Page 7 of These Divided Shores
Lu slid her legs to the floor and forced herself to shakily stand. Metal clanked next to her scuffed boots—a manacle that fed to a chain bolted to the wall.
She was a prisoner, then. How long? Where?
She felt one answer in the way her body ached from immobility. Her empty stomach grumbled angrily; her throat scratched with sand and dust.
Too long. She could be anywhere. Anything could have been done to her.
Revulsion clouded her vision. She wavered, wiping sweaty palms on her black breeches, wrestling each breath until she managed one long, calm inhale.
Where was Vex? Ben? Nayeli, Edda, Gunnar? She couldn’t fall apart, not yet. She would figure out where she was. She was, impossibly, healed. She could escape.
The window was too far for her chain length to reach. What crates were close by, blocking her cot from the rest of the room, were sealed, and no stray magic sat on the tables. She grabbed the only weapon-like item she could find: metal tongs. If they failed as a weapon, she could use them to pick the lock on her ankle.
“We should increase their dosages.”
Lu stiffened. The voice speaking in Argridian came from two places at once: from behind the crates and barrels, farther into the room; and from her nightmares.Milo.
Panic’s numbness became a shield as, step by gentle step, Lu rounded the crates, the matted tail of her braid brushing her neck.
Milo, along with half a dozen Argridians, stood on the far side of the room over three more cots filled with eithersleeping or unconscious patients. Raiders, Lu guessed, and she let a part of herself relax that she didn’t know them. One had blond hair; another wore a crocodile-skin vest. Raiders from the Mecht syndicate.
The Mecht syndicate’s Head, Ingvar Pilkvist, had stockpiled magic plants for Elazar’s experiments. Were the boxes around her from his stores? Lu couldn’t be in Backswamp, though—this building was too solid, unlike the dilapidated, swamp-worn structures there, and the light through the window was too pure.
“Increase the dosage,” Milo repeated, impatient. He was polished to gleaming, black hair neatly tied back, blue military uniform pressed into straight lines. A perfect facade, the way the lush magenta leaves of the Digestive Death plant contrasted with its deadly poison. “Menesia is one of the only plants that is permanent on its own. Something will unlock eventually.”
Confusion was a welcome counter to Lu’s fear. Menesia—the memory-erasing plant?
Vex had spoken of Menesia when they had spilled their souls to each other in theRapid Meander’s pilothouse. Remembering him, his outstretched hand toward her—Lu reeled, willing herself to focus on what he had said. That Elazar gave some of his victims Menesia to make them forget he had people experiment on them in his as yet failed quest for permanent magic.
Small doses of Menesia could wipe recent memories.Larger doses, and the taker could lose a year; enough, and they could forget how to eat, how to speak.
Lu stayed behind a stack of crates, her breathing shallow. Milo was right—Menesia was, more or less, permanent, in that takers did not regain their memory over time. These people were discussing Elazar’s magic experiments.
“Similar tests have not produced the desired results,” said a priest in long brown robes. “We could combine Menesia with other plants to see if it imparts permanence to other magics.”
“Prepare it,” Milo snapped. “With double the Menesia dosage. Force the permanence.”
Another Argridian rose from the bedside of an unconscious raider. “I know my daughter,” he said. “If Adeluna figured out the cure for Shaking Sickness, and that cure is tied to permanent magic, then it is about precision, not quantity.”
Lu’s frail, beaten body couldn’t fight the rage and sorrow that crashed into her.
Tom was here.
Tom and Kari had first sent Lu out to spy for the revolutionaries when she was ten years old. A child could go unnoticed, so she had obeyed to help her parents save her home.
When Tom started teaching her how to fight, it had been“for her own protection.”She had killed two men in self-defense. But once, Tom asked her to follow him into thejungle and pull a trigger on“an enemy. You’re so good, Lulu-bean. You’re doing so well.”
But while on Elazar’s ship, Milo had admitted that Tom was his informant.Tom had been on the inside of most of the revolutionaries’ plans during the war, and after they won—thanks to Kari’s tactical prowess, moves Tom hadn’t known about—he had been a trusted member of the Council. Lu had done terrible things at his request, secrets stolen and lives taken.
And it had all been for the enemy.
Lu swallowed her tight knot of agony. She had loved her father. Shedidlove him. And in the five years since the war, Tom had been on Grace Loray with Kari and Lu, working to do good things for this island. He couldn’t be loyal to Argrid.
Was it too much to hope that he was a double agent?
Milo glared at Tom now, arms folded across the glinting medals on his jacket. The other Argridians—priests and monxes, some defensors—fell silent, conceding to this tension.
“How do you know, Andreu?” Milo snapped. “You may have the king convinced that you were unaware your daughter healed herself of Shaking Sickness, but I’m not fooled.”
