Chapter 30
“Amber! Thank every force of order in the known world!” Wilder appeared in front of me like a wild-eyed apparition the instant I stepped into the Conservatory atrium, and his hug was like an embrace from the universe itself.
“I knew you could do it!” he declared, but the relief in his expression and the exaggerated volume of his voice said otherwise.
He’d thought I was going to die. That, at the very least, it was a strong possibility.
I hugged him back, happy as ever to prove him wrong, which had been a specific pleasure of mine since we were hardly old enough to talk.
“Where is everyone?” I asked when he finally let me go.
When I could look around the atrium and note only five of our classmates were seated on benches built into the walls.
Keryth and Lennox were huddled together closest to the staircase, arms around each other.
Cressa sat nearest the exterior door, and Pryce and Gavin had claimed isolated spots across the atrium, along the opposite wall.
Wilder made six, and he was the only one standing. Everyone else looked exhausted and still nauseated.
I was the seventh to emerge into the atrium, and Yoslyn and Petyr were still in the amphitheater. Which meant three were missing.
“Adria?” I said. “And Raelah? And…Kornell.” But then I remembered. “He failed, didn’t he?”
Wilder nodded. “We haven’t seen him. But Adria and Raelah are in the infirmary. Did you not see them on your way back?”
I hadn’t looked. I’d hardly noticed a thing on my walk through the main corridor of the Panacea wing, other than the fact that I was alive.
That my nausea was abating, my hands steadying, and my lungs clearing.
The absence of illness had left me floating in a vaguely pleasant fugue state, a cloudy oblivion in which my feet carried me forward with little help from my mind.
“Will they survive?” I asked, clutching at Wilder’s hand. I found that I needed the contact—the warmth—to ground me in this moment. To assure me that I was real, and that this wasn’t all some reverie of my dying mind as I lay unconscious on the floor of the glass-walled arena. “Will they pass?”
“I suppose that remains to be seen.” Keryth sounded a bit breathless, and my gaze found her over Wilder’s shoulder as he turned toward her voice. She was still cuddled so close to Lennox that they seemed to comprise one form with two heads, each with one arm lost to sight around the other’s back.
Lennox frowned up at me, his cheek pressed to hers, his eyes narrowed. “How did you pass?”
“She survived the same way you did,” Wilder snapped. “With a lot of talent and hard work.”
“And no memory at all,” Lennox added, his voice hollow and echoing with danger, like a plunge down a long, narrow shaft.
I waited for his words to hit the watery grave at the bottom. For the splash of my dignity into the well of his anger and resentment. But I never heard it. His ire at me, it seemed, was bottomless.
At last he added, “Or was that a lie, told to lull the rest of us into complacency?”
He stood, divorcing himself from Keryth’s comfort, glowing with rage as if someone had struck a match to his very veins. “Was this all an act? Another cruel aspect of your mad science? Are we all still lab rats in your moonstruck alchemical conjecture?”
Keryth stood and put an arm around him, drawing him back toward the bench with her.
“Forgive him,” she said while I stared at them both, wide-eyed, guilt churning in my newly calmed gut, though I could recall no offense on my part.
“His antidote produces some unpleasant secondary effects. A short tempter and unmeasured words seem chief among them.”
And yet she did not deny the truth of his rant. Nor did she appear particularly concerned that I had heard it.
What moonstruck conjecture was he referring to? What mad—
“Amber!”
I spun toward the doorway at my back just as Yoslyn burst from the Panacea wing into the atrium, and before I could brace myself for impact, she threw herself into my embrace, arms tightening around me like a corset made of human flesh and bones.
“Thank you!” she sobbed into my ear, her tears wetting my cheek, chin digging into my shoulder. “I should be dead.” She suddenly lurched away from me, hands clutching my shoulders so that I had space but lacked freedom. “I would have died, right there on the floor of the arena, if you hadn’t…”
Fresh tears formed in her eyes, and suddenly her gaze tore away from mine as she realized we were not alone. That the rest of the Mastery cohort was staring at her through gazes that felt equal parts bewildered and…frosty, as if a winter chill had drifted down from the mountain to blanket us all.
Because if she’d needed my help…she should be dead right now. That was the rule. Students who could not save themselves should not have entered the arena.
“What happened?” Wilder asked, and even his voice lacked its usual jovial warmth. “Amber?”
