When Kiva returned with Naari to the infirmary that evening, her bag of samples in hand, she expected to see Tipp waiting with more vermin. They didn’t actually need any more, since the young boy had been so proficient at catching them, but still, it was strange that he wasn’t in the infirmary, since he’d been dutifully watching over Tilda and the quarantined patients on the days Kiva went out to collect her samples. Early on, he’d wanted to join her, especially when she no longer had to leave through the gates. But with Olisha and Nergal providing only minimal care to the sick, Tipp had volunteered to watch over them, something that had filled Kiva with immeasurable pride.

“Have you seen Tipp?” Kiva asked Nergal as she dropped her bag on the workbench, waving to Naari when the guard gestured that she was taking off, likely heading to the tunnels—and to Jaren.

Kiva reminded herself that she didn’t care. What they got up to when they were alone . . . She didn’t care.

“Haven’t seen him,” Nergal said, sitting on a stool near the workbench and finger-combing his long blond hair, before tying it at his nape with a leather band.

“Is he in with the quarantined patients?” Kiva asked, aware of Nergal’s short attention span, and that he often needed prompting.

“Not sure,” the willowy man said as he stood up and stretched, as if he’d just completed a hard day’s labor. Kiva doubted he’d moved from that position in hours. “Maybe.”

“Olisha?” Kiva asked the pockmarked woman, who was hastily wiping her mouth after having helped herself to Tilda’s rations, as if Kiva didn’t know about her repeated stealing of the sick woman’s food—and that of the other ill prisoners.

“Not since this morning,” Olisha answered, one brown eye looking at Kiva, the other drifting lazily to the side. Before Zalindov, she’d owned a pair of spectacles to help with her amblyopia, but they’d been damaged during a riot soon after her arrival, the glass trampled right out of them. She maintained that she could see just as well as anyone, but Kiva often heard her swearing when she knocked things over. “He went out to prune the thistlewort shortly after you left, Kiva dear, but he didn’t come back afterward, so I suspect he ran straight off to get more of your rats.”