EMBER’S POV

She reads it the way a judge reads a confession, fast and flat and giving nothing back, and the old man drifts to her shoulder and reads it alongside her, and neither of them makes a sound.

I watch their faces for something and get nothing. They’re very good at nothing.

“Hm,” she says at last, which could mean anything.

“It’s a slowing draught,” I say, because the silence is unbearable and because I want them to know I’m not just a girl holding a paper she can’t read. “Not a cure. There’s nothing in it that could cure what she has. It binds the blackening so it...