“She shared her antidote with me,” Yoslyn said. “She gave me half, as I lay dying on the ground.”
Wilder’s brows furrowed, more in confusion than in irritation or anger.
Footsteps shuffled slowly toward us, and though I didn’t turn, I could feel our classmates closing in on us. Waiting for me to explain. To deny her claim that I had helped her cheat.
“You survived on half a dose?” Cressa Baxter asked, and I turned to find her studying me with narrowed gray eyes.
Suddenly she lurched forward, reddish ringlets swinging as she reached for my face.
I stumbled backward, my heart racing, but Wilder was at my back and he had no time to retreat.
Cressa seized my chin, and while I clutched at her wrists, she pulled down my lower left eyelid and peered into my eye.
I forced myself to relax, both because any movement could result in my injury and because there appeared to be no malice in her examination. She seemed viscerally curious and astonished, but not angry.
“How?” Cressa let me go and swung toward Yoslyn, who backpedaled out of reach.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Oh, did you forget?” Keryth snapped. “Because that’s starting to sound terribly convenient.”
“No. I mean, I know what recipe I used. But I don’t know why my antidote was enough for us both. Maybe the observer can—”
“Did you pass?” Lennox cut me off, staring daggers at Yoslyn. “Even though she saved you?”
Yoslyn’s hesitant nod tugged at my heart. “The observer said my antidote would have worked. I—” She swallowed thickly. “I got it right.”
“But not in time to save yourself,” Keryth snapped, and heads all around us bobbed in agreement.
“Take that up with the officials,” Wilder insisted. “It’s their call. I, for one, am happy she’s alive!” But then he frowned and turned back to Yoslyn. “What about Petyr? Was he still in the arena when you left?”
She shook her head slowly, lips pressed together, green eyes damp. “He’s in the infirmary. It…doesn’t look good.”
Pain flickered behind Wilder’s eyes, deeply lining his forehead. Then, in the solemn silence that had settled over our entire cohort, he stood a little taller, making an obvious effort to shield his thoughts. He put one arm around me and one around Yoslyn and ushered us toward the front door.
As he pushed it open, I turned to look over the disapproving faces staring back at me, fiery islands of anger in a sea of cold white marble.
Pryce had stood from his bench near the door to the Panacea wing. The blue skin and hair that had saddled him with an absurd look—had turned him into the very farce of a serious student— suddenly gave him a fierce and menacing edge.
He was glaring right at me.
“Are you sure about this dress?” I pulled my shawl tighter around my shoulders, shielding my décolletage from the frigid night air.
“I am entirely certain.” The giggle in Yoslyn’s voice told me she’d bolstered her own courage with a precelebration glass of wine. Or two. As did the warm breath that washed over me when she clutched at my arm.
She’d found the dress pushed to the back of my wardrobe and had seemed surprised that I did not recognize it, until she remembered my condition. At which point she’d assured me it was among my favorites.
But Present Amber truly had no memory of Past Amber’s favorite dress, or of how bold she must have felt, walking around with the upper curves of her bosom exposed.
It wasn’t just the dress, though. Even before I’d lost my memory, I’d evidently rarely left campus, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d depended upon my “instinctual” understanding of the Alchemary’s geography, as Desmond put it, until I’d let Yoslyn tug me through the gate and onto the bridge.
Past the soldiers standing guard, the Crown’s crest emblazoned upon the front of their black uniforms.
Saltstrand was only half a mile from Alchemary Island, but that distance felt interminable in my heeled boots, with the cold, humid night breeze slicing like a knife through the thin fabric of my unfamiliar attire.
With the ocean churning beneath us, night-black waves crashing on the piers beneath the bridge and against the cliffside of both the island and the mainland.
Moonlight glinted on the water, and looking down made me feel dizzy, though I had yet to touch a drop of alcohol. I let my right hand trail over the cold stone bridge railing as I walked, steadying myself just from the light touch.
“You really don’t remember anything, do you?” Yoslyn gripped my left arm as if we were sisters. As if we’d spent every waking moment of the past six weeks glued to each other’s sides.
As if we were friends.
“Not a thing,” I repeated for at least the fifth time. “I’ve been forced to relearn it all from scratch, and I’m as grateful as I could possibly be for the notes I took before I lost my memory.”
“How’d it happen?”