“Ms. Fallbrook!” my official observer snapped, his stool squealing behind me as he stood. “You are not allowed to intervene with another student.”
I knelt next to Yoslyn and used the edge of my cape to wipe scalding elixir from her hand. Blood lined her lips, and as I tried to lift her head, she coughed, spraying a foamy, pink-tinged spittle all over us both.
Vaguely, I was aware that several members of our audience had stood from their seats in order to see us over Yoslyn’s workstation. They whispered fiercely to one another, but no one tried to stop me when I brushed hair back from her forehead. Or when I pulled her chin down and poured the last half of my elixir into her mouth.
I had no idea whether or not I’d made the right cure. Or whether half of a properly brewed antidote would be enough to save either of us. All I knew was that I wasn’t dead yet, and that I could not step out of the arena and let her die, if there was any chance I could help her.
Yoslyn’s observer, a woman with hair as dark as her eyes, contrasting harshly with very pale skin, pulled me up by one arm. My own observer scribbled furiously in his journal. Then he turned to me, while Yoslyn’s observer knelt to examine her, journal and quill at the ready.
“It’ll take a few minutes,” I said to the balding man as he pulled my chin down to peer into my mouth. And yet…I’d stopped coughing.
He pulled my lower eyelids down, one at a time, then looked into my ears and peered intently at my face. He turned me around, and I felt something hard and round pressed against my back.
“Breathe,” he ordered softly.
I inhaled, then let the breath out. Had the rest of the cohort been examined this thoroughly?
“Cough,” he ordered, so I forced a cough.
Nothing came up from my throat. I tasted no blood.
The hard circle left my back, and when I heard the scratch of quill on parchment, I turned to find him writing in his journal once again. But when I tried to read the words, he retreated to his stool. A moment later, he set his quill on my workstation, stood, and gave a nod to the Bluehelm through the glass panels. Then he gestured at the attendant to open the door for me.
“Wait,” I said as the attendant waved me forward. “What about Yoslyn?”
“She is none of your concern,” her observer insisted.
Yoslyn was sitting up. She coughed softly, but I saw no blood. Her eyes looked clear, and though she had not yet stood, she looked steadier by the moment.
With an exhalation that emptied my lungs, I crossed the arena, avoiding both shattered glass and a sour puddle of vomit, and stepped through the open glass doorway. Many members of the audience were still standing. Some stared at Yoslyn. Others stared at me. But the only look I returned as I climbed the steps, following a path already trodden by nine of my classmates, was Desmond’s—not of relief, but of pure and utter pride.
“Amber! Thank every force of order in the known world!” Wilder appeared in front of me like a wild-eyed apparition the instant I stepped into the Conservatory atrium, and his hug was like an embrace from the universe itself. “I knew you could do it!” he declared, but the relief in his expression and the exaggerated volume of his voice said otherwise.
He’d thought I was going to die. That, at the very least, it was a strong possibility.
I hugged him back, happy as ever to prove him wrong, which had been a specific pleasure of mine since we were hardly old enough to talk.
“Where is everyone?” I asked when he finally let me go. When I could look around the atrium and note only five of our classmates were seated on benches built into the walls. Keryth and Lennox were huddled together closest to the staircase, arms around each other. Cressa sat nearest the exterior door, and Pryce and Gavin had claimed isolated spots across the atrium, along the opposite wall.
Wilder made six, and he was the only one standing. Everyone else looked exhausted and still nauseated.
I was the seventh to emerge into the atrium, and Yoslyn and Petyr were still in the amphitheater. Which meant three were missing.
“Adria?” I said. “And Raelah? And…Kornell.” But then I remembered. “He failed, didn’t he?”
Wilder nodded. “We haven’t seen him. But Adria and Raelah are in the infirmary. Did you not see them on your way back?”
I hadn’t looked. I’d hardly noticed a thing on my walk through the main corridor of the Panacea wing, other than the fact that I was alive. That my nausea was abating, my hands steadying, and my lungs clearing. The absence of illness had left me floating in a vaguely pleasant fugue state, a cloudy oblivion in which my feet carried me forward with little help from my mind.
“Will they survive?” I asked, clutching at Wilder’s hand. I found that I needed the contact—the warmth—to ground me in this moment. To assure me that I was real, and that this wasn’t all some reverie of my dying mind as I lay unconscious on the floor of the glass-walled arena. “Will theypass?”
“I suppose that remains to be seen.” Keryth sounded a bit breathless, and my gaze found her over Wilder’s shoulder as he turned toward her voice. She was still cuddled so close to Lennox that they seemed to comprise one form with two heads, each with one arm lost to sight around the other’s back.
Lennox frowned up at me, his cheek pressed to hers, his eyes narrowed. “How didyoupass?”
“She survived the same way you did,” Wilder snapped. “With a lot of talent and hard work.”
“And no memory at all,” Lennox added, his voice hollow and echoing with danger, like a plunge down a long, narrow shaft.
