If Gerver's classes had included lessons on lying to potential murderers, now would have been the time for Elise to remember his instructions. Nothing came to mind. She couldn't lie. But she couldn't tell the truth, not when Marek had spoken to her with blood on his teeth.

He spared her saying anything for a moment. His gaze traveled to the tapestry she still clutched in a hand. "It must have frightened you," he said, "seeing that."

Frightened her? No, the word fright no longer applied when her heartbeat rattled her insides, when it jangled down into the tips of her fingers. What pumped through her veins was beyond mere fear, a pounding terror that snapped up lesser emotions and instincts with sharp fangs. There was no sense in trying to flee the end when it had already come upon you. A strange clarity folded around her, as serene and cold as the grave. If Marek wished to do her harm, then nothing she did mattered. She could tell him anything at all. "Yes," she said, letting go of the tapestry, "it was frightening seeing Adesso violate the health codes like that."

Marek blinked in surprise. Then his face molded into its usual mask of bland pleasantness. "Looks like your sense of humor is intact." He glanced over his shoulder. "That said, you should get going. I have a feeling that somebody might be in a lousy mood, and it ain't me."

Without anything further, he blew past her like he had better things to do.

Was he really going to leave her behind with all those crazy people in the next corridor? Maybe he wasn't as great a danger to her as she had thought. Well, unlike Adesso, he had yet to prove himself as her enemy despite his name being on the suspect list. "W-wait!" she said.

If he heard her, he didn't heed her.

She swiveled around, then went after him. "Marek, wait."

Slowing, but not stopping, he said, "Yes, how may I help you, Ellsworth?" His tone was polite, almost disturbingly so. How could he sound that way after what had happened to him? Couldn't he show anything? Two faces or not, he was human.

Elise caught up with him. "You're bleeding." She lifted a hand from a wheel long enough to point, but momentum kept her alongside him. "There and there."

He touched a cut high on his cheek, then the corner of his mouth. "So I am," he said, looking at the blood on his fingertips. "Imagine that. Romilly is slightly less pathetic than he looks." He dragged a handkerchief from the inside of his sport coat so he could dab his face. "Thanks for your concern, but I have places to be."

"Wait, let me give you something." Getting the necklace from beneath the top of her dress required her to use both hands, so she stopped her wheelchair.

A few feet away, he halted in place. He sighed as he turned around to face her. "I really don't have t —"

She removed the vial from her pendant, then thrust it at him. "Here, you should use th-this." She swallowed, trying to ease the stupid stutter that had come into her voice. "On your cuts."

Frowning, he took the vial. Inspected it. "Kyurall? You're giving me kyurall?"

"What?"

"Kyurall — it eases pain and heals injuries." He was in her face so swiftly that she jolted back. "Why did you give this to me?"

"Because you've been hurt," she said. Wasn't that obvious?

He straightened up, turning the vial between his fingers; the silvery liquid churned against its glass. "You have no idea what this is, but you handed it over to me without thinking twice because I'm hurt."

Had she done something wrong? She must have. But what was wrong about wanting to help someone? Did he think that she was trying to poison him? "It's safe. I've tried it. Like you said, it eases pain. I don't know about wounds, though; it doesn't seem to do very much for mine."

"Most people would question where you got this."

Back to rudeness again, were they? "I didn't steal it if that's what you're thinking. I have more, a lot more."

He struggled with his expression for a moment, before wrangling it into blankness. "You shouldn't flash this around to just anyone."

"I don't think you're 'just anyone,' and neither do you."

He stared at her, one of those terrible, unnerving stares he seemed to like giving. It went on and on until she twiddled her pendant around just to have something else to occupy her mind with. "You're right," he said, finally turning his gaze elsewhere. "But you oughta know something ..." He twisted the vial up, looking at it under one of the gaslights on the wall above. "This isn't the kind of bottle it comes in at the drugstore. People will wonder why."

"That's because it isn't from the drugstore." Now he did not look at her at all, and that seemed worse than staring. "I made it."

