Chapter 7 Saskia #2
Your Guardians wouldn’t take kindly to being surprised, would they?
Find a mirror, little nightmare.
In all my life, nobody has ever spoken to me that way. No one has ever made me doubt and question and wonder as much as that voice did in the span of mere minutes, which tells me there’s no way my own brain could have conjured such outlandish thoughts, even if I was sick.
Not a fever, then. Also not a dream, since I kept pinching myself to no avail.
Someone was speaking to me through the vial.
Either a Guardian or… I don’t even know.
Another citizen? A Chosen One or someone banished from beyond the Wall?
Whoever it was, I’m positive that voice must have been the last thing Diggory heard before the sentries dragged him off.
Maybe it even drove him to madness, and that’s why he was screaming and thrashing by the end.
So for the rest of the night, a new resolve twined around my bones, hardening into place.
I was Diggory’s healer. I am Diggory’s healer. I will find out exactly what happened to him so that I can make an appeal on his behalf and save him before it’s too late.
And contrary to what the voice tried to claim about me, that means asking the right questions. Like what those shiny objects that people used to wear even are.
“Oh.” Malcolm nearly laughs now, and part of me marvels over the way it changes the shape of his face, how it makes him look younger and more carefree. “You’re talking about jewelry.”
“Jewelry?”
Even though we technically aren’t doing anything wrong by discussing the Dark Days, our faces both twist in equal expressions of disgust, as if the word itself is greedy to use.
“Yeah,” Malcolm says, lowering his voice.
“Back when there was an imbalance of power, the rich liked to flaunt their jewels in front of those who were less fortunate. Some children went hungry and cold while other children’s parents wore those jewels on parts of their body—rings and bracelets and necklaces. ”
Necklaces. The chained vial is a necklace.
I knew I’d heard the word before, but I never could have guessed how relevant it would become to me.
How on earth did Diggory find such a thing from five hundred years ago?
The Guardians destroyed all remnants of the Dark Days when they came to save us from our own ruin, building Xantera upon the ashes of everything foul and ugly.
How did such a delicate piece of jewelry survive all that… and why?
“Why?”
“Why?” Malcolm echoes me. “Because they thought it was pretty. To show off their wealth. Why else would anyone drape riches over their body parts?”
I shrug.
“Saskia?” he asks, peering at me.
“Hmm?”
“Is there a reason you’re asking me about this?”
Yes. I have a forbidden necklace in a drawer in my room and I heard a wicked male’s voice when it touched my chest and despite every instinct telling me to turn it into the authorities, a darker, deeper part of me wants to hang it around my neck and hear that voice again.
“No, not really. I was just wondering.”
For the first time since we were assigned as partners, I feel a nip of guilt for holding back on him. Every other time I’ve kept something to myself, it’s been because I don’t want to be rude by talking too much about myself, but now…
“I hope you have a good day,” I say before I can let myself dwell on it. Jumping up, I throw my cloak over my shoulders and pin my badge to my chest, refusing to let my eyes wander to my reflection in the screen. I don’t know what I look like seems to ring through me.
Other people know what I look like, though. Malcolm himself looks at me, day in and day out from across the table, side by side when we clean the kitchen, hovering above me in the dark when he used to be inside me. I wonder what he sees.
“You as well,” Malcolm says slowly, almost cautiously. “I’ll see you tonight.”
I smile and find that the smile is easier than it’s ever been despite the secrets swirling in my chest. “See you tonight.”
Hopefully by then, I’ll be one step closer to finding out where that necklace came from.
And who is speaking to me through it.
After repeating “good morning” nearly a dozen times, I’m back in the locker room, saying hello to Gaia like usual, but this time with a weird mixture of hope and nerves writhing in my gut at what I’m about to ask her.
“Morning,” Gaia says back, peeling off her blood-spattered shirt. It must have been a long night. “Did you hear?”
I pull my eyes back to her face, off the red dots dried into the fabric. “That Diggory was found? Yes. I actually saw the sentries haul him off yesterday after my shift.”
“You did?” Her eyes pop wide open, hungry for the information.
