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I hold her with my hand palming the back of her head, the other around her shoulder. She is cold, having given more than she had, and her body is shuddering against mine.

I wrap my arms around her tighter, then lift her up and take her to bed.

Chapter

Twenty-Five

SATURNA

The ferry captain has not stopped looking at me since we boarded, which is somehow worse than if he had said anything. I stand at the rail with Baz close beside me, the sleeve of his coat brushing against mine, and the captain is in the pilot box behind us pretending to adjust something that doesn’t need adjusting. Baz tells me that in years of weekly crossings he has traded maybe one word with the man, and I know whatever story reaches the ferryman’s house this week is going to begin with Professor Vale seen leaving the Mortis at midnight with a red-haired student. As long as the gossip stays at the ferryman’s house however, I don’t care what he says. We had to do this trip eventually, if not just to get Baz his clean clothes.

By the time the lights of Sogliano come up on the water, Baz has leaned his shoulder against mine because he is weak enough still that he should be in bed. If I point that out, though, I know he’ll deny it. Somehow death has made him even more stubborn.

Sogliano after the lamp-lighters have gone home is a different city from the one I remember being brought to as a child in daylight. It’s moodier, more mystical in a way, the scents hitting my nose full of brackish water, woodsmoke from chimneys still lit, and the curious smell of the camphor they used to boil into the beak of a plague mask. I say used to, but in Sogliano the tradition is still alive.

Baz walks me over at least three bridges as we snake toward his apartment, his hand comfortingly at the small of my back the whole way, and he tells me about his street as we walk it, bookbinders and retired academics and plenty of cats. He also mentions that the last few months he had the feeling he was being followed, which is unsettling and explains why he keeps looking over his shoulder.

His door is at the end of the lane, three steps up, with an iron knocker shaped like a hand holding a ring.

“I don’t remember the last time I was in this apartment,” he says as he places the key in the lock. “The man who last turned this key is dead. I’m a different man standing here, with a very different problem on my shoulders, and I don’t know what I’ll find on the other side of this door.”

“Do you want me to go in first?”

“No. Thank you. I need to be the one. Just…stay close.”

“Oh, I’m not going anywhere.” The tether will make sure of that.

He turns the key and the door swings inward. It already feels wrong, there’s a staleness to it, though it could be because no one has been inside to air it out.

He steps in ahead of me and stops dead.

“No,” he says under his breath.

I come in behind him and see what he is seeing. The main room is a long rectangle with a tall window at the far end and bookshelves running down one wall and a desk in front of the window. Or it was. The desk is overturned and the books from the near end of the shelf are on the floor in a long swath of splayed pages and spines. The wall opposite the desk is pocked with pinholes in a specific grid, the kind of pinholes you’d leave if you had taken down a chart that had been there for years, except the chart is nowhere I can see. The lamp on the mantel has been overturned, oil pooled dry on the wood.

He goes to the wall first. He stands in front of the pinholes with his hands at his sides and his head tilted the way it tilts when he is trying to make something make sense that will not.

“My chart,” he says, and the anguish in his voice nearly breaks me. “It was here when it was five sheets, then ten, then twenty. The last time I remember looking at it was the Thursday before the library nook with you, before the month I don’t have. It was here. It was all here.”

“Someone took it.”

He goes to the desk next. He crouches and starts going through the papers on the floor with hands steadier than I would have expected, and I take off my cloak and hang it on the hook by the door and slowly begin to walk around the room, stepping over things and righting them when I can, trying to see the apartment as it would have looked a month ago. It was a beautiful room. I can see it under the ruin. The ceiling is high and the beams are dark and the shelves are the kind of built-in dark wood you only get in old buildings maintained by people who care about them.

In the bedroom, the bed is made but one corner of the quilt has been pulled up as if someone had looked under the mattress. The drawers of the small bureau are mostly closed but not perfectly. Someone searched here too, more carefully than in the main room, as if they had learned by the time they got to this room that destruction wasn’t going to help them find what they were looking for. Perhaps they even felt bad.

I go back to Baz. He is sitting on the floor with his back against the overturned desk and loose pages in his lap, not reading them, just holding them.

“The ledger is gone,” he says, without looking up. “The intake ledger I spent two years copying. The last thing I had of my research that was any good is gone. They took it. They took the chart. They took my notes with my conclusions. They took the pages on the plague-year gaps. They didn’t take the broader records, because those are reproducible, anyone could request them from the registrar. They took specifically what was mine. They took what would have been evidence if I had lived long enough to use it.”

I sit down on the floor beside him.

“Did they take anything that wasn’t research?”

He goes through the rooms systematically, with my hand under his elbow when he gets up because he needs it, and by the time he’s finished the pattern is clear. His working papers are gone, the physical traces of his argument are gone, and nothing else is missing. His books are on the floor but accounted for. His clothes are undisturbed. The small silver his grandmother left him is in a drawer in the bedroom where he left it. Whoever came here knew exactly what they were looking for and took only what they needed.

“We shouldn’t stay,” I say. “If they came once they might come again.”

“They won’t come tonight. They have what they wanted. Whatever I was going to prove, I can’t prove now, and they know it. The apartment is safer tonight than it has been in a month.”