“I came as soon as I heard.” The Sister knelt over the bundle on the litter, resting a battered leather bag beside her. “Nancy, take the others and ready the sickroom. And you, come here. I need you with me.”
Emma realized that this was directed to her. The Sister’s voicehad sounded gruff, but the hand that beckoned her trembled. Emma knelt with her.
The bloodstained bundle on the floor was a person. Someone had covered it—her—with a blanket. Red blooms had already soaked through the fabric.
The hair was matted, not smoothly tucked under a nightcap. Instead of glaring, the eyes were unseeing. But the face was familiar. The Sister looked at Emma closely. “You know her.”
“We met last night. We had a disagreement. About me sharing her room.” Emma looked down, saw her hands clutching her elbows tight to her body. Realized she was shaking. “What happened to her? Did those men—”
“Do this to her?” The Sister smoothed the hair from the girl’s forehead. “No, this is what happens when you cross the Night City.”
The Night City had done this. The sick feeling clawed up from Emma’s stomach to her throat.
“Sara must have fled the house while the others were sleeping.”
“Is that why she didn’t want me in the room? So she could leave—”
“Unnoticed. Indeed. The girl believed she could escape. Start a new life, outside the City.”
Emma looked down at the figure on the litter. Sara’s lips were moving soundlessly.
“She did what is forbidden. She tried to flee the City.”
Emma’s voice shook. “What happened?”
“There are beasts that guard the outer reaches of the Night City. Monstrous, ravening things. Answering only to the City. There was no hope of making it past. It was madness to try.”
Saskia’s pale face appeared in the stairway. “Sister? The sickroom’s ready now.”
“Right.” The Sister got to her feet with a grunt of effort. “All of you. Lift her gently. We can only move her once. She’s close to the end of her strength.”
The fox maidens gathered around their sister, each taking hold of an edge of the litter. Emma joined them. Her panic was threatening to spill over. Fugitives were not treated kindly. There were consequences for those who crossed the Night City. She saw them now, etched in blood on another girl’s face.
What would happen if she were caught searching old books for the secret to crossing between worlds? If she were discovered planning to escape?
When they lifted the litter, Sara screamed.
The sickroom had the cold look of a barely used space. The Sister set her bag on a countertop and began whisking labeled jars from its insides. Emma watched her sort linens into baskets by the bedside, lay out instruments in precise rows on the worktop. There was an ease to her movements Emma had never seen. In the sickroom, the Sister finally looked at home in herself. She lit the candles and beckoned Emma to her side. The other fox maidens filed out. When the Sister finally lifted the blanket from Sara’s body, Emma flinched. But after one rebellious roll, she forced her stomach to stay put.
“You have no medical training, I suppose?”
Emma shook her head. “I studied law.” She clamped her lips shut again quickly. The salt-metal scent of blood was in her mouth.
“Pity.”
“Did you? Have medical training?” Emma asked, watching the deft way the Sister’s gnarled fingers unrolled bandages.
“I might have done. Had I been born in a different age.” Before Emma could ask what age she had been born into, the Sister had turned to rifle through a drawer. “You might give her some water.”
Emma tried, but the water mostly dribbled from the sides of Sara’s mouth. Emma forced her eyes downward, to what she had been trying not to see. Beneath the blooms of blood, the sticky gleam of raw flesh. Emma realized that her hands were knuckling into her stomach.
“Will she—” She could not say it.
The Sister joined her at the bedside, a jar in hand. “No, she may not die of this. But with these wounds…”
“What can I do?”
“Good girl. Fetch me that jar—no, don’t open it yourself. I have everything here secured with alarm spells. Let me… there.”
