The whispers in Nina’s head rose again, less angry than longing. Hush now, they said, hush.
The Springmaiden passed through an archway into … a dormitory. Nina sank into the shadows by the arch, not quite believing what she saw before her.
Women and girls lay in narrow beds as the Springmaidens moved among them. Beyond them, Nina glimpsed a row of bassinets. The room was otherwise bare, the dusty ruin of the factory wing cleared of equipment. The windows had been papered over in black—to prevent any lamplight from leaking outside and raising questions.
A girl who couldn’t be more than sixteen was being walked up and down the length of the corridor by a Springmaiden. Her feet were bare and she wore a light gray gown that stretched over her jutting belly.
“I can’t,” she moaned. She looked unspeakably frail, the thrust of her stomach at odds with the sharp knobs and angles of her bones.
“You can,” said the Springmaiden, her voice firm as she led the girl by her elbow.
“She needs to eat,” said another of the women from the convent. “Skipped her breakfast.”
The Springmaiden tsked. “You know you aren’t to do that.”
“I’m not hungry,” panted the girl between heavy breaths.
“We can either walk to help the baby come or I can sit you down for some semla. The sugar will give you energy during the birth.”
The girl began to cry. “I don’t need sugar. You know what I need.”
A tremor passed through Nina as understanding came. She recognized that desperation, that deep hunger that sank its teeth into you until all you were was wanting. She knew the need that turned everything you’d ever cared for—friends, food, love—to ash, until all you could remember of yourself was the desire for the drug. The wasted body, the dark hollows beneath her eyes—this girl was addicted to parem. And that meant she must be Grisha.
Nina peered down the row of beds at the women and girls. The youngest looked to be about fifteen, the oldest might have been in her thirties, but the ravages of the drug made it hard to tell. Some cradled small bumps beneath their thin blankets, others hunched over high, protruding stomachs. A few might not have been pregnant—or might not have been showing yet.
Nina felt her body tremble, heard the thunder of her heartbeat in her ears. What was this place? Who were these women?
Help us. Could these be the voices she had heard? But none of the women were looking at Nina. It was the dead who had summoned her. Justice.
The door behind Nina opened again, and as one, the patients in their beds turned their heads like flowers seeking the sun.
“She’s here!” cried one of them as the Wellmother swept in. She was pushing a cart. The women began to rise from their beds, but the Wellmother gave a short, sharp “Be still!” They sank back obediently against their pillows. “There will be no rushing or shoving. You will get your injection when we come to you.”
Nina eyed the rows of syringes on the cart and the ruddy liquid inside them. She wasn’t even sure if it was parem, but she felt the pull of the drug, could swear she smelled it on the air. A year ago she would have clawed her way to those syringes without a second thought for revealing herself. She’d fought hard to break free from the addiction and had learned that using her new power helped. Now she focused on that power, on the current of that cold and silent river. She needed all the sense and calm she could summon because none of what she was seeing made sense.
Grisha under the influence of parem were beyond powerful. They could accomplish things that were otherwise unimaginable even with the most extraordinary amplifier. Jarl Brum had attempted to experiment on Grisha with the drug in the hope of turning them into weapons to be used against Ravka—but always under carefully controlled conditions. His Grisha captives had been confined to specially built cells that prohibited them from using their power, and the parem had been mixed with a sedative to try to make the prisoners more compliant.
These women weren’t even in restraints.
The Wellmother moved down the line, handing syringes to the sisters, who injected the orange concoction into waiting arms. Nina heard a few sobs, a low, contented groan, a grumbled “She always starts on that end. It isn’t fair.”
The pregnant girl being walked along the aisle said, “Please. Just a little.”
“Not so soon before the baby comes. It could put you both at risk.”
The girl began to cry. “But you never give it to the mothers after the babies come.”
“Then you’ll just have to get pregnant again, won’t you?”
The girl cried harder, and Nina didn’t know if it was hunger for the drug or dread at what the Springmaiden was suggesting that made the girl cover her face and weep.
The women fell back in their beds, fingers flexing at their sides. The fire in the lanterns leapt. A gust of wind shifted a stack of bedsheets. Mist gathered over one girl’s bed—she must be a Tidemaker. But they were all docile, gave not a single sign of defiance. Grisha on parem didn’t behave this way. It was a stimulant. Had the drug been combined with another substance? Was this what had poisoned the wolves? If Nina somehow managed to steal a syringe, would Leoni be able to discern what new atrocity the Fjerdans had concocted? And how had the girls survived long enough on the drug to bear children, maybe multiple children?
