Thank you for reading!
Wylan had retreated to the steps, watching the butterflies and waiting and wishing and worrying, when he heard Tolya's voice calling his name desperately. It sounded like he was choking.
"Tolya?" He hurried to the door they had gone through. "Tolya!"
"The air is poisoned! It's killing us!"
Tolya sounded as though he was on the verge of collapse. And if he was in such dire straits, what about the others? What if Jesper was ...
Panicked, Wylan tried opening the door, but it wasn't going to move. He pounded at it, calling to Tolya, calling for Jesper, calling anyone, but there was no response.
Quickly he grabbed his bag, retrieving the vials he needed and carefully but efficiently mixing the explosive. He dug a handful of earth from the nearest garden bed and used it to plaster the explosive against the door, then lit the primer cord and turned away as it burned down and exploded. Peeling off the clod of earth, he tapped a small hammer against the spot, which shattered, opening a hole large enough to see through.
Putting his eye up to the hole, Wylan saw Kaz on the ground, motionless. "Tolya? Jesper?" Next to Kaz, Inej. "Anyone? Hello?" Past Inej, he could just see Jesper's left foot. All of them, taken down by some kind of poison. But how was he to determine what it was in order to make up an antidote? Especially in time.
Finally, he heard Inej groan. She rolled over with evident difficulty.
"You're alive," Wylan said in relief.
"We're dying," she gasped. "We've been poisoned." She groaned again, fighting the effects with everything she had.
Wylan thought rapidly, sorting through everything he knew about poisons. "Uh … throwing up? Or hallucinations?"
"Hallucinations. Some kind of orange vapor."
His eyes were on the Datura Meloxia. So that's why it was here. Now that he knew what the poison was, perhaps he could work out the antidote. There wasn't a known antidote—Datura Meloxia was incredibly rare, enough so that even the poison wasn't used often. But there were the cyan morphos, the only creatures in existence who could digest the nectar without dying. He plucked a butterfly off its blossom and carried it back to the opening he'd made in the door.
Inej was dragging herself across the floor, calling his name.
"Sorry," he whispered to the butterfly. But … if the butterfly existed to be the mate of the flower, then perhaps counteracting the poison was part of its reason for living. He hoped so, anyway. Pushing the butterfly through the opening in the door, he said to Inej, "Take this. Eat it."
She grasped the insect from him. He couldn't see her, but he hoped she was eating it.
"That—that might sound strange, but the, the poison doesn't kill them, so they might be the antidote," he explained.
On the other side of the door, he heard Inej coughing. Then he saw her face through the opening. "Wylan. We need three more."
"Okay." He hurried to get them, hoping it wouldn't be too late for the others. He passed Inej another butterfly. She fed it to Tolya, who spluttered and groaned as the butterfly revived him. Wylan gave her one more, which she handed to Tolya to feed to Jesper, and then a third for Kaz. And then he sat and waited, counting the seconds, in an agony of fear, as he heard Tolya say Jesper's name—and then finally heard Jesper's voice call out "Mama."
Only then did Wylan remember to breathe.
Jesper felt oddly for a moment as though he was split between two realities—his long-ago home, where his mother waited for him, and this dark room filled with the scent of rotting flowers and the taste of … bugs? "Mama!"
He grasped Tolya's shoulders, trying to reorient himself, while Tolya laughed at him. "If you say so. Welcome back from your nightmare."
Nightmare? That was the best dream he'd had in—years. Possibly in all his life. And now he was awake choking on some foul thing in his mouth. "Is this the nightmare part?"
He and Tolya got shakily to their feet while Inej was holding Kaz down, trying to get him to eat something bright and blue.
From outside the door, he heard Wylan's voice. "Is everyone … alive?"
"We're alive," Inej confirmed.
"Okay."
Tolya was staring at Inej. "I owe you my life," he said softly, and with something that sounded like awe.
"It was Wylan. He saved us."
"Wylan did?" Jesper asked.
"You're welcome," Wylan called through the door.
Jesper looked in his direction. It was as though he was seeing the world with new eyes, hearing with new ears. Everything seemed sharper, brighter. Clearer. And one thing that was perfectly clear to him was that the man outside that door was extraordinary. And how lucky they were that he hadn't been in the room with them, or they'd all be dead now.
He straightened. "We almost died, didn't we? At the same time … I had the most incredible hallucination. Did anyone else get lulled into a comforting sense of joy?"
They all turned to look at him with expressions that said they very much had not, and proceeded to deny having seen anything.
Listening through the door, Wylan wanted so much to know what Jesper had seen. He wished he hadn't ruined everything between them, destroyed any chance that Jesper might want to be with him, to talk to him.
"All right, what's the plan?" Tolya asked.
"You said there was another heartbeat in the house."
"Southeast corner. The heartbeat's weak."
"I suspect she built all of this to protect that heart." Kaz surveyed the inner doors speculatively. "Along with a different way in to get to it."
He arranged them all on the floor, as if they had been felled by the poison, and stationed Inej in the rafters. Wylan was asked to hide himself outside. When Ohval came in, she would open the doors and find them here, and they could take her by surprise. And so they waited.
Jesper lay on his side on the floor, wishing he could use this time to go back to his hallucination, to ask his mother what he should do now. But she had told him, hadn't she? To stop hiding who he was. He just wasn't sure how. He'd spent a whole lifetime pushing away his powers, pushing away his memories of her, being angry with her because the alternative was to miss her so much he couldn't breathe from the pain of it.
It felt different now. It felt as though … as though he had her back. As though she was a part of him again, and this time, she could never be taken away from him. Lying there, he couldn't help but smile.