For a beat, I look at it, then a reluctant sigh slumps me. I set the phial down on the floorboards, then take the jar.
Serena kicks back from me and stalks for the rows of cabinets and cupboards on the other side of the room.
Her voice follows her, “I’m sick of them—of the men, my father, your father, Oliver, Dray, the lot of them.”
I start sliding the lotion over my cheek.
“I’m sick of their rules, their commands, how they are only charming when it suits them, but ugly when we dare speak a word they don’t like. I’m sick of the control, the restriction, the future…”
My fingertips still on my cheek, the wet milky substance dripping down my jaw.
As if now speaking to herself, she goes on, “I am nauseas in my sickness of stolen futures.”
I watch her hair sway like a rope from a cinched ponytail. She leans over a rotted table, rummages through things I can’t see but can hear. A lot of paper, cardboard, glasses clinking, and finally she tugs out a bag. A plain white canvas type of bag, the kind the poorer students carry around the academy.
I dip my fingers into the jar again, almost robotically, and rub more onto my face.
It’s a soothing sensation, but I don’t get to relish it, not before Serena is marching back to the medical cabinet.
“That’s just the way it is,” she says to herself, lips curling around her ivory teeth. “Don’t question it. Ignore all potential and talent we might have and live to serve the men who claim to love us.”
Her mouth purses and—she blows a raspberry.
My brows hike.
A gesture like that, crude and juvenile, from someone like Serena… it’s startling.
But her words are what should startle me.
Instead, they feel sort of distant. A rant that lashes around me but doesn’t quite touch me.
Because maybe I know, deep in that worming gut of misery and fear, that if I was accepted from the beginning, as a deadblood or with magic, then I wouldn’t be unhappy with the way things are.
I wouldn’t feel trapped.
Serena has that existence that I always wanted.
So how can she feel suffocated?
She gets to breathe.
She does not know what suffocation is.
The metal cabinet clangs, loud enough to strike my bones, and I cringe against it.
She muffles a curse under her breath, then tips some things into the canvas bag—but I can’t see what through the door.
I screw the lid back onto the jar. “What are you doing?”
Serena glances at me—then double takes. “Done with that?”
In three brisk steps, she’s on me, snatching the jar from my loose grip, and shoving it into the bag.
“I’m leaving,” she says, then kicks aside the cupboard door, revealing all the bandages and phials and syringes inside. “I’m taking what I might need. And you are coming with me.”
For a heartbeat, two, three, I am utterly still.
Then my lashes flutter over dazed, drying eyes, aching with bloodshot, and I watch her hand dart from box to box, stealing all sorts of supplies and shoving them into the canvas bag.
