She could tell, beyond all that careful control? They must be friends. Drake peeled his eyes open. “Didn’t say anything.” Much.

She scowled at him. “Be kind to her, Drake—her mother just died on Wednesday, very unexpectedly.”

“What?” He jerked, winced, hissed with the pain, and made no objection when Nurse Anonymous elbowed Dot aside to help him lie down. Why hadn’t she said something sooner? Or why hadn’t he been able to tell that something so massive had just struck? Or, better still, why had Margot De Wilde even come here today, so soon after such tragedy? As the nurse settled him, he ground out between his teeth, “I wasn’t unkind. I wouldn’t be. She’s your friend.”

But she wasn’t like Ada, that was for sure. Margot De Wilde wasn’t the sort of friend he’d be kind to but avoid whenever he could. No, Margot De Wilde was a different sort of friend altogether.

Dot huffed and came around to the other side of his cot. “All right. I won’t badger you.” She leaned down, kissed his cheek once more. “Rest well and get well. Do you understand me? I’ll tolerate nothing less than a full recovery.”

Her words were so strong, so brave—like Margot claimed she was—but he saw the shadows in her eyes. The ones that said You can’t die too. And if Margot didn’t see those . . . maybe she was the idiot.

Perhaps he’d tell her so sometime. And see what her ratios did for her then.

11

Emptiness surrounded her. Somehow it wove through the usual chatter of the room, snuck in behind the thunk of the pneumatic tubes, edged out the scratching of pens and pencils, the clicks and clacks and dings of the typewriters. So much busyness.

But empty. Margot squeezed her eyes shut, but that only amplified the problem. Her desk wasn’t empty. The room wasn’t empty. The building wasn’t empty. But that part of her own mind where it never had been before . . . that was all silent, echoing darkness.

Like a grave. She blinked her eyes open again and just stared at the half-blank page before her. Instead of the neat columns of numbers and decrypted words she’d written down, she saw that gaping black hole into which they’d lowered Maman last week.

“Her heart,” Lukas had said last night. That’s what the doctor had decided it must have been. He’d never detected any problems with it before, but the cold she’d caught, the fever she was probably running, could have exacerbated an unknown condition.