A baby began to cry in one of the tiny cribs. A Springmaiden snatched a bottle from the bottom of the cart and picked up the infant, quieting it. “There you go, sweetheart,” she crooned.
Nina pushed back against the wall, afraid her legs might give way. This could not be. But if the mothers were ingesting parem … then the babies would be too. They would be born addicted to the stuff. Perfect Grisha slaves.
Nina shuddered. Was this Brum’s work? Someone else’s? Were there other bases that had been given over to these experiments? Why did I think these nightmares stopped at the Ice Court? How could I have been so naive?
Her gaze fell on a woman lying in a daze, face nearly as pale as her pillow. A young girl lay in the bed next to her. Nina gripped the wall to steady herself. She recognized them. The mother and daughter from the Elling docks. Birgir had sent them here. Nina wished she’d killed him more slowly.
Was this what had become of the Grisha women who hadn’t made it to the safe house in Elling? Were they in this room right now? Girls go missing from Kejerut. Not just any girls. Grisha.
A bell sounded somewhere in the factory. The Wellmother clapped her hands, and several of the Springmaidens gathered to follow her.
“Have a good night, Marit,” she said to one of the uniformed women as she left. “We’ll have a shift in to relieve you tomorrow night.”
Nina slipped in behind them as they left the dormitory. She kept to the gloom, trying to steady herself and think of the task ahead—getting out of the factory. But her mind felt fractured and wild, crowded with the images of that room.
Help us. The voices of the dead. The pain of the living.
Ahead she could see the Springmaidens approaching the guards at the main door.
“Did your straggler find you?” she heard one of the guards ask the Wellmother.
“What straggler?”
“I don’t know, braids, pinafore. Looked the same as the rest of you.”
“What are you talking about? We’re all very tired and—”
“Line up for a head count.”
“Is that strictly necessary?”
“Line up.”
Nina did not wait to hear the rest. She set off at a sprint, back down the hall toward the eastern wing, trying to keep her footsteps light. The main entrance wasn’t an option anymore. If the guards discovered an extra Springmaiden had—
A bell began to sound, different from the last, high and shrill. An alarm.
Lights came on all around her, the sudden glare blinding.
She wasn’t going to make it back through the dormitory to the eastern gate.
Nina slid behind a dusty hunk of machinery as two guards stormed past, guns at the ready.
She looked up. Several of the windows here were broken, but how to reach them? And what was on the other side?
No time to debate the issue. By now the guards and the Wellmother knew that a rogue Springmaiden or someone dressed in a convent pinafore had infiltrated the factory. Nina had to get down the mountain and back to the convent before anybody found her bed empty. She scrambled atop the old piece of equipment and reached for the window ledge, struggling to haul herself up. She managed to wedge her foot between two bricks and shove her body onto the stone ledge.
Through the broken glass, she could see the twinkling lights of the town in the distance, patches of snow on the forest floor far below.
She heard footsteps and saw another squad of armed soldiers charging through the eastern wing on heavy boots.
“Lock down the perimeter,” one was saying. “We’ll search in a grid and work our way back toward the central hall.”
“How do we even know someone is here?” another complained.
If they looked up—
But they continued on, conversation fading.
Nina took one last glance out the window.
“No mourners,” she whispered, and launched herself through the broken glass.
She fell fast and hit the ground hard. Her shoulder and hip screamed at the force of the impact, but Nina stifled any sound as she rolled down the slope, unable to stop her momentum. She tumbled into the tree line, struck the base of a pine, and forced herself to shove to her feet.
She made herself take a moment to get oriented, then ran, dodging through the trees, keeping her hands up to try to stave off the slicing branches, trying to ignore the pain in her side. She had to get back to the convent and inside before the Wellmother returned. If she didn’t, Leoni and Adrik would be taken unawares, and all their covers would be blown.
She came to a stream and charged through, shoes squelching in the shallows, then plunged down the next hill.
There, the convent—its windows still dark, though she could see lanterns in the stables, the chapel yard, the dish of scraps she had left out for Trassel.