Steelhands - Jaida Jones [138]
“Wish it was,” I said. “See, whoever’s in charge has been scheduling these checkups for all the new students—I guess to make sure we’re all protected from whatever fever’s running through the dormitories and whatnot, or to make sure we aren’t bringing anything into the city with us that we picked up from the farm. Everyone’s had ’em, or at least, most of us have, but then … It started to seem like everyone who went came back with this mean kind of fever. Like somehow getting the checkup was making us sick.”
“Physician wouldn’t be doing his job, if that was the case,” Adamo said.
“Her job,” I corrected him. “And that’s exactly what I thought. I’ve got a healthy constitution—only been sick five days in my whole life—and after my second visit, all of a sudden, I’ve got this awful fever. Sweating, vomiting—no use coating it with sugar; I was doing a lot of things I wish I wasn’t—and having these weird dreams where I kept hearing things that weren’t actually there.”
“Hearing things?” Adamo asked, suddenly looking sharp.
“I’m not screwy,” I told him firmly, suddenly regretting all the sweet cocoa in my stomach since some amount of being nervous was finally settling in. “At least, I never was before I came to the city. And I know how it sounds—like I’m out of my mind—but maybe I’m half expecting you to tell me I’m being cracked and all I need is to pull myself out of it. The thing is, they want me coming again, for another one of those checkups, but I don’t want to go and find myself sick again. It’s just a feeling I have, but it doesn’t sit right with me. Goes against my instincts, and I don’t like doing that.”
“When’re you due?” Adamo asked. I pulled the card out of my pocket, setting it down on the table.
4:00 PM, it read, and under that, M. GERMAINE.
“Stands for Margrave Germaine, I’m assuming?” Adamo asked.
“She’s the one,” I replied. “Seems all right enough, even though her place is full of these instruments—metal ones, all of ’em kept out of sight so as not to make us shudder. But I caught sight of ’em, and damn me if it wasn’t eerie.”
Adamo picked up the card, turning it back and forth. It looked small and silly in one of his enormous hands, but I didn’t know what he thought he’d get out of inspecting it so closely. He must’ve known something I didn’t because he couldn’t stop staring at it.
“Didn’t lend yourself much time to get out of it,” he said finally.
“Sure I did,” I said. “The first notice was when I came to see you last week.”
“But you didn’t tell me about it,” Adamo added.
I felt myself color and cleared my throat, trying to keep any signs of blushing off my face. “Guess I didn’t want to tell you,” I explained, “because it sounds so loopy.”
“You’re saying others had this same fever after going to visit her?” Adamo asked.
“Sure did,” I said, remembering Gaeth suddenly. A feeling of dread crept through me, and Adamo must’ve seen some of it on my face because he gave me a sharp look.
“Anything else you want to tell me?” he asked.
“Someone I know, another first-year,” I told him. “He got the fever, too. Had his appointment before me and suffered from it for a little while. And then, out of nowhere, he just disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Adamo repeated. His tone wasn’t skeptical—at least, not skeptical of the information I was giving him, I didn’t think—and it encouraged me.
“I thought maybe he’d gone home, but he left everything behind in his room,” I explained. “Like he meant to come back to it. Like something happened to him. And then Toverre—you remember, my fiancé—wrote a letter to his mother back home, and when she replied, she seemed to think he really was still here. But nobody’s seen him for over a week now.”
“Sounds like he disappeared to me,” Adamo replied.
I set my cocoa down on his desk. It was too cold—having passed the perfect point where it wasn’t scalding hot but wasn’t warm enough, either.
“So,” I said. “I’m crazy, right?”
“You shouldn’t go to that appointment,” Adamo told me. “That’s what I think.”
It hadn’t been what I was expecting, not by a wide mark, and I had to