Beside me, Lina heaved a ragged sigh as she struggled not to cry. For once it made me viciously glad that I could hurt her with nothing more than feeling, that she could sense every iota of my pain.
“How could you do it?” I finally said through gritted teeth, letting us into ?i?a Jovan’s garden. The gate wheezed rustily shut behind us. “How could you tell her? Don’t you think I wanted to tell Luka myself, a thousand times? But I didn’t, did I? Because Mama said not to, to keep us all safe. And all that bullshit you gave me how it was all right, it was better that I barely had any gleam left. It was what all of us needed. While you were singing for Niko, spilling out all our secrets to her.”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, her voice shaking. “I swear it wasn’t. I just . . .”
“‘Pie,’” I broke in, rounding on her. “Is that why she calls you that? Pie, like cherry pie? Did you tell her Mama’s story about you and me, the fruit and the flower? Even that?”
“Yes.” Almost under her breath. “I’m sorry.”
“You are not,” I whispered furiously, my stomach hollowing. “You say that all the time, just throwing it around, like it means nothing. Sweet Lina who’ll do whatever she likes, but not to worry, she’ll be so sorry for it later.”
“Unlike you,” she mumbled, sullen and tearful. “Who never apologizes for anything, no matter what.”
“Apparently I don’t need to,” I snapped, slapping my hand on the wrought-iron table beside us, so hard my palm stung. “Compared to this, apparently I’ve never done anything to you worse than maybe a three, possibly a four, on the ‘accidentally flat-tiring someone’ to ‘breaking the most sacred of vows’ scale. Does that sound about right?”
“I just don’t . . .” She trailed off, running her hands over her face and into the thick, shining mass of hair backlit by the lantern light from the Bastion, her curls both brighter and darker than the clouded night above us. She looked so much like a tragic damsel in deep, melodramatic distress, as if she were the injured party, that the sight of her pissed me off that much more. Fuming, I turned away, fumbling with the door.
Inside, the lights were blazing and the doors to all the rooms flung open. I cringed inwardly at the thought of ?i?a Jovan waiting for us for hours as the sun peaked and then sank, pacing up and down the gauntlet of the apartment and puffing at his cherrywood pipe. In the whirlwind of the day, we’d forgotten to worry what he might think had happened to us.
“Jovan?” I called out, heading for the studio. If he’d managed to settle anywhere, it would be there.
“Riss, wait,” Lina said, and the strained pitch of her voice stranded me in place. “There’s a note for us. It says he’s at the hospital. It says we need to go as soon as we get back.”
THE CAB RIDE to the hospital was the closest thing I could imagine to being trapped in purgatory. Lina kept reaching out for me, then remembering we were fighting and dropping her hand to twine it frantically in her skirt.
“Do you think she died? All the way?” she finally whispered hoarsely.
My insides contracted around my pounding heart. I was so queasy with twinned dread and anticipation that every bump and pothole made my stomach come climbing up my throat. “I don’t know.”
“Or do you think she—”
“Lina, I don’t know!”
We lapsed into quiet after that, both of us laboring just to breathe.
?i?a Jovan met us in the hospital’s dismal entryway, his haggard face flicking from relief to devastation and finally to fury, like a flurry of projector slides. “Where have you been?” he demanded, gripping me by the shoulders and giving me a shake. This was the angriest I’d ever seen him, his thick white hair rumpled from raking his hand through it, his eyes blazing beneath bushy white brows. “How could you go and not tell me, with who knows what maniacs out there waiting for you? And you too, Malina. I would have thought at least you might have more sense than this. One of you could have picked up your phone, or checked your messages. Given me a single moment’s thought.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, steeling myself for yet another lie. “We just . . . Luka offered to drive us to Perast to our Lady of the Rocks, so we could leave an offering for Mama. A prayer and a love token, if it makes any difference to her now. Jovan, why are we here? What’s happened to her?”
?i?a Jovan closed his eyes for a long moment. When he finally opened them, they were bleak as quarry water. “It’s not a quarantine any longer. It’s a different secret they’re keeping now.”
“Why?” Malina whispered, the question like a wince. “What’s happening?”
“They don’t know, my girls. She’s gone. Someone stole her away from them. Apparently the hospital’s too godforsaken to afford security cameras, so they have no trace of what happened to her. The nurse maintaining quarantine swore up and down that no one slipped by her, that she saw nothing.” He hitched his shoulder at an attendant hovering several feet behind, hands clasped tight in front of her bleached-out scrubs. I recognized her from the last time: the same sallow-faced woman who had let Mirko pass with us in tow. “She’s the one I spoke to.”
“And nothing? She can’t remember seeing anything at all?”
His jaw worked beneath the muscle of his cheek. “That’s what she says, though I can’t fathom it. They had our Jasmina here, and now she’s gone. Someone must have taken her, by God. She certainly didn’t walk out of here on her own! So I’ve railed at all of them, my girl, all the way up to the hospital director; Mirko was here earlier, too, to interrogate them in turn. None of them have a thing to say for themselves.”
I could feel myself swaying from the inside, like some rickety stilt hut in high winds. Could Mama have somehow left by herself, in the state she was in? A shudder tore through me at the thought of her dragging herself out of the bed, eyes half lidded and twitching blindly, tubes trailing from her slack limbs, her chest concave beneath the papery hospital gown. But how could the nurse have possibly missed it? Lina and I exchanged frantic looks, and I could see her come to the same conclusion.
Someone would have needed to have been there with the nurse, to lure away her memories.
Someone like Sorai.
I squeezed Jovan’s shoulder. “Let me talk to her, Jovan. Before we leave.”
He nodded once, and held an arm out to Malina. “Why don’t you stay with me, sweetheart. I need someone to lean on for a spell.”