Rami was further gone than she was, and she worried that he no longer had the reserves to sweat through the soaring temperature. Every few hours, she would stumble to his room, praying that the fever had finally broken and cursing when she placed a hand on his forehead.
And there was the thirst—the ever-present thirst. No running water existed within their house. On the second day she staggered toward the pump situated at the bend of the road, filled a bucketonly halfway, as she could not manage a heavier weight, then dragged it back along the cobbled street. No one stopped to help her; her neighbors saw the fever in her eyes and turned their collars up. She made Rami drink first, triumphant when even the smallest droplet of water breached his dry mouth, before guzzling the water herself afterward. All the while, she dreaded the next morning when she would have to refill the bucket once again.
But every day after that she opened her door to find that someone had left a pail brimming with water on her step. Living in Golborne was like being fed spoonfuls of cruelty or kindness, never quite becoming accustomed to the taste of either.
And throughout her illness, Leena kept vigil.
It had been three years since Leena had gained her abilities to see past the curtain of death, and she’d learned in that interim that ghosts had the awful habit of trying to possess her body when she was weak. There had come times—terrifying times—when she’d awoken in a random field or on a strange street with no recollection of having got there. What had she done in those moments of blankness? Had she hurt someone? Hadshebeen hurt without knowingit?
In those first few months after Leena had first begun seeing phantoms, she’d rarely slept. She had been a lady’s companion at the time, under the employment of the esteemed Lord Hargreaves and his mother. It was a coveted position that would’ve saved Leena from the horrors of the factories—that would’ve freed her lungs from cotton filaments, her eyes from flying shrapnel, her wrists from the lashes of the angry overseers. It was the reason her baba had pushed her and Rami to go to school; he’d worked his fingers stiff over the spinning mules in the cotton factory to doso.
Still, despite her father’s sacrifices, she had quit nearly three weeks after she’d seen her first ghost. Leena’s odd behavior had begun to arouse the suspicions of the watchful housekeeper and butler; they’d begun to comment on the numerous times Leena had been seen whispering to walls or striking back at nothing. Leenaknew that it wouldn’t be long before one of them would express their concerns to Lord Hargreaves, suggesting demurely that it might be safer for everyone if Leena was sent to the state sanatorium.
She ran before that could happen.
Baba hadn’t yet been imprisoned by the time she returned home, although he’d already begun planning the walkouts with other union leaders. While her father’s Morish was broken and stuttering, he was eloquent in Algaraan. He used to lecture in history at the University of Algaraa back home before the civil war broke out, and Baba’s fluency could reach the migrant workers better than any Mor in a blue collar could.
Rather than be disappointed at Leena’s abrupt termination, Baba had wrapped her in a fierce hug. He smelled familiar—like a factory chimney.
“You’re home,hayati.” He spoke in Algaraan, calling herhayati—my life—before leading her inside their cramped home. He didn’t scold her for quitting, as Leena had feared he would the entire journey from the south, but merely ordered her to go to sleep. They would sort it all out in the morning.
They never had a chance. For that very night, the soldiers had come for Baba.
The Al-Sayer siblings were left alone to face the bitter stings of their grief and Leena’s horrifying new curse.
For their grief, they could only live throughit.
For the ghosts, Leena and Rami tried everything to ward them away. They hung garlic cloves and dried thyme over the door, burned incense. Leena lost weight. Dark circles marked the area beneath their eyes. Any knowledge they stumbled on was accidental, through trial and error. Charms did nothing. But ghosts were repelled by the strike of two copper coins hitting each other, and the sound of humming disturbed them.
She’d learned that phantoms were at their strongest at noon and midnight, their forms taking clearer shape, their lost eyes at oncealert, as if being pulled back into the world of the living. Leena learned to dread the hollow chime of twelve church bells.
It was Rami’s idea to encircle her bed with salt; he had read it in an old book from the lending library. By that point, Leena was past the point of exhaustion, her skin so gray that she looked phantom-like herself. When she realized that ghosts could not cross the unbroken circle of salt, she burst into sobs. Every night, the phantoms lingered on the other side, various faces of the departed—some wrinkled, some starved with protruding eyes and bloated bellies, others with manacles and chains around their wrists. They watched her, still as scarecrows. They didn’t pace, they didn’t stir, they merely waited.
It was the first relief she had had in months. She wouldn’t leave the salt circle except for her toilette. She kept the curtains drawn and the windows shut, muffling the sounds of life happening outside that she could not join. Rami silently brought her food, then took away the unfinished plates without a word. One day, he left an Algaraan book on the bed.
He cleared his throat. “If you study hard enough, you can find employment in the Algaraan consulate or you can translate in the refugee camps. You could even translate Mama’s poetry books. You cannot hide behind your salt forever.”
When she looked up at him, she noticed that her brother also looked haggard. Guilt bloomed in her chest.
Before this, she had grown up speaking Algaraan like a foreigner, in the same way many of the immigrant children born in Morland did, stumbling in and out of both languages, not being able to find a home in either. While her Algaraan had been heavily accented, she had learned to read Morish in the schoolroom with ease, and spoke it eloquently as if Morish—and not Algaraan—was the language of her heart.
She began studying linguistics, burying her pain in her books, then took her first tentative steps out her front door. Eventually, she found work in a laundry factory—a far cry from when she was employed as a lady’s companion. For a while, things were better.
Until the night she woke up to a phantom hovering inches from her face, wild-eyed, skin mottled, as he tried to bludgeon his soul into her body. She fought him, humming frantically, reaching for the coins she kept under her pillow. She yanked and writhed, finally gripping the copper pieces and striking them together. The ghost lurched away, and Leena scrambled out of bed to find that a mouse had run through the salt, breaking the circle.
She never slept easy again.
—
Whether it was the effects of her weakened body or not, the nightmares that plagued Leena’s fevered sleep were disturbing. She didn’t think they were possessions. Several times throughout the night she’d stumble out of bed to ensure the salt circle remained unbroken, but it was as if her fever allowed remnants of the spirits to claw into her subconscious.
More than once, Leena had nightmares of running out of her house and into Margery’s, petrified she had given the old lady Sweeper’s Cough, only to find her on the floor, long dead from the illness. She’d awaken with a silent scream curling in her chest, only calming herself once she remembered that Margery had told her that she’d already had the disease and could not catch it again.
Leena also dreamed of the dead, their memories sinking teeth into her.
She was a little boy on the beach running from a foaming, rabid dog that snapped its jaws at her shoulder. She felt the agony of the bite as if she had experienced it herself, and she jerked herself awake with a cry. The flickering candlelight threw shadows across her small chamber, and beyond the salt circle was the little boy, his shoulder a mangled wound, his eyes unfocused from the effect of the virus. Leena reached for her copper coins, feeling comforted by the metal cooling her skin.
Afterward, Leena was an old woman on her deathbed. Her joints ached, and she felt the cancer eating her abdomen. Her husbandwas not beside her, the sheets crumpled but empty. She heard muffled movement from another room.
