Reached

where is he? Where is Papa?”
    Bram doesn’t answer my question. He looks away.
    “Bram,” I say again, “where is Papa? Do you know? He can come with us to have the cure—they promised—but we don’t have much time. We have to find him
now
.”
    And then Bram starts to sob, great heaving sighs. “They bring the dead out to the fields,” he says. “Only those of us who are immune can go out to check on them.” He looks up at me with tear-filled eyes. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the Archivists,” he says. “I can go out and look for faces.”
    “No,” I say in horror.
    “It’s better than selling the tubes,” he says. “That’s the other job that pays well.” His eyes are different—so much older, having seen so much more—and still the same, with that obstinate glint that I know well. “I won’t do that. Selling the tubes is a lie. Telling people whether or not their friends or family are dead is the truth.”
    He shudders. “The Archivists let me choose,” he says. “They have people coming all the time wanting information or tubes or to know where the people they love are. So I helped them. I could find the people, if they gave me a picture. And then they paid me with what I needed for me. And for her.”
    He did everything he could to take care of our mother, and I’m glad he saved her, but the cost was so high. What has he seen?
    “I wasn’t in time for him,” Bram says.
    I almost ask Bram if he’s sure; I almost tell him that he might be wrong, but he knows. He saw.
    My father is gone. The cure is too late for him.
    “We need to leave,” the medic tells me as he helps the Rising officer lift my mother onto a stretcher. “Now.”
    “Where are you taking her?” someone asks from across the room, but we don’t answer.
    “Did she die?” someone else calls out. I hear their desperation.
    We pass through the still and those who tend them, leaving them behind, and my heart aches.
We’ll be back,
I want to tell them.
With enough cures for everyone, next time.
    “What do you have?” someone asks, pushing through. An Archivist. “Do you have a different kind of medicine? How much is it worth?”
    The officer takes care of him while we hurry through the doors out of the Museum.
    On the ship, Bram climbs down into the hold with me and with the medic, who starts a line for my mother. I pull Bram close and he cries, and cries, and cries, and my heart breaks, and I think his tears will never end. And then they do and it is worse, a shivering and shuddering that shakes his whole body, and I do not know how I can feel this much pain and survive, and at the same time know how much I have to live.
Please,
I think,
let Bram feel that second part, somewhere inside his despair
,
because we are still together, we still have each other.

    When Bram falls asleep, I take my mother’s hand. Instead of singing her the names of flowers, as I had planned, I say her name, because that is what my father would have done.
“Molly,”
I say. “We’re here.” I press the paper flower into her palm and her fingers twitch a little. Did she know this lily would cure us? That it was important somehow? Was she simply finding a way to send me something beautiful?
    Whatever the case, it worked.
    But not soon enough for my father.

CHAPTER 55
    XANDER
    T
his all comes naturally to you,”
Lei said once before.
“Doesn’t it?”
I wonder if the medics watching me inject the cure into the line think the same thing. The patient getting the cure went still within the same time frame that Ky did—that’s a requirement for this first trial of the cure.
    “That’s all you’ve got to do,” I tell the medics. “Inject the solution and wait for it to work.”
    The medics nod. They’ve done this before.
I’ve
done this before, back during the original Plague when I first gave cures and speeches at the medical center. There aren’t many of us left now. “These hundred patients are the only ones we have on this trial,” I tell the medics. “We’re trying to find more of the plant, but it won’t be in flower much longer. We know the structure of the parent compound, so we’ve got people working around the clock to find the synthetic pathway so we can make it in the lab. But all
you
have to worry about is taking care of the patients.
    “You’ll need to give new doses every two hours.” I gesture to where the supplies are stored, in a locked cabinet guarded by several armed officers. I