“Yes.” I pause for a steadying breath. “And I need you to do something for me.”
For once, my friend seems at a loss for words. Her mouth hangs open, her hands frozen mid-movement. Among the Cardinal List of Rules is Don’t wish for more than necessary, and I’m obviously breaking it now. Along with Don’t ask unsolicited questions, of course.
For all my little jokes I’ve shared with Gaia over the years, for all the small tidbits of harmless gossip we’ve traded, I’ve never once asked her to do anything for me.
Yet here I am, asking. My conversation with Malcolm went so well this morning that part of me believes she won’t even scold me for breaking such an ingrained rule.
But then Gaia sucks in a breath, her eyes narrowing, and her tone morphs into something a little more suspicious than ever before.
“What kind of favor?”
I seem to be speaking in a lot of whispers lately. Even still, I try to keep my words as casual as possible as I pull on my clean, blood-free scrubs.
“Oh, nothing huge—just find Diggory’s personal information.” I look down at the laces of my shoes. “Who his partner is. Where she lives. That kind of thing.”
“Guardians help me,” Gaia hisses out. “Tell me you’re joking.”
“Not today, unfortunately.”
“Only the information clerks would be privy to that kind of thing.”
My tone stays light when I say, “You have a good ear,” but Gaia’s face is darkening with every new word I speak.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean I can just go around snooping in files I don’t have access—” Gaia cuts herself off as one of the male healers across the room turns to head out the door.
His eyes cut to us, his lips turned down in disapproval as if he thinks we’re arguing.
Maybe we are. Gaia waits until he closes the door behind him before resuming in a lower voice. “It would be improper to dig.”
“But—”
“It would be improper to dig.”
The finality in her voice is striking. I let my shoulders deflate before the fight can claw its way out of my throat. I’ve crossed a line, and the fact that Gaia is reminding me of that rather than turning me in is a testament to her loyalty. Yet…
You don’t ask the right questions, that voice in my head claimed last night. Well, I want to scream back, look what happens when I try to! Since Diggory isn’t around to give me answers, I wanted to pay a visit to his assigned partner, but I can’t do that if I don’t even know who she is.
Gaia lets out a grumbling sigh and gives my shoulder a half-squeeze. “This is the first patient you’ve lost, Saskia. It’s normal to feel emotional about it.”
I freeze in place. The first patient I’ve lost. As if Diggory is already dead.
And what if he is? What if the Guardians already threw him over the Wall and the Monster tore into his flesh as soon as his body hit the ground? I can practically hear the crack of bones, the tearing of skin and sinew, the gurgle of blood and—oh, I’m going to be sick.
“Right, I’m only emotional. I’ll be fine tomorrow. Have a good sleep, Gaia,” I intone, my words a bit sharper than I intended in an effort to hold back the tears stinging the back of my nose.
“Saskia, wait—”
I’m already out the door.
I pull back the curtain around my young patient’s room, and she turns over at the sound of the metal hooks scraping along the rod.
“Odette,” I smile. “How are you feeling today?”
“I feel fine,” she insists, sighing into her pillow. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
I nod empathetically as I approach her bedside. “Of course, but passing out can be scary. We want to make sure everything is okay before we release you.” I muster up a lighthearted tone to mask my impatience. “You’ll be back to your regular routine in no time.”
Staring at her chart only makes me blink harder, faster.
There are no answers. Only the same questions.
We’ve already pestered her with all the standard medical questions that might point us toward a resolution.
Are you eating all of your designated meal portions?
Have you ever felt faint before now? What were you doing before you passed out?
But so far, no part of her daily routine seems abnormal, and her scans are normal and her blood cell counts have all come back within normal range since then, even if they’re a bit on the lower end.
As hard as I’ve tried to turn off every bit of greed and curiosity and selfishness that has been festering in me throughout the day, my mind wanders again for the millionth time to jewelry and mirrors and questions that shouldn’t be asked.
Like the one I can’t help but voice aloud now out of annoyance because no other questions have given me answers.
“Do you ever dream?”
Odette’s head jerks up, and a grin splits her face wide open.
