“He did this,” I say to myself. “He did this.”
“Hold it together, my girl,” Mistress Lawson says. We rush back outside, arms full of bandages that don’t begin to cover what’s needed. Mistress Braithwaite waves me over with a frantic hand. She tears the bandages from me, furiously wrapping up the leg of a woman screaming beneath her. “Jeffers root!” Mistress Braithwaite snaps.
“I didn’t bring any,” I say.
“Then bloody well get some!”
I go back to the cave, twisting around healers and apprentices and fake soldiers crouched over patients everywhere, up the hillsides, on backs of carts, everywhere. It’s not just women injured either. I see male prisoners, also starved, also beaten. I see people from the camp wounded in the fighting, including Wilf with a burn bandage up the side of his face, though he’s still helping carry patients on stretchers into the camp.
I run into the cave, grab more bandages and Jeffers root, and run back to the gully for the dozenth time. I cross the open ground and look up the path, where a few more people are still arriving.
I stop a second and check the new faces before running back to Mistress Braithwaite.
Mistress Coyle hasn’t returned yet.
Neither has Lee.
“He was right in the thick of it,” Mistress Nadari says, as I help her get a freshly-drugged woman to her feet. “Like he was looking for someone.”
“His mother and sister,” I say, taking the woman’s weight against me.
“We didn’t get everyone,” Mistress Nadari says. “There was a whole other building where the bomb didn’t go off–”
“Siobhan!” we hear someone shout in the distance.
I turn, my heart racing a lot faster and bigger than I expect, a smile breaking my cheeks. “He’s found them!”
But you can see right away it’s not true.
“Siobhan?” Lee is coming down the path from the forest, the arm and shoulder of his uniform blackened, his face covered in soot, his eyes looking everywhere, this way and that through all the people in the gully as he walks through them. “Mum?”
“Go,” Mistress Nadari says to me. “See if he’s hurt.”
I let the woman lean onto Mistress Nadari and I run towards Lee, ignoring the other mistresses calling my name.
“Lee!” I call.
“Viola?” he says, seeing me. “Are they here? Do you know if they’re here?”
“Are you hurt?” I reach him, taking the blackened sleeve and looking at his hands. “You’re burned.”
“There were fires,” he says, and I look into his eyes. He’s looking at me but he’s not seeing me, he’s seeing what he saw at the prisons, he’s seeing the fires and what was behind them, he’s seeing the prisoners they found, maybe he’s seeing guards he had to kill.
He’s not seeing his sister or his mother.
“Are they here?” he pleads. “Tell me they’re here.”
“I don’t know what they look like,” I say quietly.
Lee stares at me, his mouth open, his breath heavy and raspy, like he’s breathed in a lot of smoke. “It was . . .” he says. “Oh, God, Viola, it was . . .” He looks up and past me, over my shoulder. “I’ve got to find them. They’ve got to be here.”
He steps past me and down the gully. “Siobhan? Mum?”
I can’t help it and I call after him. “Lee? Did you see Todd?”
But he keeps on walking, stumbling away.
“Viola!” I hear and at first I think it’s just another mistress calling for my help.
But then a voice beside me says, “Mistress Coyle!”
I turn and look up. At the top of the path is Mistress Coyle, on horseback, clopping down the rocks of the path as fast as she can make the horse go. She’s got someone in the saddle behind her, someone tied to her to keep them from falling off. I feel a jolt of hope. Maybe it’s Siobhan. Or Lee’s mum.
(or him, maybe it’s him, maybe–)
“Help us, Viola!” Mistress Coyle shouts, working the reins.
And as I start to run up the hill towards them, the horse turns to find its footing and I see who it is, unconscious and leaning badly.
Corinne.
“No,” I keep saying, under my breath, hardly realizing it. “No, no, no, no, no,” as we get her down onto a flat of rock and as Mistress Lawson runs towards us with armfuls of bandages and medicines. “No, no, no,” as I take her head in my hands to cradle it from the hard rock and Mistress Coyle tears off Corinne’s sleeve to prepare for injections. “No,” as Mistress Lawson reaches us and gasps as she sees who it is.
“You found her,” Mistress Lawson says.
Mistress Coyle nods. “I found her.”
I feel Corinne’s skull under my hands, feel how the skin burns with fever. I see how sharp her cheeks look, how the bruising that discolours her eyes is against skin sagging and limp. And the collarbones that jut up from above the neckline of her torn and dirty mistress cloak. And the circles of burns against her neck. And the cuts on her forearms. And the tearing at her fingernails.
“Oh, Corinne,” I whisper and wet from my eyes drops onto her forehead. “Oh, no.”
“Stay with us, my girl,” Mistress Coyle says, and I don’t know whether she’s talking to me or Corinne.
“Thea?” Mistress Lawson asks, not looking up.
Mistress Coyle shakes her head.
“Thea’s dead?” I ask.
“And Mistress Waggoner,” Mistress Coyle says, and I notice the smoke on her face, the red angry burns on her forehead. “And others.” Her mouth draws thin. “But we got some of them, too.”
“Come on, my girl,” Mistress Lawson says to Corinne, still unconscious. “You were always the stubborn one. We need that now.”
“Hold this,” Mistress Coyle says, handing me a bag of fluid connected to a tube injected into Corinne’s arm. I take it in one hand, keeping Corinne’s head in my lap.
“Here it is,” Mistress Lawson says, peeling away a strap of crusted cloth on Corinne’s side. A terrible smell hits all of us at the same time.
It’s worse than how sickening it stinks. It’s worse because of what it means.
“Gangrene,” Mistress Coyle says pointlessly, because we can all see that it’s way past infection. The smell means the tissue’s dead. It means it’s started to eat her alive. Something I wish I didn’t remember that Corinne taught me herself.