“Evelyn! We found you!” a voice very unlike Captain Goode’s said.
As I was set down on a roof, my body was finally adjusted so I could see my captors. Laura and Emily were both frowning and ready to argue.
“How did you find me? You two shouldn’t be out here,” I said, struggling as Emily held me in place.
“We followed you! From the rooftops!” Laura grinned, clearly enjoying her adventure. “And we’re not going back until you are.”
I stared at their stubborn gazes. “Even after what I said? It’s my fault your parents are gone.”
“No, it’s not,” Laura said. “It’s Captain Goode’s.”
“But I should have—could have saved them. I have this amazing power, and it’s still not helping anyone.”
“So help them,” Laura said rather bluntly, pointing to the building behind me across the street.
It was long and massive. Its tall gate seemed to stretch down the road forever, disappearing into the fog. St. Thomas’ Hospital. Rose had told me about this over the years, saving every little mention from our father’s newspapers. It was still being built, and it was already ten times larger than the hospital Miss Grey and I had visited to find Oliver.
I stared for a long while. Months before, I’d thought about walking into a hospital and healing everyone, though Captain Goode had discouraged me from doing it, on the grounds that it would draw too much attention to the Society. The entire city would be talking about the miracle.
Which made it such a simple, perfect idea now. They already knew about miracles.
“That is a … brilliant notion,” I said. “Emily, will you bring me back down?”
“Only if you let us come with you,” she said.
“You should go home, both of you.”
“It’s not a home if everyone leaves,” Emily said stubbornly. There was a note in her voice of deep sadness, and I looked at her more fully. Emily was constantly trying to keep us together, keep everyone safe and happy. So unlike her own family that had abandoned her to a wretched asylum.
“We will stay up here all night.” Laura sat down to demonstrate, reaching into her overly large coat and pulling out a handkerchief-wrapped bundle that turned out to be a muffin.
I sighed, wished for a muffin as well, then decided it would not hurt to take them into a hospital.
“If you promise to be very quiet,” I began.
“Evelyn! When have I ever let you down?” Laura’s tiny hands were on her hips and her eyes were blazing, and I loved her irrepressible heart so much in that moment.
“Never,” I conceded and pulled her in for a hug.
Emily floated us down gently into a dark, empty alley below. We crossed the street toward the hospital, and I touched a gaslight to let Mr. Adeoti and Mr. Kent know that we were all safe if they were to track us this far.
After my thoughts were imprinted on the cool metal, Emily proceeded to toss us one by one over the iron gate into the foggy courtyard. We crept quietly, staying in the shadows until we reached a ground-floor window to one of the hospital wards. It took Emily a moment to peer inside and unlatch the window, which brought us into a dim room full of twenty sleeping patients.
“Emily, can you keep watch by the door?” I whispered. “Warn us quietly if a nurse or an orderly is coming.”
“I can put them all on a roof,” she offered.
Not ideal. “I don’t want to alarm them. We’re doing this so the newspapers won’t keep treating us like the villains. We need to hide.”
“Fine,” Emily said, looking a bit disappointed.
“And Laura, remember, we have to—”
“Hello,” Laura cheerily greeted a pale patient.
“Stay quiet,” I finished for no one in particular.
“Water,” the patient rasped. He was an older man—thin, graying hair, a thick beard. I crept over to them while Laura poured a glass of water and gave it to the man. He sipped it slowly as I glanced at his chart, wondering what ailed him.
“Thank you, nurse,” he told Laura.
“Oh, we aren’t nurses,” Laura proudly declared. “We are here to cure you.”
The man coughed and hacked loudly at that, answering my question about his condition. Consumption.
When he finally finished coughing, he took a deep breath and fell back onto his pillow. “You’ll cure that?” he asked skeptically.
“Of course. Evelyn can cure anything. She has one of those powers you might have heard of…”
As Laura regaled the patient with everything there was to know about the powers, and some things that were embellished, I took a seat between his bed and the patient to his left, took a breath, and took both their arms.
I held on for a few minutes. The man had a coughing fit in the first minute, and once I was certain that would be his last, I let go. “There, all cured,” I said.
The man chuckled, like we were silly little children. “You two are funnier than the other nurses.”
“Thank you,” I said, not particularly wanting to correct him. Not with so many others to heal. He’d figure it out on his own sooner or later. Or at least a doctor would.
I proceeded to the next two beds along the line and took the hands of both sleeping patients, while Laura struck up a conversation with another one nearby.
“I should like to get a puppy.” Somehow, Laura’s whisper was still carried halfway across the room. “I would let him do whatever he wanted. No rules. He would be the happiest pup in the whole—”
A loud bell interrupted Laura and rang through the hospital nine times. Perhaps that was time for the nurses’ rounds.
Sure enough, after about ten minutes, I felt myself lifted a couple of inches off the ground and shaken silently as Emily’s warning.
“Out the window,” I whispered.
As Laura and I climbed out, Emily held the door to the ward closed tightly against the nurse’s best efforts. The moment we were out of sight, Emily let go, and the nurse burst in, out of breath and perplexed about her strength and the door’s.
With the nurse checking the patients in that ward, we crept over to the next one free of nurses.
“I like this,” Laura whispered louder than most people shouted.
And despite the fact that we were creeping through bushes in the middle of the night like criminals, I had to agree. “Me too.”
We should have done it sooner. There was something simple and uncomplicated about it all. No worries about whether I could trust someone. No doubt about whether I was doing the right thing. Just helping people through a painful night so they could return to their lives in the morning.
We slipped into the next ward, a children’s one, which only seemed to be half-filled. I checked one boy’s chart to make sure a nurse had already been in here, and then I proceeded to take his hand, along with the swollen hand of the boy on the other side of me, and started healing.
Laura made several turns about the room, looking for those in the most pain and unable to sleep, keeping them company until I could move on to them.
We improved the routine smoothly over the course of the night as we realized how many patients the hospital held. Eventually, Emily started floating beds closer to me, while Laura would maneuver the patients’ hands so I could make physical contact with four or five people at once and heal a ward within thirty minutes. We slowly worked our way through, slipping out the windows when the clocks rang out and the nurses did their rounds and circling back when they were done. We tried to find the most severe wards first—the ones with terminally ill or contagious patients. Then we floated up to the first and second floors, finding the wards with patients recovering from surgery and non-life-threatening ailments.