“Why would I bite you?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and finally putting his hands down atop the blanket.

She murmured, “I surely hope you have no reason to,” and brought the blinding white lantern (what powered that thing, anyway?) up close. She hung it on a hook Rector hadn’t noticed before, which held the light over his bed. He felt like he was on stage, standing in a curiously cold pool of light.

“I’m feeling a whole lot better,” he assured her, but when he tried to jam his arms into the jacket, she took it away from him and tossed it back onto the bedpost.

“Don’t go covering up just yet. Let me see you.”

She took his face in her hands and tilted it up to face the brilliant light. He squinted against it, but held his eyes open when she told him to. He swallowed when she told him to do that, too, and opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue—and he felt silly about every single second of it.

Satisfied that her patient wouldn’t die right there on the spot, Mercy Lynch sat down on the edge of the bed and said, “You young fellows are made of rubber. You can bounce back from almost anything.”

“I’m … I’m eighteen,” he told her. “I mean, nineteen.”

She smirked. “That old, eh?”

“At least. But between you and me, I’m not real sure.” Now that he appeared to be permitted to do so, he retrieved his jacket and slipped his arms inside it. He pulled it shut across his chest and noticed he’d lost a button.

“I heard you were brought up in an orphanage.”

“That’s right. I was sent there after the Blight. I was only a little thing, so I don’t know my right age. Don’t know my birthday. Don’t know much.”

“You know plenty about sap,” she said bluntly.

He had the overwhelming feeling that he’d get roughly as far arguing with Mercy as he would with Zeke’s mother. Or with the princess, for that matter. He supposed it took a certain kind of woman to survive down here, underneath the walled city. That was all right with him, but he didn’t really want to talk about sap.

So all he said was, “I know about it, yeah.”

“How long were you using it?”

He avoided her eyes and pretended to fiddle with the empty buttonhole on his jacket. “Not sure.”