Nausea rolled over me again, and I clenched my jaw against the forcible return of my breakfast. My hands shook, my fingers still tingling, and…did they look a little red?
Directly in front of me, Yoslyn gasped. She coughed, spraying her workstation with spittle, just like Lennox had, drawing more soft reactions from the crowd, but she was close enough for me to notice the crimson tint of her saliva. Was the blood from her lungs? Or from her mouth? Were her lungs filling with fluid? With blood? Or had ulcers developed on her tongue?
Focus!Yoslyn would be fine. Or she would die. Either way, her struggle was no different than anyone else’s. We’dallconsumed poison. Every member of my cohort was likely less than an hour from death—by design. The only way to walk out of the amphitheater, for any of us, was to maintain focus and put our skills to work.
Wilder had two elixirs going, each over a lit burner, each boiling at a different intensity, based on the height and color of the flame. But I could not tell what he’d put into his beakers, nor could I understand why he was making two different antidotes.
All I knew for sure was that the symptoms I was experiencing didn’t match anything in Past Amber’s research on toxins.
With a groan, fighting another brutal wave of nausea, I dug back through her notes, reading as fast as I could, desperately scanning the text not just for the wordtoxinbut for the symptoms I’d seen and was beginning to truly suffer. Finally, the second time I went through the pages, forcing myself to slow down and process the words, one stuck out.
Tremors.
I kept reading.
Respiratory distress with the production of bloody sputum. And…swollen red skin.
My gaze snapped up to the top of the page, where the subject she’d expounded upon was written in large, scrolling print and underlined twice. The top line was thin and wispy, done in a hurry. The second, lower line, however, was thicker and darker. As if it had been written with more intentionality, with a freshly dipped quill.
But it was the words themselves that captured my attention:Acute ingestion of base metals.
Metal toxicity.
I hadn’t included this page among the poisons because metal wasn’t a poison. But itcouldbe a toxin.
My gaze dropped again to the section with the symptoms that matched the ones I was feeling. The ones I was seeing all around me.
Arsenic.
I’d swallowed a vial full of arsenic.
Normally, acute arsenic poisoning would take several days to become fatal, but this was the Black Trial. Whatever the administering team of professors had done to the toxin had clearly accelerated its impact, for the purposes of the event.
I’d swallowed not just arsenic, butalchemically compoundedarsenic.
Shit.
Hands shaking, I swept my notes on toxins and poisons off the edge of the workstation and into my open satchel, distantly noting my official observer as he scribbled in his journal from his stool at the end of the table. Then I flipped the page on metal toxicity over, hoping against hope that Past Amber had taken notes on a remedy.
And she—I—had. Copious, prolific notes, full of concepts that strained the level of knowledge I’d managed to reacquire and exceeded my post-amnesia experience entirely. It would take me hours just to read through all of it and determine which parts were relevant to this specific scenario, much less identify the formula for an antidote, and…
Wait. The alchemical symbol for arsenic was underlined, in that same bold style as the second line beneath the title of this section of notes, trailing downward on the left end of the stroke. As if the writer had started on the right and moved her quill to the left.
As if she—no,he—were left-handed.
Desmond.
He’d been in the lab that morning, making a remedy for potential conception, for me. While he was there, he’d gathered my notes into my satchel and brought it to me. Had he also done this? Underlined the relevant bits of Past Amber’s research on metal toxicity?
Why? He’d said he had no idea what the poison would be.
A cough billowed up from my chest and exploded from my throat, spraying pink-tinged droplets all over the notes, and distantly, I heard another murmur from the crowd.
Panicked, I swiped the sleeve of my robe across the page, leaving pink smears across the ink. Smudging the print.
There was no time to wonder how or why Desmond had decided to help me, or to feel like I was getting an unfair advantage. Yes, I wanted to survive on my own merits. But more than that, I wanted tosurvive.
I scanned the text, homing in on each underlined word and phrase, reading just enough of the surrounding bits to understand the context. Then I raced back to the supply cupboard, grabbed what I needed, and got to work.