His hand drew down from the light. "You made it," he said. Not making a question of the words, only putting them together as if this was the first time he had heard them. "Christ, you don't even know what you're saying. It's a restricted substance, and you made it."

Restricted? Her diary hadn't mentioned that, nor had her recipe notebook.

"You didn't know." He shook his head. "Of course you didn't know. You've only forgotten everything that matters." He uncorked the vial, then wet a fingertip with the kyurall. "I'll let you know a few tips." He spread some of the liquid across the cut on his cheek; the wound stopped bleeding. "First, if you don't want people asking inconvenient questions, don't let them know that you have kyurall." Now he treated the corner of his mouth. "Second, don't tell them that you make it, because they'll want to know how you, a college student, got the ingredients for it." He tilted his head back so he could take a drop on the tongue. When he straightened up, he finished, "Third, someone broke into one of the Valley's supply depots a couple years back. Whoever it was got away with a lot of things, including the stuff that goes into kyurall."

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

A protest rose within her, one that she quashed. He was right to say that she had forgotten everything that mattered. She might have even forgotten burglarizing a supply depot. It was absurd, not impossible.

"You're not capable of it, of course," he said, "but other people might not believe that."

"You sound sure that I'm incapable." She tilted her head up to him. "Almost as if you know it."

He corked the vial, then thrust it back at her. "You don't know me."

"Keep it."

"No." Why was he refusing it? Because it was valuable? Or because it seemed a form of pity from her again? "What I really want is knowledge. You said you made it, so you must at least have access to a formula."

"Teach you? But you're ... you're ..." The memory of him reading a poem in a long-ago high school class reoccurred to her. The teacher had obviously found him a good student. But Elise had barely got any studying done today. How could she compare?

His expression darkened. "I see."

"You don't," she said. "It's not about you. It's me. How can I teach you anything? You're an Underseer, and that's special, isn't it? You're special. I'm just ..." She shook her head. "I don't know what I am."

He relaxed the slightest bit, though he still looked chary. "It's best to learn a thing like this from someone with experience in making it," he explained. "Not only that, but the ingredients are hard to come by. That's another way of saying they're expensive. But you obvious have access to them." Explanation suited him, allowing him to relax further. "This is the part where you ask me what you get in return."

"I don't need anything."

Instead of being pleased, he looked mystified. "You're an Ellsworth — no, not just that, you're human. And humans always have a price. Name yours."

"I don't have one."

Amusement seeped into his face. "Really?" he said. "Is there nothing you need?" His voice deepened, its lowness curving around her. "Is there nothing you want?" He leaned toward her. "Nothing that you crave in all the world?"

The heat of her face slithered down to her neck and chest. She ducked her head. No one spoke to her like he did, no one got so close and then stayed there, no one was half so ... so ... invasive.

Yet he was not wrong. There was one thing she needed, wanted, craved.

"The Rambling Herald," she said.

Disappointment replaced his amusement as if he had been rapped across the knuckles by a ruler. "If you want a copy, I have to point out that you're part of its staff."

"Work with me." Something about that sounded strange, so she rephrased. "With us. All of us."

He seemed on the verge of laughter, and not a happy kind. "Out of all the — that's your price?"

"We're short. The Herald, I mean, short after ... after ..." Her next words stuck in her chest.

"Cooke."

She nodded.

He began pacing. His white hands twitched and tapped with the same thoughts that altered his face, but not once did he lose his grip on the vial of kyurall. "It's a large price to pay," he said, slowing to a stop. "A large price. I don't have a lotta free time."

Her courage didn't amount to much, but she did have some. She had to use it. Between her efforts to figure out who killed Charlotte and to keep herself afloat at this college, she would barely be able to keep up with the paper. More help was needed with the articles and the editing. "Kyurall has a large price, too."

"Ellsworths shouldn't be concerned about money."

"My family doesn't seem to be concerned about it." Unlike her.

