Annalisa had gone into the hospital twelve days ago.
The nurse pushed her wrists together, fingers cupped upward. Lu recognized the motion as one used by followers of Argrid’s Church.
Her nose curled. How people could still believe in the Church on Grace Loray, after everything that toxic religion had done here, was beyond Lu.
“I pray for the Casales children,” the nurse said, speaking of Annalisa and Teo. “And for your soul as well.”
Pray all you like, Lu wanted to tell her. Your god would never accept my soul.
“Thank you,” Lu said through gritted teeth. She moved past with the remaining pastry. Annalisa would tell her to give it to Teo, but it would make her happy for a moment.
Moments were all they had now.
The war had seemed like a fun game at first: taking school lessons in the lower decks of steamboats and sleeping in blanket-filled cellars, always on the move, waking up in new places and around new people. But the illusion came to a crashing end when Lu was whisked out of a cellar one morning, her mother, Kari, screaming orders to their soldiers, with Tom grasping Lu’s hand and yanking her around sprays of cannon debris.
Lu learned that when Tom sang her to sleep at night, it was not always to comfort her—it was to cover the moaning of their soldiers upstairs as others dug bullets out of their limbs. And when people called her mother Kari the Wave, it was not because she so loved the ocean, as she told Lu—it was because she had single-handedly led dozens of armed rebels into an Argridian headquarters to steal their battle plans, sunk a fleet of enemy steamboats, rescued prisoners from a damp mission basement, and performed dozens of other acts that kept the rebels afloat.
None of this was a game. The war was a necessity. And as Lu got older, she became a part of that necessity, more than the other children of the rebels. Like Annalisa, they believed in the fun of revolution long after she had learned the truth.
“It’ll end soon!” Annalisa had often declared. “My mother promised.”
My parents have never promised me that, Lu thought. But she would smile, and play with the other children, and use their innocence as fuel when her parents sent her on missions.
But she was with Annalisa for the war’s end. Lu tried not to remember the day, for many reasons. It served as a definitive break—before that day lay the war and her duty as a soldier; after it, peace, and her duty to help her parents build a functioning country.
There was no place in her new reality for the children she had grown up alongside. Only months after the revolution’s end did Lu’s mother ask, “Why have you not seen Annalisa? You two were once friendly.”
Looking at Annalisa was like reliving the sacrifices of the war. Lu had been glad to have other children to motivate her during it, but it was finished. Annalisa had escaped unscathed. What more could there be?
Sickness, apparently. After Annalisa and Teo’s mother, Bianca, died of Shaking Sickness and Annalisa came down with the same illness, Lu had stumbled back into her life. She had kept a war from hurting Annalisa—she would not let something as small and useless as a disease harm her.
Or so she had tried. And still tried.
Now Lu reached Annalisa’s wing. The peeling plaster walls surrounded a dozen patients in cots, most of Mecht ancestries thanks to New Deza’s position in the declared territory of the Mecht syndicate. Only the impoverished hospitals needed entire wings dedicated to Shaking Sickness—it struck mostly the poor. However Shaking Sickness happened, Annalisa had probably gotten it, like Bianca, from helping those who refused to help themselves. This was Annalisa’s reward for being more selfless than Lu could hope to ever be: a death sentence.
Annalisa’s dark eyes dropped to the pastry as Lu approached. “You smuggled that past Teo?”
Lu sat next to her, knotting her petticoat and shift around her legs to block bedbugs from making a meal of her. She ignored the stench of the foul bedding, the muffled screams from the surgery wing, and the occasional retching of other patients.
“He insisted you have it,” Lu said. “A generous little boy, that one.”
Annalisa picked up the pastry. Her arm’s splint reached only to her wrist, leaving her hand free. A few bruises decorated her fingers, but Lu forced herself to overlook them.
“Have they finalized the treaty yet?” Annalisa asked.
Lu bit down on her lip. The Council was weeks from approving the treaty, according to Lu’s mother. The war might have technically ended five years ago, but this would ensure it was truly, finally, over.
Lu fought the unease that had been filling her since the Argridian diplomats had landed. She didn’t want to think of them. She yanked open Botanical Wonders, the cover creaking as much as the cot. The descriptions from Grace Loray’s earliest explorers stared up at her, along with her own scribblings, and she dove into the distraction.
“Where did we leave off last time? The Digestive plant?”
Annalisa hesitated, her finger coated in the pastry’s rum glaze. Her eyes widened and her face broke out with sweat. Violent tremors clacked her teeth, and she dropped the pastry, a shaking spell rushing over her, limbs twitching so she looked as though she was trying to fly.
When it passed, Annalisa pressed her forehead to Lu’s arm, tangles of black hair falling around her face. The patients in the other cots didn’t glance over, so it wasn’t shame that made Annalisa turn away. It could have been pain—though her body occasionally released tremors, her internal organs were in a constant state of convulsion. That was part of why she was covered in blankets despite the heat. She didn’t want Teo seeing the yellow and blue marks on her limbs.
“Digestive,” Lu tried again. “Purple stems with magenta leaves. Found in the peat bogs of Backswamp. Consuming one stem sates hunger for seven days. Based on that”—Lu forced a smile—“when would be the most inopportune moment to take it?”
Annalisa lifted her head. A vein in her eye had burst, streaking red around her dark iris.
“Will you never give up?” she asked. Bianca had fled from Argrid when Annalisa was ten, and painful fits let the accent Annalisa had grown up with sneak through.
I fought in the revolution to keep people like you happy, Lu thought. If I can ease this suffering of yours now, somehow, someway—no, Annalisa. I will not give up.
“Digestive.” Lu nudged her, emphasis heavy on the word.
“Fine, fine.” Annalisa let her head fall back against the wall, her dark hair sliding off her neck. “Digestive. If it sates hunger for days, then . . . then the most inopportune moment to take it would be the day before the Mild Season Festival. Think of all that food you’d be unable to eat. Roasted aubergine and pig-tail stew—and, oh, the smoked fish! It would be torment.”
“Then we’d best get some for Teo before the next festival. Remember last year? He ate fistfuls of that imported whipped sugar and vomited all over the Emerdian trader’s booth. You had to buy two dozen stone rings and a whole stack of Emerdian leather hats because he ruined them.”
Annalisa’s grin froze. “Lu,” she said.
Lu’s hands tightened around Botanical Wonders, her finger finding its way to the bullet hole in the back cover.
“You’ve done so much already. But you’ll take care of him? Teo, I mean.”