later, R.H. and D.H. Her aunt and uncle…” Lucy paused. When she turned back to me, her face was grim. She pointed to a set of initials close to the very top. M.W. My heart thudded.
“Mama…” I breathed.
Lucy looked back to the list, scanning it. Then she pointed again, to a set of initials on the very bottom.
“L.A.” she said softly. “Lucy Arbor.” She turned to me and smiled a pained smile. “I was right. I was right all along.”
It felt as though all the air went out of my lungs.
“But this paper is so old it’s almost falling apart. And the date…!” Mr. Jameson pointed to three symbols up near the left-hand corner. “The date for this last section is the day after you were kicked out of Elysium, before fifty of these people even got Sick. There’s no way she could have known.…”
“She caused it,” Lucy said. “She’s the one making people Sick. She’s the one who made me Sick. She’s killing us so she’ll have more resources to sacrifice. Just like I thought.” Lucy bent then and coughed into her handkerchief. She braced herself against me, and I held still to support her. Her rattling wheeze made my breath quicken, brought back images of the hospital, of Mama on her bed. “She’s doing this on purpose,” Lucy finished weakly, putting her muddy handkerchief back in her pocket.
My mind reeled. All this time. All this time the woman I had lived with, learned from, idolized, had been the one who killed my mother. Had been the one who caused the death I’d blamed myself for since I was young. And now she was killing Lucy.
“Mother Morevna wouldn’t do that,” Mr. Jameson said shakily, eyes on the backs of his hands. “She’s a hard woman, and not easy to understand, but I know her.” Then he shook himself and said, weakly, “She loves this town. She loves these people.”
I stared at him, daring him to look away. “Do you really believe that, Mr. Jameson?” I demanded. “After she didn’t listen to Olivia about Mr. Robertson? About Rosa? About me?” I kept my eyes on his. “You know it deep down. You know that she did it. You know that she’s responsible for so much suffering in Elysium. Don’t you?” I breathed. “But you don’t want to say, because if she’s done this, that means that by not questioning her, you…”
“That I’ve helped her,” Mr. Jameson’s voice broke. “Oh, Lord, I’ve helped her the whole way.”
Mr. Jameson’s voice was as hollow and empty as a tomb.
“But I still don’t know how,” said Lucy. “Surely we’d know if she cast a spell over all of us.”
Mr. Jameson shook his head in disbelief, leaned closer to the fire to scrutinize the list again, looking for anything that would absolve the woman he’d been working with all this time. Anything that would absolve himself of his passivity.
“Wait…” Lucy said. “What’s that on the back?”
I squinted. On the back of the paper, more Cyrillic letters were slowly appearing in a paragraph at the bottom.
Mr. Jameson flipped the paper over and read the paragraph on the bottom.
“It’s code… but it’s… it’s talking about spells. Trapdoor spells laid a long time ago, at the beginning of Elysium.” He squinted. “It’s talking about a stone… put somewhere far away.”
“The Master Stone,” I said. “She must have made one a long time ago and put it somewhere safe. That’s what she was talking about when she told me about taking precautions. There might be layers and layers of spells. Major ones that can’t be undone by any white stones. We’d need the Master Stone for that.” I shook myself mentally, focused on the task at hand. “But what about this one? What’s tripping the spell for Dust Sickness?”
Mr. Jameson read on. Then his face went white as a sheet. “The Dowsing Well,” he said.
“Sal,” Lucy said. “The water rations…”
A jolt of horror went through me. Suddenly I remembered Trixie’s memory, the water rations under the table, how they’d all had a black smudge on them. I thought of all the Dowsing Well rations I’d given Lucy for her aunt. All of them had had the same black markings.
“So that’s why only certain people were allowed to drink from the well in the first place,” I said. “She was controlling who gets it and who doesn’t.”
Across from me, Mr. Jameson’s face was pale. The paper hung limp in his hands.
Mr. Jameson put his head in his hands, his shoulders