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Dr. Klein says, “Who, Mary?”
Jordan nods. How’d she know?
The doctor picks up a pencil and points it right at him. “To be successful here, Jordan, you’ll need to be able to tell when a patient is delusional.”
“I’m not saying her sister has actually beenstabbed,” he protests. “I just meant—Hannah’s really upset.”
“That’s what the quiet room is for,” Dr. Klein says.
But it’s a prison, he thinks.
Dr. Klein tucks the pencil behind her ear. “We’ve found that Hannah actually does better if we let her work through these … episodes, I’d call them, in a safe space,” she says. “One minuteshe’s here with us, aware of everything around her, and the next moment it’s like she’s gone, her body left behind. There’s no getting through to her, no awareness. You can even see the moment it happens. When Hannah goes deep down into her mind, she goes into a place we can’t understand. A place we can’t reach her, no matter how hard we try.”
“And is that … typical of a schizophrenia diagnosis?” Jordan asks hesitantly.
“We’ve come to understand that schizophrenia is not a single disease or a unifying diagnosis,” Dr. Klein says. “It’s better understood as a group of mental health disorders with a set of co-occurring psychotic symptoms.” She takes a sip of coffee from a chipped old Zoloft coffee mug. “And believe me, it’s a good thing that our understanding of schizophrenia is evolving. Up until the fifties,lobotomieswere considered an answer to the diagnosis. A miracle cure, in fact.”
Jordan shudders. Just last week he’d read about the transorbital lobotomy, which was when a doctor took an ice pick, hammered it into a patient’s eye socket above their eyeball, and then stirred the pick around in the brain’s frontal lobes.
“Hannah has extended periods of lucidity,” Dr. Klein goes on. “But then some stimulus—external or internal, we can’t really predict—can send her into her fantasy world.”
“Where is that fantasy world?” he asks.
“The more interesting question is actuallywhen,” Dr. Klein says. “If memory serves, the year is 1347. England, perhaps, or maybe some other part of what’s now the UK. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work.”
CHAPTER 18
A scream tore itself from my throat as guards burst into the cavernous castle kitchen.
“Run, Mary!” I cried.“Run!”
It was too late. I pressed myself against the wall as two men charged past me in pursuit of Maraulf, who was trying to slip out the back passageway. His son, Merrick, grabbed a poker from the hearth and swung it like a sword. Another guard lunged at Otto, who flung his heavy sack into the side of the man’s head, knocking him to his knees.
“Go, Hannah—leave us!” Otto yelled.
The cellar staircase was only inches away, but I couldn’t go without my sister. Mary was somewhere in the dark, invisible behind the attacking enemy. I tried to weave my way toward where I’d last seen her.
“Mary!” I shouted.“Mary!”
Plates and kettles crashed to the ground as Maraulf struggled against two burly men who had him by his arms. Merrick had bloodied his assailant with the poker, but then another guard slammed him up against a wall and pressed the tip of a dagger into the skin of his throat. Before I could reach him, a guard grabbed me, spinning me around at the same time his other fist smashed into my temple.
Stars exploded before my eyes. Blindly I reached out for a weapon, my hands scrabbling across the table until my fingers closed around the neck of a wine decanter. I struck the guard across the nose with the leaden jug. Blood mixed with wine dripped down his face, but he laughed as if I’d tickled him. He grabbed for me again, and his grimy fingers caught the bodice of my dress, ripping it almost to my waist.
I kicked his knees and clawed at his eyes. I felt his skin shredding beneath my nails, but he was so much bigger and stronger. He struck me again, and I felt the skin on my cheek open up. When I staggered forward, he caught me, pulled me up, and punched me again.
Out of the blurry corner of my eye I saw Otto and a guard circling around each other, each holding a knife and dancing away from each other’s swings.
“Mary, where are you?” I yelled.
The guard kept hitting me on the arms, the chest. He could have killed me right then and there, but he seemed to enjoy raining his fists down onto my body. I could hardly see from the blood in my eyes. Every blow pushed air out of my lungs. I fell to the ground, bracing myself for another attack.
Then I saw the cook’s knife, gleaming dully on the floor. I flung myself toward it. When the guard tried to catch me, I leapt out from under the table and sliced the blade across the front of his shins. As he backed away in surprise and pain, I rose up and cut him straight across his midsection. He fell screaming, fingers clutching madly at the wound as his entrails spilled themselves onto the floor.
“Mary!” I sobbed, the dripping red knife still clutched in my hand. “I’m coming!”
I thought I saw her—her pale dress, her golden hair—dodging the blows of another guard. “Go! Run to the tunnel!”
If we could just shut the grate behind us, it would buy us enough time to get out. The forest was a stone’s throw away on the other side of the moat, and once we made it into the trees, they’d never find us.
