A groan from the front of the room caught my attention, and I looked up to find Lennox bent over his workstation, clutching his stomach. Even from where I stood, across the arena, I could see sweat glowing on his forehead.
I was not allowed to copy a classmate’s technique or recipe, but the officials couldn’t stop me from using what I happened to notice about someone else’s symptoms. Right? So long as I wasn’t watching anyone blatantly enough to be accused of cheating?
Abdominal cramps. Sweating. Common symptoms, which could come from almost any poison.
A pleasant humming came from my right, and I turned to see Wilder smiling as he added ingredients to a beaker suspended over an unlit burner. He seemed unaware of the solemnity both of the event and of his fellow students. He’d blocked it all out. Evidently effortlessly.
I had no such luxury.
I surreptitiously studied my classmates, beginning with those who’d taken the poison fastest. Lennox was the first, and…
Keryth suddenly pivoted away from her workstation and vomited on the stone tiles. A soft gasp rose from the audience.
Keryth had taken the poison after Lennox, but she was smaller—half his weight, maybe—so she was feeling the effects faster and likely more severely than he was.
She stood, turned resolutely back to her workstation, and picked up a beaker. But she only stared at it.
I frowned, trying to understand why she stood seemingly frozen, holding the beaker. I needed a closer look, but any observation of my fellow students and their methods would have to be covert. So I headed for the cupboard again, taking a path that took me by her station. And as I drew closer, I understood the problem.
Her hand was shaking so badly that she was clearly afraid to try to use the beaker—or even set it down—until the tremor passed, for fear of shattering the equipment.
Neurotoxin. Whatever they’d given us affected the brain and its control over the body. That should narrow things down.
Lennox, I noticed, had also developed a slight tremor, but his shaking was nowhere near as severe.
Women, it seemed, would get the worst of this challenge, by virtue of being generally smaller. Which meant I had mere minutes before I’d be in the same position as Keryth.
I rushed toward the cupboard and grabbed the most commonly useful elixir ingredients.
I still had no symptoms. Wilder, however, had stopped humming. Sweat had broken out across his forehead, and though he wasn’t clutching his stomach, he seemed distinctly uncomfortable. And more than a little irritated by that fact.
I flipped through Past Amber’s notes again, pulling out every page on poisons. Then I sorted through them, plucking out pages that detailed symptoms like those my classmates seemed to be suffering.
Nausea, vomiting, and abdominal distress were quite common among them, but the tremor was distinctive. That narrowed the field to four. All were neurotoxins.
At the front of the room, Lennox began to cough, spraying his workstation with spittle. Keryth was bent over, clutching the edge of her table with both hands, gasping for breath. And though the audience remained respectfully quiet, I could practically feel the weight of the gazes trained on us.
I added respiratory distress to the list of symptoms and turned back to Past Amber’s notes just as the first wave of nausea rolled over me, a tidal wave of queasiness and dizziness that left me clammy and unsteady on my feet.
I bowed my head for a moment, breathing through the discomfort. Then I focused on the list again. Sheets of parchment shook in my hands. My fingers clenched unexpectedly—my very body betraying me—and crumpled the pages.
With a groan, I set my notes on my workstation and flattened them.
Four possibilities. One was a snake venom, one was secreted from a poisonous frog, one was from a spider, and one was distilled from a variety of spiky hibiscus grown on this very island.
The antidotes to all four used three of the same ingredients, so I began measuring those out, moving slowly, to avoid dropping or spilling anything.
That was it. That was all I could do, until I knew for certain what I’d ingested. Until I understood what other specific ingredients should be added. How rapidly the solution should be heated, and to what temperature. Whether or not it should be condensed, purified, or diluted. How much of the provided beyn to use.
I turned to look at Wilder, hoping for some clue about technique—though he and I rarely approached any assignment the same way—but before I could process the setup of his equipment, my gaze snagged on his face, which was bright red and appeared a bit puffy.
My own face began to burn, but without access to a looking glass, I couldn’t tell whether or not I was imagining that symptom simply because I’d seen it in him. But I wasnotimagining the sudden pins-and-needles sensation in the tips of my fingers.
My heart racing—the room spinning—I turned back to my notes and scanned them for mentions of numbness, redness, or swollen skin.
None of the four remaining toxins listed any of that. Frustration lit a fire in my belly.
I was missing something.
