“New plan. If I find a clear liquid, you smell it.”
I agree to that, and head to one side of the lab while Beckett goes to the other. I lean over to sniff a blue vial at random. There are many of these. It smells a little like amrita, but I would think amrita was made in the kitchens, not in the labs. Maybe the kitchens need some of what grows here. Maybe this is cookery rather than chemistry and we’re in the wrong lab.
“Beck,” I say. He straightens from his examination of a coil of metal tubing. “Don’t move anything. They will remember.”
He nods, and goes back to looking. And then I notice something odd across the room’s front wall. A tall, square box made of glass, almost as tall as me, similar to the dome over the tiny tree, only this glass is housing a vine. The vine twists around a young silvercurrant bush, slowly choking the life out of it, its own small berries hanging shriveled from the ends in haphazard clusters. Bitterblack.
The rage inside me flames, blown by the sight of that black berry. One way or another, none of this will stand. Nita will be the last one, I think. No matter what I have to do.
I step away from the bitterblack, wishing I Knew a safe way to destroy it, and find another box of clear glass, this one large and rectangular, stretching across a long table, its inside divided into three clear sections. I bend down to peer at it. Each section has two holes cut through the front, and the holes have … gloves. Like the smiths sometimes wear. But these gloves are long, sealed to the glass, so that someone could work inside the box without the risk of touching with their skin. The first section has small tools, a tiny scalpel, and one fat seed pod, cut open, and there are two glass bottles, very small, one with a minuscule amount of fine white powder.
I study the box, seeing how the bottles can be passed into the middle section, sealed, washed, then passed into the third section, where wafting flowers clean the air, waving their feelers against the glass. Four full vials of powder sit among them. Whatever they’re harvesting here, it must be poisonous. Dangerous. Even worse than the bitterblack.
“Hey.”
I jump. I was so engrossed I didn’t notice Beckett leaning down beside me. “A clean space,” he says, looking into the glass box. Then, “Someone just passed along the corridor, outside that door.” He nods toward the main door, just down the wall from the bitterblack.
I straighten up, looking at the door in alarm.
“They didn’t stop, and yes, the door is locked.”
And suddenly I understand how a person can become dependent on technology. I was so sure Beckett’s glasses would know someone was coming I wasn’t thinking to be afraid.
“Want to come smell this for me?” he asks.
I go with him, between a row of tables, and at the end of a distiller is a jar of clear liquid, some of the smaller bottles Reddix was using sitting empty beside it. I nod at Beckett. I already Know. I can smell it. But now that I think of it, why was Reddix filling the bottles for our injections? And in a storage room? That should have been a chemist’s job.
I peer at the clear, harmless-looking liquid. And what if this really is Knowing? What if all we’ve ever had to do was throw this away, dump it in the Torrens, and no more Council, no more Underneath and Outside. One people. And I would still have my memories.
I could try to live with them. For Beckett. Which is easy to say in this moment, when I’m not killing Nita over and over again or listening to the crack of my brother’s bones. I will beg for mercy when that happens again. But maybe I could heal, like Grandpapa said. I could try. And I wouldn’t have to Forget him.
Beckett is on his knees, staring through the glasses at the liquid in the jar.
“What do you see?” I ask him. “Is it like a picture?”
“No. Right now I can see the jar, but I can also see words about what’s inside. Amounts and percentages of everything that makes it what it is, and what those things can be used for. It’s still analyzing … ”
I see the tiny movements of his eyes as he reads. He reads for a long time, hands splayed on the table. Then he looks up at me.
“It’s vitamins,” he whispers. “Concentrated like you wouldn’t believe”—he looks at the jar again, like he wants to be sure—“but just vitamins. Not even anything that can’t be identified … ”
And I feel an ache deep inside my chest. A shriveling kind of pain that in my mind looks like bitterblack.
“I can’t believe it,” he says. He tents his fingers over his face, still staring at the jar. “I was so sure … ”
So it is Forgetting that has to bring down the Council. No memories and no Beckett.
No matter what, I will lose.
And now so will he.
I follow Samara through the empty corridors, feeling just about as hollow inside. I made her hope. I saw that in the lab, because I saw when her hope was gone. And now she gets to remember that, too. Feel it over and over again. Until she doesn’t have to anymore. And it’s then I decide that I am an idiot. A really selfish one. I saw her scream in the cave, watched her face tell me a story of pain. Just being in her own room was torture. And she was hoping not to Forget, to keep those memories, heal everyone, and keep her own pain, and that was because of me. If I really love her, I’ll help her Forget. I’ll do it even if it rips me in two.
I think it might.
She takes my hand, because that’s the way we go places now. We’re on one of the lowest levels, either the second or third, I think, when Sam turns right through a doorway. There’s a small set of stairs on the other side, leading to another door. I’m starting to get what a maze this city is.
“The keys,” Sam whispers.
I fish the iron ring out of my shirt, untie them from the lace at my collar. She puts a key to the lock, and then we’re inside some kind of room, a place that hasn’t been used in a long time from the smell, too dark to see. But before I can switch to night vision, the little green light in the corner of the lenses goes crazy. Pulsing at double, triple the speed that it was. Whatever the power source is, we’re getting close.
She brings me across the dark room like she can see it, and I hear her putting a key to another door. Then we step into a void. Black, a solid floor beneath my feet, but with a huge sense of space. I’m switching to night vision when Samara whispers, barely a breath, “Is anyone here?”
“No.” The little bit of echo I made is startling. It came from all directions, above and below.
“Then make your light happen.”
I turn on the light, my eyes adjust, and I just stand there, staggered. “You have got to be kidding me … ”
Books. Thousands of them. An enormous, spiraling shaft of shelves, farther than I can see with my eyes in both directions. I’m standing on some kind of railed wooden walkway, and we make our way down it in a twisting slope, round and round. I can’t think of a crime Joanna Cho-Rodriguez wouldn’t commit to get ten minutes in here.