Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
At the front of the room, with a touch of bravado, Lennox tilted his head back and swallowed his poison in one gulp. He shoved the empty vial at his observer, then raced toward the cupboard, dark curls flopping as he ran, clearly eager to get first choice of the equipment and supplies.
Keryth was right behind him.
I resisted the urge to follow their example, even as three other students raced after them, one stomping on the empty vial he’d dropped in his haste.
Instead, I held my poison up to the lantern suspended directly above my work surface. With the bright, unnaturally white flame shining through the glass vial, I could make out thousands of particulates suspended in the fluid.
I turned the vial over and watched the substance flow toward the cork, noting its thin consistency. Mentally eliminating several possible poisons from my list before I’d even opened the container.
As my observer watched, scribbling madly in his journal, I thumbed the cork from my vial and sniffed the damp end as if it had come from a fine bottle of wine.
I noted the scent, and with the vial carefully held in my other hand, I dipped my quill in ink and scribbled all of my observations on a sheet of the provided parchment.
And finally, while several more of my classmates ran to select their equipment, I took a sip of the poison.
Rather than gulp it, I held a few drops of liquid on my tongue, noting the smooth texture and the fact that the particulates were too fine to feel.
Noting the acrid taste. I swallowed, then immediately inhaled, in order to analyze the aftertaste—as much scent as true taste—as it bloomed with the inhalation.
I made more notes, while the observer watched me with a thoughtful arch of his brows. Then I took a deep breath and swallowed the rest of the liquid.
My observer accepted the empty vial, corked it, and slid it into his pocket. He scribbled in his journal again, lamplight shining on his dark, bald skull.
I…bent in half beneath a wave of pure panic.
A muted murmuring traveled around the otherwise hushed audience.
My hands clutched my knees, nails digging into my flesh through the layers of my cloak and skirt. My back arched as I sucked in great gulps of air and stared at the floor.
I’d just poisoned myself. Voluntarily.
A ticking echoed in my head like the hands of the Seminary clock, counting down toward my demise, and with every mental click, I flinched.
Get. Up.
The voice was mine, and yet it wasn’t. It was Past Amber shouting at me through the fog of amnesia.
I could practically feel her disgust, not just at my ignorance but at my inaction.
I could feel her pacing through the dark, inaccessible recesses of my mind, itching to show me what she would do in my position.
Past Amber could yell at me. But she could not help me.
Finally, I stood, and my gaze locked immediately on the official observer, quill poised over the half-full page in his journal, where he’d clearly meticulously noted my panic.
I blinked. Then I raced toward the supply cupboard with the observer at my heels.
Wilder was still there. He turned to me with a smile as I reached for a set of beakers and a burner. We weren’t allowed to speak to each other, but he took a moment, before turning toward his workstation with an armload of equipment, to give me a saucy wink.
The scoundrel was having fun!
I returned his smile—a subtler version—and gathered my initial load of supplies, then carried them to my workstation. My official observer did not help, but he did make note of everything I selected, as well as everything I added on my second trip to the supply cupboard.
I arranged my equipment, setting up beakers and burners, but I still had no idea what ingredients I would need.
What format my antidote should take. And since I’d ingested the poison later than everyone else, I would be last to feel its effects, thus last able to analyze those effects on others.
A disadvantage, to be sure, when everyone else would be able to use their own symptoms to help identify the poison well before I could.
However, Lennox and Keryth had taken very little time to study the poison before they’d swallowed it, and as far as I knew, they had taken no notes on the details of its initial presentation.
Which was potentially a disadvantage to them.
We’d chosen different methods of analysis, and I could only hope mine was not in error.
While I waited for the poison to take effect, I went back through the notes I’d taken in preparation for the trial.
None of the six potential poisons I’d focused on looked exactly like what we’d actually been given.
But it was possible that some small variance in the composition had given the poison its particulates. Or its pale color.
It was also possible that variance was introduced on purpose, to throw the students off. That those details were cosmetic in nature and unrelated to the function of the poison.
Of course, it was just as likely that they’d chosen a poison I’d never even considered during my preparation.
I flipped through my notes, searching for anything with even marginal similarities to the taste, scent, and consistency of the poison, and while a couple were vaguely similar, nothing truly stood out.
Fighting panic over the utter blank slate in my mind, I set aside my trial preparation notes and pulled a large stack of loose parchment from my satchel: Past Amber’s research notes.
They were copious and meticulously organized.
And detailed. They could also take an eternity to go through, especially considering that I had yet to feel any effects from the poison.
This trial was a deadly gamble. I could not identify the poison, nor could I start devising the remedy, until the sickness emerged. But the sickness itself would likely impede my ability to think, and perhaps to physically perform.
Until it killed me.
A groan from the front of the room caught my attention, and I looked up to find Lennox bent over his workstation, clutching his stomach. Even from where I stood, across the arena, I could see sweat glowing on his forehead.
I was not allowed to copy a classmate’s technique or recipe, but the officials couldn’t stop me from using what I happened to notice about someone else’s symptoms. Right? So long as I wasn’t watching anyone blatantly enough to be accused of cheating?
Abdominal cramps. Sweating. Common symptoms, which could come from almost any poison.
A pleasant humming came from my right, and I turned to see Wilder smiling as he added ingredients to a beaker suspended over an unlit burner. He seemed unaware of the solemnity both of the event and of his fellow students. He’d blocked it all out. Evidently effortlessly.
I had no such luxury.
