As Nate coughed and tried to breathe, Agatha hunched over a polished metal workbench, decanting pale liquid like a chem fiend, but clear-eyed and steady-handed.
Nate slipped in and out of consciousness. It was like trying to see at night with a faulty crank-light. He reached his hand out, afraid of falling.
Reed.
“Please hurry,” someone said. “Please.”
Nate’s awareness strobed. Pixel in the corner on a red couch, crying with a piece of bread in her hands. Brick at Nate’s shoulder, pinning him down on a tabletop as his body moved on its own, lost in convulsions. Reed’s face in front of Nate’s, saying things Nate couldn’t understand over the sound of his own senseless cries. His boots thumped at the table with every violent jerk.
Where are my tools?
They couldn’t move again without his tools.
Reed cupped Nate’s jaw fiercely as Agatha hurried over with a liquid that splashed into Nate’s mouth with a familiar, sharp taste. He swallowed, coughed, and swallowed more as she continued to pour it down his throat.
The sounds in the room slowly cleared. Nate heard Pixel’s muffled sobs and Reed at his ear, wet and hoarse. “Gods, Nate.”
“I’m okay,” Nate exhaled.
Agatha peered over him, her eyes pale-brown. He knew them. “You were nearly too far gone,” she said, faintly accusing.
Brick hung back, red tangles matted against her skin and sweat running down her pale face like tears. “No more screaming.” Without another word, she walked to the couch and sat heavily beside Pixel.
Nate tried to twist his thoughts back together. Alden had warned them not to bring Pixel here, but he didn’t know why it mattered so much. And he didn’t know why Agatha was cross with him for being sick. He wanted her to be fond of him, but it felt like the memory of a longing. Nothing made sense, so he focused on what he knew. “You make Remedy,” he said to her.
She grasped Nate’s wrist, fingers gentle at his pulse point. “Yes.”
Nate watched her face and saw fine lines around her eyes he’d missed before. “Is that how you’re so old?”
GEMs didn’t get old. He’d known that since he was a child, when Bernice had told him he’d never become like her, frail and weathered, with a lifetime of memories and knowledge.
“Yes,” Agatha said with a rueful, severe laugh. She helped him sit up, her grip strong and sure. “That is how I’ve survived for this long.”
Nate ached like one of his gutted tickers, broken apart and spread across a clean worktable. But it was a sore kind of hurt, not the mind-numbing agony from before.
Reed stood beside the table, close to Nate, his hand warm and heavy on Nate’s thigh. Tremors ran through him, his nerves as hot as electricity. Nate wanted to touch him, to reassure him, but his mind raced. He had to put the pieces together, light up the fog in his mind.
A realization struck him with a sting of betrayal. Another thing he should have known all along.
“You sold Remedy to Alden,” he said.
“You’re a clever one.” Agatha flashed her teeth. “Any Remedy in the Withers comes through me. I like to think of it as a service. It served you well until now, I imagine.”
Brick held Pixel on her lap and watched them closely, her blue eyes clouded with worry. Her gaze darted to a door like the one at the stairway, heavy and locked with a massive hinge. Once again, a distant familiarity struck Nate.
Reed’s fingers twisted into the loose fabric of Nate’s pants. “Why did you stop giving it to Alden? Nate almost died.”
“To flush him out, of course. So we could help him,” Agatha said. “Not Nathan specifically, but any GEM Alden was hiding. Though it turned out to only be you. We had a deal that he would send any GEMs he acquired to us, and he did not keep that end of his bargain. We had to remove the middleman.”
“Alden said we wouldn’t like what you had to say,” Reed said.
Agatha placed her hand over her heart and shook her head. “A chem dealer with his own personal GEM? Of course he did,” she said, gentle. Pained.
Aldenhadbeen shifty—always hiding something. The scrawled notes in his books. Telling Nate not to leave, not to be seen. It was too much to untangle, too much to consider. Had Alden selfishly kept him from his best chance at staying well? Of surviving?
If Nate hadn’t left Alden for the gang a year ago, he may have never left the shop again, may have wasted away long before now.
So of course Alden wouldn’t share him with Agatha.
