Dark Metropolis by Jaclyn Dolamore Page A

eats away at people, and so sorcerers are always eating away at something else. Magic does things to a person. It turns hair silver, too.”
    “I didn’t realize.”
    “Not many people do. Strong magic has never been common. I still try to keep my hat on unless I’m someplace where it would be too conspicuous to wear a hat, like the dining room of a nice club.”
    She took a deep breath. “So…these people you bring back…where do they come from?”
    “Gerik and Uncle—Gerik’s brother—bring them to me.”
    “And they’re the ones who told you all the people committed suicide?”
    “They must have,” he said. “I mean—it must be true. Why would they bring so many people back otherwise? I’m giving them a second chance.”
    “But are you?” Thea grabbed the bread for him and started slicing it; at least it was something for her hands to do. “My father hasn’t come back.”
    “Well, Gerik isn’t a monster . He wouldn’t want to bring back soldiers who fought for this country and never let them see their families again.”
    “Wouldn’t he?” Freddy was wrong. He had to be wrong. “My mother isn’t the only woman in the parish who was bound-sick, you know. Surely not all these men were cowards and traitors or suicidal? And even if they were, why wouldn’t they at least tell us the men were being held somewhere, instead of letting their wives get sick? If my mother could just see my father here and there, she wouldn’t be sick.” Her stomach was churning the more she thought of it. “What does happen to them, then? The revolutionaries mentioned…” Well, they hadn’t mentioned many specifics. “They spoke of getting them out. You said Nan was at a hospital?”
    “No, actually,” he admitted. “Uncle brought her into his parlor.”
    “So it isn’t too far away, I imagine.”
    “When I saw Nan, she said she was working in a factory and the food was bad. After I revive them, they’re led off through the basement.”
    “Underground?” She thought of her mother trying to enter the subway. The subways that were all shut down after the war.
    This image of her father and Nan trapped beneath the streets was too much for Thea to bear. Her father had been gone for eight years. Her mother had been losing her mind for eight years. And it could have been prevented. It wasn’t death that had torn them apart; it was the government. The same government that had called her father up for military service in the first place. Moving like a mannequin, she handed a plate of buttered bread to Freddy.
    “I’m sorry,” Freddy said. “I didn’t know.”
    “Maybe you should have thought about it sooner.” She jerked back when he tried to touch her. “Don’t. Please don’t.” She couldn’t bear to even think of his hands on her, knowing what they could do—and what they had done.
    “Are you afraid of me?”
    “I just don’t want to be touched right now. Not by you.”
    He stepped back again. “But…maybe there’s just been a mistake. Maybe—”
    “How could it be a mistake to take everyone I love away from me?”
    He didn’t answer.
    She felt small and wretched, like it was the first time something truly awful had ever happened in her life, all over again. But she wasn’t a child anymore, and she couldn’t give in to it. “We have to set them free,” she said. “You have to tell your fake uncles that you won’t bring anyone else back unless they let the people go free.”
    “I can’t…just…do that.”
    She drew a breath deep enough to lift the buttons on her dress, and then said, “Well, we have to do something. And you can’t bring people back from the dead anymore. Surely you can’t, knowing this now?”
    He didn’t respond.
    She was still shuffling through all the ramifications. “So…you can really defy death, for good?”
    “Well…almost,” he said. “The only thing is that they need to take a magical serum. It keeps the magic going. Like a medicine.”
    “Do