The girls dispersed before they could be told what to do, and Bisma pulled Luna aside.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t have the freeze potion for you, Luna,’ she said. If they had, Luna wouldn’t have had to go through the awful bloodletting process. ‘Can you ever forgive me?’
‘Baji, it’s not your fault,’ Luna said, squeezing her hand. ‘I’m just glad you have it now for Deebs, so she won’t have to go through what I did.’ Her hand absentmindedly went to the scars on her arm again, a darkness entering her eyes for a moment. Then Luna shook her head, and Bisma wondered if she imagined it.
‘You’ll find the cure,’ Luna said. ‘I know you will.’
But as Bisma carried Deeba back to Xander’s greenhouse, she couldn’t help but doubt herself, her thoughts racing. She still needed to find out who had done this, and why, but finding the cure was more pressing. She just hoped she’d be able to do everything and that her sisters’ faith in her was not misguided.
Letting herself down was something she could survive.
Letting her sisters down was something she could not.
16
‘Alright,’ Xander said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Let’s get to work.’
She was back at the greenhouse and had laid Deeba down on a small cot Xander had procured from Forest knew where. The advantages of being rich, she supposed.
‘I’m glad to see the freeze potion is holding,’ Xander said, after examining Deeba. ‘Now to make the cure … It would be easiest to run trials if we had the poison to test on.’
‘Right,’ Bisma agreed. ‘Can we extract it from Deeba?’
‘Precisely what I was thinking,’ Xander said. ‘If we take some of her blood, we should be able to separate the poison from it.’
‘But the poison won’t stay alive outside of the body,’ Bisma said. ‘Didn’t you say the blood we extracted from Luna wasn’t viable to examine?’
‘Yes, that is a problem …’ Xander ran a hand through his hair, thinking.
‘What if we manipulate the freeze potion and apply it to the poison to keep it from dying. Would that work?’
‘Possibly,’ Xander said. ‘But I don’t know if manipulating the poison in that way would affect how it would interact with a cure. Also, how would we do that in the first place?’
They both puzzled over it, until Bisma was struck by another idea.
‘Wait,’ she said. ‘What if we simply put the poison on something else living, but make sure it can’t kill the host?’
‘That would work,’ Xander said. ‘With your speciality in growing, particularly. You could make a plant that could survive that sort of thing, and we could inject it with the isolated poison.’
‘Alright,’ Bisma said. ‘I’ll work on that; you work on extracting and separating the poison.’
They both attended their tasks, working in comfortable silence. Bisma was used to working alone, so she anticipated working with Xander to be a nuisance, but she was glad to see that he was just as serious as she was when it came to their magic.
He gave her space, working at a different table, as she tried to create what they needed.
It took some time, but Bisma created a smaller version of an evergreen tree, though of course it was manipulated with magic to become something more. Evergreen trees survived the harshest of winters without dying; this magical plant would survive this poison.
‘I’m just about finished as well,’ Xander said, spreading a fine white powder over a small dish of Deeba’s blood.
Bisma went to watch, standing on her tiptoes to look over his shoulder so she wouldn’t be in the way. The blood was a strange color, a kind of dark purple, red and blue mixed together.
A moment after the blood absorbed the powder, the dish made a hissing sound. Bisma watched as the liquid separated itself, until there was red blood to one side and dark blue liquid on the other.
Xander released a breath. ‘Finally.’
‘Now to test it,’ she said.
Xander put the poison into a syringe and brought it to the other table, where her magical evergreen tree was waiting. It wasabout a foot tall and perfectly lush, though the green leaves were threaded through with iridescent silver.
