drug, but …” He turned to Kuwei. “Could the parem alter a Grisha’s power? Change it? Destroy it?”
Kuwei fiddled with the latch on his travel pack. “I suppose it’s possible. She survived the withdrawal. That is rare, and we know so little about parem , about Grisha power.”
“Didn’t carve enough open to solve that riddle?” The words were out of Jesper’s mouth before he thought better of them. He knew they weren’t fair. Kuwei and his father were Grisha themselves, and neither had been in any position to keep the Shu from experimenting on others.
“You are angry with me?” said Kuwei.
Jesper smiled. “I’m not an angry type of guy.”
“Yes, you are,” said Matthias. “Angry and frightened.”
Jesper sized up the big Fjerdan. “Beg your pardon?”
“Jesper is very brave,” protested Kuwei.
“Thank you for noticing.” Jesper stretched out his legs and crossed one ankle over the other. “You have something to say, Matthias?”
“Why aren’t you going to Ravka?”
“My father—”
“Your father could go with us tonight. And if you’re so concerned about him, why weren’t you at his hotel today?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
“I know what it is to be ashamed of what you are, of what you’ve done.”
“You really want to start this, witchhunter? I’m not ashamed. I’m careful. Thanks to people like you and your drüskelle buddies, the world is a dangerous place for people like me. It always has been, and it doesn’t look to be getting any better.”
Kuwei reached out and touched Jesper’s hand, his face imploring. “Understand. Please. What we did, what my father did … We were trying to make things better, to make a way for Grisha to …” He made a gesture as if he was pressing something down.
“To suppress their powers?” suggested Matthias.
“Yes. Exactly. To hide more easily. If Grisha don’t use their powers, they grow ill. They age, tire easily, lose appetite. It’s one way the Shu identify Grisha trying to live in secret.”
“I don’t use my power,” said Jesper. “And yet …” He held up his fingers, enumerating his points as he made them. “One: On a dare, I ate a literal trough full of waffles doused in apple syrup and almost went back for seconds. Two: A lack of energy has never been my problem. Three: I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”
“No?” said Matthias. “There are many kinds of sickness.”
Jesper touched his hands to his revolvers. Apparently the Fjerdan had a lot on his mind tonight.
Kuwei opened his pack and took out a tin of ordinary jurda , the kind sold in every corner shop in Ketterdam. “Jurda is a stimulant, good for fighting fatigue. My father thinks … thought it was the answer to helping our kind. If he can find the right formula, it will allow Grisha to remain healthy while hiding their powers.”
“Didn’t quite work out that way, did it?” Jesper said. Maybe he was a little angry.
“The tests do not go as planned. Someone in the laboratory is loose in his talk. Our leaders find out and see a different destiny for parem .” He shook his head and gestured to his pack. “Now I try to remember my father’s experiments.”
“That’s what you’re scribbling away at in the notebooks?”
“I also keep a journal.”
“Must be fascinating. Day one: sat in tomb. Day two: sat in tomb some more.”
Matthias ignored Jesper and said, “Have you had any success?”
Kuwei frowned. “Some. I think. In a laboratory with real scientists, maybe more. I’m not my father. He was a Fabrikator. I am an Inferni. This is not what I’m good at.”
“What are you good at?” asked Jesper.
Kuwei cast him a speculative glance, then frowned. “I never had a chance to find out. We live a frightened life in Shu Han. It was never home.”
That was certainly something Jesper could understand. He picked up the tin of jurda and popped the lid open. It was quality stuff, sweetly scented, the dried blossoms nearly whole and a vibrant orange color.
“You think if you have a lab and a few Grisha Fabrikators around, you might be able to re-create your father’s experiments and somehow work your way to an antidote?”
“I hope,” said Kuwei.
“How would it work?”
“Would it purge the body of parem ?” asked Matthias.
“Yes. Draw the parem out,” said Kuwei. “But even if we succeed, how to administer it?”
“You’d have to get close enough to inject it or make someone swallow it,” said Matthias.
“And by the time you were within range, you’d be done for,” finished Jesper.
Jesper