“Yes! All the time. Is that strange?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I answer honestly, and cock my head at her. Before I can second-guess myself, I sit on the lip of her hospital bed. “Tell me about them. Are they happy? Scary?”
My frustration over Diggory and the Choosing and the mysterious voice from last night is bleeding through cracks that have slowly but surely began fissuring inside me.
It feels like I’m losing control of all poise and restraint, but the girl isn’t so well-trained in manners yet, so she doesn’t appear to be offended by my request. In fact, she lights up as if delighted and props herself up on the pillows.
“Oh, both. I have all sorts of dreams.”
“Which one is your favorite?” I ask.
“Sometimes I dream that I have wings and all my schoolmates laugh at me because they don’t believe that I can fly, but then I start flapping and ha! You should see their faces when I take off.”
I laugh. “It would be fun to fly. What’s another happy one?”
“Well, I know the whole thing about beware its eyes, resist its howl, stay within the stone and all that, but I’ve dreamt that I climb up the Wall and stand there at the very tippy top.”
“On top of the spikes?” I ask curiously.
“Well, in my dream, they don’t hurt me, and when I look down, I find a whole field of rainbows on the other side.”
I fold my lips into a smile. I wish that were the truth, what would be waiting for us if the Wall ever fell.
“Or sometimes,” Odette continues, unable to hide her newfound excitement, “I dream that I’m the first person in the world who can defeat the Monster because my fingernails can actually turn into sharp knives that stab him to death!”
I raise my eyebrows as she continues, finding myself enjoying the visuals she describes despite the impossibility of them, before she drops her eyes and fidgets with her fingers.
“If only my own dreams were so freeing,” I encourage her. “I might be more excited to go to sleep at night.”
She looks up at me, hopeful. “You dream too?”
“I do. But mine are less courageous, more constricting. Like the Wall flattening me into the ground, burying me into the earth, or that my heart is a blood moon, pumping crimson moonlight through my body.”
I suddenly startle myself, snapping back to who I’m talking to, and how I shouldn’t be saying any of this out loud. I’m not a child anymore. I can’t just cry about my nightmares in my mother’s arms. Besides, I shouldn’t scare my young patient.
But then Odette says something that makes my breath pause.
“Just the other night, I dreamed of something like that. One of the Guardians, actually.” She wrinkles her nose. “Not the Third one who’s so handsome, but… which one has the thing on his neck again?”
“The Eleventh,” I answer immediately, knowing what she means: an Adam’s apple. All the images of the Eleventh Guardian always depict him with a long neck and a bulging Adam’s apple. I squint at her. “Why do you think you dreamt of him?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. Dreams are just funny like that, aren’t they? Uncontrollable, just like yours. This one was really vivid, though. I thought I was already awake until I actually woke up.”
My breath seems to unstick itself in my lungs in one giant exhale.
“What did the Eleventh Guardian do in your dream?”
“Just stared down at me and told me to go back to sleep.”
A frown drags down my lips. “That’s it?”
She shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Were you scared?”
“No,” she replies, shaking her head. “At first, he was just standing there, protecting me. Like they always do, watching over us to make sure we’re safe. It was boring, actually. And then I woke up and he was gone. But I’d rather dream of flying or rainbows. Do you like rainbows?”
“What? Oh. Yes,” I say, thinking of the flimsy films of colors that sometimes stretch from cloud to cloud after a bout of rain—how they fall across the sky and land somewhere beyond the Wall, somewhere we can’t reach.
What I don’t say is that I much prefer the deep shade of red that glares from the blood moon against a black-as-ink sky—it’s both terrifying and exhilarating.
“Well, Odette, why don’t you get some rest?
I’ll be back with your lunch in about an hour. ”
The girl sighs and lies back down, but her words leave me in a state of confusion that slowly buds into more anger by the end of my shift.
I don’t know what happened to Diggory. I don’t know where his partner lives. And I don’t know why a little girl’s dream seems to bother me. All I know is that there’s a forbidden necklace waiting for me in my drawer at home.
And this time, I’m going to ask the right questions to figure out who is speaking from the other end.