her tells me that nothing is wrong. Her eyes are so bright, so eager, that I know immediately she’s discovered something. It’s the same look she gets when she has designed something no one else has ever thought of, when she sees something that no one else can see.
“I think Red just ended our war,” she says.
18
It’s early enough that Adena’s shop is one of the few in the Grid that has its torches lit and machines on. Early morning light filters across the dusty floors, dotting the scattered piles of tools with patches of sun.
My mother is still there when I arrive, hunched over a series of identical glass vials all lined up in a wooden box, each of them with a different label. She waves at me when she sees us arrive. There are faint bags under her eyes too.
“Your friend’s been awake all night,” she tells me in Basean, touching my wrist and nodding at the display. She raises an eyebrow at me. “She came knocking on my door at some ungodly hour. I almost hit her with a pan before I realized she wasn’t a soldier or a thief. It’s as if I have two daughters.”
“Why?” I sign back. “What for?”
My mother takes one of the vials out of the container and hands it to Adena. “You explain it, child,” she tells Adena, switching now to her accented Maran. “You discovered it.”
Adena beams at her as if praised by her own mother. She takes the vial and holds it up to the light. “You know that no one has your mother’s hands,” she tells me. “I asked her to help me prepare these samples in the most sterile way. You see, this contains Red’s blood. The same that I collected yesterday.”
She hands me the vial before she takes out the second. “And this contains blood from the Ghost in the prison.”
I look closely at the two vials. Although the Ghost’s blood is darker, they’re both a purple-black hue that sometimes looks blue under the right light. I glance expectantly back at Adena.
Adena nods at my mother, who takes a slender glass pipe, fills it with a bit of the Ghost’s blood, and then carefully drops a bit of the liquid onto a flat tablet. Her movements are so sure and refined that I’m immediately reminded of when I was a child, when I’d watch her administer medicine to her patients.
Here is when one can see the true difference between their blood and our own. The Ghost’s congeals immediately into a tight circle and then expands out as thin as it can go, as if the rage contained in a Ghost shows up even in their veins, moving outward in a hungry pursuit of unaffected blood. I stare at the unnaturally flat sheet of blood that’s stretched itself thin, my stomach roiling at the sight.
“Ghost blood has low surface tension,” Adena explains to me when she sees my face. “It likes spreading itself out.” She opens a jar of the magnesium flakes we’d collected the day before and drops a few into the blood sample. “So you can see what’s happening,” she says. The circle of Ghost blood suddenly shimmers with bright bits of dust, the metallic flecks winking in and out of existence. After a while, the magnesium dissolves into the blood, leaving the liquid a shade lighter.
My mother holds a vial of Ghost blood near the sample on the glass tablet. As I look on, the froth in the sample stays completely still, reacting in no visible way to the presence of the vial.
“As you can see,” Adena says as she goes, “Ghost blood is obviously uninterested in itself. Ghosts have no interest in attacking one another, or anyone else with the same poison in their blood.”
She nods at the Ghost’s blood. “Now watch what happens when I put my own blood beside it.”
My mother takes another red vial from the container. She puts a few scarlet drops of Adena’s blood right next to the sample of the Ghost’s on the tablet.
The color of the sample blood almost seems to move toward the vial, forming a gradient with darker blood on the nearest end, as if drawn by an invisible force.
“Ghosts hunger for us,” Adena says, pointing at herself, my mother, and me. “Their blood wants to bind with ours and consume it.” She pauses to point at the Ghost’s blood. “The blood has a gradient now because it has likely gathered against the side,