After the concentrated terror surrounding Elizabeth’s escape, Andrew was almost relieved to wake the following morning to the mere constant, buzzing anxiety of the previous weeks. Julia Weaver remained hidden from them, her captor remained unidentified, and the date of Amelia’s own departure remained nonnegotiable.
It felt positively manageable.
Andrew answered a knock at his office door that evening to find Jonas standing in the hallway.
“What’s that?” Andrew asked, nodding at the bundle Jonas held under one arm.
“Boy’s clothes in Amelia’s size, and some theatrical makeup,” Jonas said, thrusting it at him.
Andrew must have looked skeptical, because Jonas’s tone hardened. “She’s done it before. I don’t know that we’ll use them, but better to have them than not. I’m trying to create some options. Just stow them for me.”
Andrew accepted the clothes, despite his doubts about their utility. Even as slight and fine-boned as she was, he had a hard time imagining anyone ever mistaking Amelia for a boy. Beneath the ragged mop of hair, her face was distinctly feminine. Her eyes, especially. And her mouth was— He cut himself off, suddenly uncomfortable.
Andrew hid the bundle in the storage room and left his office, headed for the infirmary, where he had little enough time to think about things best left unconsidered. Six patients—all from the same ward as the woman earlier in the week—had come down with some sort of ague. Three were quite ill.
Another eight sickened the following day, and Andrew spent a sleepless night tending to them.
When he stumbled back to his office the next morning, he found a thick envelope from the coroner’s office waiting on his desk—the copy of Blounton’s autopsy results he had requested. He paged through them wearily, but they told him nothing he hadn’t already known.
The body had been spotted by a passing boat some two hundred yards north of the asylum dock, which meant it had gone into the water near the north end of the island. Depressed fractures in the area of the suture of the occipital and parietal bones, Andrew read, rubbing the area at the back of his own head. Water in the lungs. Cause of death: drowning.
Perhaps Blounton slipped and hit his head on the seawall as he went in. Or perhaps he’d been attacked. Based on the report, there was no way to know. Andrew sighed and tossed the report in a drawer, just as Jonas knocked at his door again. Amelia was at his side, her face pale and strained.
Alarmed, Andrew swung the door wide and ushered them inside.
“She can’t stay in five,” Jonas muttered to Andrew he passed.
Amelia paced the office like a tiger in a too-small cage as she relayed the things she’d seen when she touched the women in the incurables ward. A harrowing childbirth. A fire in a crowded tenement. Several near strangulations. Beatings at the hands of mothers, fathers, strangers, lovers. Her voice was strained, her face pale as she ticked off their names.
Andrew shot Jonas a horrified look over her head and hurriedly wrote out a transfer to ward four. Jonas crouched beside her chair, speaking in a low, gentle voice. Whatever friction there had been between them seemed to have evaporated.
“They’ve all been like that?” Andrew asked.
Amelia nodded, her eyes tired.
“But you don’t get a vision every time you touch someone?”
“No. Thank god.” She shuddered.
“And these are definitely memories, not futures?”
Amelia nodded again, frowning slightly. “They feel different. More like with Mara. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m sure these are things that have already happened.”
Jonas looked thoughtful. “I think I understand what’s happening. Your power changed when you nearly died, and now death is what you’re seeing in others. All these memories you’re seeing, they’re times when someone almost died. If someone hasn’t had such an experience, you don’t see anything when you touch them. And those flashes of the future you’re getting, they’re happening when you touch people who are at risk of death—Mrs. Franklin, Elizabeth. When they’re in the valley of the shadow, if you will.”
They looked at him.
Jonas waved a hand. “Yes, I know. That was overly dramatic. But accurate, nonetheless. That means—”
“It means there’s no point to my going around trying to read people,” Amelia said. She laughed, and the hollow despair in it made Andrew’s heart twist. “I’ve been making myself see all those horrible things for no good reason.”
There was an appalled silence in the room. Guilt stabbed at Andrew’s chest. He’d kept her here. He was responsible for what she was enduring. And it seemed it was for nothing.
“We’re going to have to try another way,” Jonas said finally. He looked at Andrew. “That scrap of paper you found in the desk. Do you have it?”
Andrew blinked at the change in subject. “It’s in my rooms at the boardinghouse.” Hidden in the middle of a book on diseases of the kidney, in fact, and buried in a box of similar tomes. He’d initially kept it in his shaving case but found himself imagining outlandish scenarios in which it was discovered—by whom was unclear, even in his own mind. He’d moved it in the middle of the night during a fit of paranoia. In the light of day, the precaution seemed foolish.
But he hadn’t moved it back.
“Could you bring it with you in the morning?”
“Why?”
Jonas gestured to Amelia. “I want both of us to have another look at the handwriting before we start searching the doctors’ apartments.”
Andrew gaped at him. “You cannot be serious.”
“It’s the obvious next step,” Amelia said. “We need proof. Letters, records of payments—anything that proves someone here knows about Julia or Elizabeth.”
This was madness. “You’ll be caught,” Andrew protested. “Surely there’s another way.”
Jonas snorted. “I suppose one of us could stand in the Octagon and shout accusations. Anyone who looks confused probably isn’t involved.”
“We could go to the police,” Andrew said. “Or the press.”
“With what?” Amelia’s voice had steadied. “We think there may be more women hidden, but we’re certain of only two. We haven’t found Julia, and as far as anyone knows, Elizabeth is dead. We have a suicide, a psychic, and a scrap of paper. That’s not proof of anything. There’s no reason for anyone to believe us. This is the only way. And we won’t get caught.”
Andrew had the distinct impression she was now avoiding his eyes.
“We’re not precisely amateurs,” Amelia concluded.