk all the nonsense you want if it helps to keep you conscious,” he says.
I look at Basil’s eyes, and I see what he’ll be like in his dodder years. I see his skin wrinkled, his expression still soft and kind. I want to live to grow old with him, and I feel that future being drained out of me as though someone has cut a hole in my skin.
Across the kitchen, Alice is holding the measuring bottle up to the light to see that the elixirs form the richness Lex is describing.
They’re talking softly. I don’t hear Alice’s question, only Lex telling her, “I can’t neutralize something if I don’t know what it is. I have to force it out.”
He comes back to my side. “Morgan? Staying awake?”
“Yes,” I say.
“This is going to make you sick,” he says. “But you have to drink all of it.”
That’s the only explanation I get before Alice is emptying a vial down my throat. It fizzes and burns. Her hand covers my mouth so I can’t cough it up.
It’s not long before the concoction takes effect. Basil holds back my hair when I vomit into the bowl Alice is holding before me.
Lex is at a distance now, trying to stay in his medic frame of mind, but wincing at the sounds I make.
“How does she look?” he asks.
I slump against Basil, gasping to catch my breath.
“Still flushed. Sweaty,” Alice says. She grabs my chin, looks right through me. “Pupils are still dilated.”