A considerable silence elapsed. Perhaps he was thinking about shabby cuffs and worn shoes, the same as she was. Not very far away, an enormous bell began ringing the hour.

"Fine. My time for your time, then." He brushed a hand through his hair again, which was still out of place despite his earlier efforts to fix it. "When should I go to your headquarters?"

"Um, seven, I think." That would be after dinner, but not too close to curfew. "Tonight or tomorrow, if that's all right."

He did not need long to think about it. "Tonight would be better," he said. "We'll have to start on the kyurall after the meeting, of course."

Spending part of the evening with a roomful of potential murders would be scary enough. The idea of going off alone with one of them set her heart racing a second time. But that wasn't anything she hadn't done before, was it? If one of Herald staff was a killer, he or she seemed in no hurry to harm Elise. The same went for Marek. Perhaps her "amnesia" had assured the murderer that she was no longer a threat.

Even so, just because she was difficult to kill didn't mean someone wouldn't try it again ... and it didn't mean it wouldn't hurt. She would have to keep her returning memories a secret, then, to keep herself safe. At the most, she would tell anyone who listened that she had regained a thing here or a thing there, but nothing important. Tell them that it was as if most memories about Charlotte had been wiped away by the accident. That would be the safest thing, and it would mean that she could still investigate the suspects on her list.

Decision made, there was still an obstacle. "The meeting will run at least an hour," she said. "Won't curfew get in the way?" She had no idea how long kyurall took to make, but the directions had seemed complicated.

"It will, but it's a lucky thing that I'm an Underseer." He paused to assess her. "But if you're objecting to the hour or the company, that's fine. I understand."

"No, it's not that ..."

Just what was she going to say? That she didn't want to be alone with him? That would make him wonder why, and he couldn't do that if he was Charlotte's killer. But he wasn't the only name on her list, and he had been something of an ally to Elise. After all the things that she had witnessed and remembered about him, his prickly behavior was understandable.

And there was a chance that she couldn't be murdered, that she couldn't die. Her insides quivered with terror and exhilaration at the thought. Not dying was the province of gods or monsters. If she had that power, what did that make her?

Safe, for one thing. Safe to ask questions and get answers. She couldn't take any risks until she knew for certain how far her ability to heal went, but the possibility eased the fear that had knotted itself between her lungs.

"You okay there, Ellsworth?" Marek said, making her remember exactly where she was and who she was with.

She nodded. "Yes," she said. "And I don't object to the hour or the company."

Did that sound as much a lie to him as it did to her?

"Glad to hear it." He looked as if he had never been glad of anything in his life, so maybe he had caught the lie. He set the vial on a stone ledge protruding from the wall nearby her, and pretended not to notice her twitch away from his nearness. "Tonight, then."

He left. She took the vial, which was still warm from his hand. What in the world had she just agreed to do? She would be teaching a boy of questionable motives a questionable form of medicine in the dark of the night. Her gaze found his retreating back, the book bag that thumped against his hip — speaking of books! She looked down at the one she still had on her lap, the one that sent her after him in the first place.

* * *

Only in her room inside Persephone Dorm did another thought stall her.

"Where am I going to teach him to make this thing, anyway?" she asked the ceiling. But as soon as she said it, an answer came. She slipped out of her wheelchair, so she could get the red valise from under her bed. Opened the secret compartment. Grabbed the map sitting in with the vials and the ingredients. Could this be what she needed?

It might be, so she left her room again.

Twenty minutes later, she had found her way onto the third floor and through a labyrinth of old, cramped rooms that dizzied the head with their unfailing sameness. But the one indicated on the end of her map had a silver spiderweb on its door and no lock. The spider's kitchen. She splayed her hand on the wood. Hinges creaked as the door opened gently inward. The long, thin room behind it was unimpressive, dusty, and colorless even with daylight filtering through its grubby rose window.

But then she rolled inside, and saw what kind of things it held. Yes, it was exactly what she needed.