The chair legs screeched as I pushed away from the table, my palms slick on the varnished wood, knees locked to keep me upright. “You can’t keep us away from her, not if she’s still alive. Or whatever she is. Even if she were . . . fully dead”—everything was insane—“you’d still let us see her one more time, have her body for a funeral at least. So you’ll take us to her. Now.”
His mouth tightened into a grim line. “I can’t do that, miss. I shouldn’t even have told you to begin with. As far as the police are concerned, your mother is dead. I can’t bring you to the quarantine, much less let you loose after.”
Certainty flooded over me, pounded against my insides like a rain-swollen tide. I could do this for us, for me and my sister. “You can. Because if you don’t, we’ll tell everyone what you just told us. Our friend Nevena Stefanovi?—she was our mother’s apprentice. She’s also the councilman’s daughter. Even if you detain all of us, you can’t lock her away somewhere. And she’ll do it for us, she’ll tell everyone, and whatever happens then will fall on you.”
I bit off the last of the words, forced them through chattering teeth. My entire body was trembling with just the effort it took to keep myself standing. Beside me, Malina rose and slid her arm around my waist, letting me lean invisibly against her.
“You wouldn’t have said anything in the first place, would you, Detective?” she asked softly, her voice warm as a hand to the nape of the neck. “If you hadn’t meant for us to force you to take us to her. You know what the best thing to do is, the kindest thing. I can tell you do. So just do it for us, will you? Please.”
He watched her silently, a hint of something like awestruck fear glinting deep in his pouched eyes. Finally he rubbed his chin with one hand, fingers rasping over the bristle of his stubble, and gave a single nod.
“Just the two of you, then.”
Jovan heaved a harsh-edged sigh. “Mirko . . .”
“No, sir. Not even for you. Even this could ruin me, end my entire career. I have Kristina to think of, and my boy. I’m sorry, but it’s the best I can do. It’ll have to be just the two of them.”
ALL THE HOSPITALS I’d ever seen had been grim, communist affairs, reeking of antiseptic and floored with curling linoleum or chipped tile. Like Mama, Lina and I had always been healthy enough to avoid everything but vaccines when we were little, so hospitals made us both nervous with the memory of the childhood fear of needles sliding under skin and the surrounding miasma of illness swampy in the air.
But this one seemed somehow worse than most, though it could have been the gloom of the rain-soaked night outside. The detective had insisted on taking us in late, long after hours, when the hospital depended on an underpaid and exhausted skeleton staff. In the dim, dreary hallway, we could hear the water beating on the roof like the rattle of dice in a cup, and even at this hour a few stragglers waited for attention in the seats that lined the corridor: a withered grandmother with mottled skin and scabs around her mouth, a little boy with a wracking donkey’s cough who buried his face in his mother’s lap when each bout got the best of him.
And then there was the moaning. It was faint but relentless, like the sound of the whistling witch-winds that sometimes stole through cracks in the walls in high summer, and it made all the fine hairs on my neck and arms stand on end.
After a brief conversation with a sallow-faced, tight-lipped nurse in crisp whites—I could see his hand brush hers, and wondered if he’d paid her to look the other way—the detective led us down the hallway, cutting a right into a massive room lined with cots separated only by thin curtains. The distant moaning we’d been able to hear even from the hallway was much louder here. I had thought it might be the cumulative hum of the sick, but most here were asleep and silent, save for snatches of mumbling and phlegmy snores.
We followed the sound down two sets of stairs, until we were well underground, and Mirko unlocked a padlocked door and shouldered it open with a grinding metal screech, bringing us to a stop in front of a room encased in glass. There was a set of clear double doors set into the glass, the vestibule between for decontamination, I guessed.
And beyond, our mother lay like a deathbed princess under fluorescent lights.
It was the ugliest sort of light, the kind that usually made anyone beneath it look like a riverbank corpse recently fished out of the water. But with her ravaged chest covered by thin sheets, and all that bloodied, knotted hair tucked away into a surgical hat, Mama was gorgeous as ever, so transparently pale I could practically see the finesse of the facial bones straining beneath her skin. Her eyes strobed, unseeing—closed, then half open, then closed—and she emitted a keening, unceasing moan like a deflating bagpipe, both too high-pitched and too soft to be so pervasive.
The moaning never flagged, not even for a moment. It sounded like the quietest torture, something so drawn out and tormented that only sheer fatigue kept it tamped down.
“I’ll be at the stairs,” Mirko said tightly, “when you’re ready to leave.” His footsteps clicked down the hall, then faded.
Once we were alone with Mama, I could hear Malina’s breathing speed up beside me, and my heart began to pound in answer. “Riss,” she choked out, stumbling against my side. “I can’t stay here. I—I can’t listen to her.”
I wrapped an arm around her, clenching my other hand into a fist until my nails sank into my palms good and hard, slicing sharp. “Why?” I whispered, wanting and not wanting to know in equal and opposite force. “What does she sound like?”
Lina closed her eyes, her lips trembling, and the fine blue capillaries on her quivering lids reminded me so much of Mama when I’d found her that I wanted to thrust my own sister away from me, to cauterize the image from my mind. “She just wants it to stop. It all hurts so much, and she wants it to stop, and she’s fighting and fighting with nowhere to go. There’s nothing else, I can’t hear her like I usually can, I can’t even find her. It’s like something feral’s trapped inside her skin, Riss. Like a dying animal that just wants to finally die.”
It was too much to take. I could feel steel slipping in, my blood turning to mercury. I had to be both stable and fluid, made solely of strength. There couldn’t be anything warm or yielding to get in the way.
We had to find her, the woman who had done this to Mama. Wherever Mama’s mind and soul were stranded, she was the one who had ferried them there.
EIGHT