I surreptitiously studied my classmates, beginning with those who’d taken the poison fastest. Lennox was the first, and…
Keryth suddenly pivoted away from her workstation and vomited on the stone tiles. A soft gasp rose from the audience.
Keryth had taken the poison after Lennox, but she was smaller—half his weight, maybe—so she was feeling the effects faster and likely more severely than he was.
She stood, turned resolutely back to her workstation, and picked up a beaker. But she only stared at it.
I frowned, trying to understand why she stood seemingly frozen, holding the beaker.
I needed a closer look, but any observation of my fellow students and their methods would have to be covert.
So I headed for the cupboard again, taking a path that took me by her station.
And as I drew closer, I understood the problem.
Her hand was shaking so badly that she was clearly afraid to try to use the beaker—or even set it down—until the tremor passed, for fear of shattering the equipment.
Neurotoxin. Whatever they’d given us affected the brain and its control over the body. That should narrow things down.
Lennox, I noticed, had also developed a slight tremor, but his shaking was nowhere near as severe.
Women, it seemed, would get the worst of this challenge, by virtue of being generally smaller. Which meant I had mere minutes before I’d be in the same position as Keryth.
I rushed toward the cupboard and grabbed the most commonly useful elixir ingredients.
I still had no symptoms. Wilder, however, had stopped humming. Sweat had broken out across his forehead, and though he wasn’t clutching his stomach, he seemed distinctly uncomfortable. And more than a little irritated by that fact.
I flipped through Past Amber’s notes again, pulling out every page on poisons. Then I sorted through them, plucking out pages that detailed symptoms like those my classmates seemed to be suffering.
Nausea, vomiting, and abdominal distress were quite common among them, but the tremor was distinctive. That narrowed the field to four. All were neurotoxins.
At the front of the room, Lennox began to cough, spraying his workstation with spittle. Keryth was bent over, clutching the edge of her table with both hands, gasping for breath. And though the audience remained respectfully quiet, I could practically feel the weight of the gazes trained on us.
I added respiratory distress to the list of symptoms and turned back to Past Amber’s notes just as the first wave of nausea rolled over me, a tidal wave of queasiness and dizziness that left me clammy and unsteady on my feet.
I bowed my head for a moment, breathing through the discomfort. Then I focused on the list again. Sheets of parchment shook in my hands. My fingers clenched unexpectedly—my very body betraying me—and crumpled the pages.
With a groan, I set my notes on my workstation and flattened them.
Four possibilities. One was a snake venom, one was secreted from a poisonous frog, one was from a spider, and one was distilled from a variety of spiky hibiscus grown on this very island.
The antidotes to all four used three of the same ingredients, so I began measuring those out, moving slowly, to avoid dropping or spilling anything.
That was it. That was all I could do, until I knew for certain what I’d ingested.
Until I understood what other specific ingredients should be added.
How rapidly the solution should be heated, and to what temperature.
Whether or not it should be condensed, purified, or diluted. How much of the provided beyn to use.
I turned to look at Wilder, hoping for some clue about technique—though he and I rarely approached any assignment the same way—but before I could process the setup of his equipment, my gaze snagged on his face, which was bright red and appeared a bit puffy.
My own face began to burn, but without access to a looking glass, I couldn’t tell whether or not I was imagining that symptom simply because I’d seen it in him. But I was not imagining the sudden pins-and-needles sensation in the tips of my fingers.
My heart racing—the room spinning—I turned back to my notes and scanned them for mentions of numbness, redness, or swollen skin.
None of the four remaining toxins listed any of that. Frustration lit a fire in my belly.
I was missing something.
Nausea rolled over me again, and I clenched my jaw against the forcible return of my breakfast. My hands shook, my fingers still tingling, and…did they look a little red?
Directly in front of me, Yoslyn gasped. She coughed, spraying her workstation with spittle, just like Lennox had, drawing more soft reactions from the crowd, but she was close enough for me to notice the crimson tint of her saliva.
Was the blood from her lungs? Or from her mouth?
Were her lungs filling with fluid? With blood? Or had ulcers developed on her tongue?
Focus! Yoslyn would be fine. Or she would die.
Either way, her struggle was no different than anyone else’s.
We’d all consumed poison. Every member of my cohort was likely less than an hour from death—by design.
The only way to walk out of the amphitheater, for any of us, was to maintain focus and put our skills to work.
Wilder had two elixirs going, each over a lit burner, each boiling at a different intensity, based on the height and color of the flame. But I could not tell what he’d put into his beakers, nor could I understand why he was making two different antidotes.
All I knew for sure was that the symptoms I was experiencing didn’t match anything in Past Amber’s research on toxins.
With a groan, fighting another brutal wave of nausea, I dug back through her notes, reading as fast as I could, desperately scanning the text not just for the word toxin but for the symptoms I’d seen and was beginning to truly suffer.
Finally, the second time I went through the pages, forcing myself to slow down and process the words, one stuck out.
Tremors.
I kept reading.
Respiratory distress with the production of bloody sputum. And…swollen red skin.
My gaze snapped up to the top of the page, where the subject she’d expounded upon was written in large, scrolling print and underlined twice.
The top line was thin and wispy, done in a hurry.
The second, lower line, however, was thicker and darker.
As if it had been written with more intentionality, with a freshly dipped quill.
But it was the words themselves that captured my attention: Acute ingestion of base metals.
Metal toxicity.
I hadn’t included this page among the poisons because metal wasn’t a poison. But it could be a toxin.
My gaze dropped again to the section with the symptoms that matched the ones I was feeling. The ones I was seeing all around me.
Arsenic.
I’d swallowed a vial full of arsenic.