And throughout her illness, Leena kept vigil.

  It had been three years since Leena had gained her abilities to see past the curtain of death, and she’d learned in that interim that ghosts had the awful habit of trying to possess her body when she was weak. There had come times—terrifying times—when she’d awoken in a random field or on a strange street with no recollection of having got there. What had she done in those moments of blankness? Had she hurt someone? Had she been hurt without knowing it?

  In those first few months after Leena had first begun seeing phantoms, she’d rarely slept. She had been a lady’s companion at the time, under the employment of the esteemed Lord Hargreaves and his mother. It was a coveted position that would’ve saved Leena from the horrors of the factories—that would’ve freed her lungs from cotton filaments, her eyes from flying shrapnel, her wrists from the lashes of the angry overseers. It was the reason her baba had pushed her and Rami to go to school; he’d worked his fingers stiff over the spinning mules in the cotton factory to do so.

  Still, despite her father’s sacrifices, she had quit nearly three weeks after she’d seen her first ghost. Leena’s odd behavior had begun to arouse the suspicions of the watchful housekeeper and butler; they’d begun to comment on the numerous times Leena had been seen whispering to walls or striking back at nothing. Leena knew that it wouldn’t be long before one of them would express their concerns to Lord Hargreaves, suggesting demurely that it might be safer for everyone if Leena was sent to the state sanatorium.

  She ran before that could happen.

  Baba hadn’t yet been imprisoned by the time she returned home, although he’d already begun planning the walkouts with other union leaders. While her father’s Morish was broken and stuttering, he was eloquent in Algaraan. He used to lecture in history at the University of Algaraa back home before the civil war broke out, and Baba’s fluency could reach the migrant workers better than any Mor in a blue collar could.

  Rather than be disappointed at Leena’s abrupt termination, Baba had wrapped her in a fierce hug. He smelled familiar—like a factory chimney.

  “You’re home, hayati.” He spoke in Algaraan, calling her hayati—my life—before leading her inside their cramped home. He didn’t scold her for quitting, as Leena had feared he would the entire journey from the south, but merely ordered her to go to sleep. They would sort it all out in the morning.

  They never had a chance. For that very night, the soldiers had come for Baba.

  The Al-Sayer siblings were left alone to face the bitter stings of their grief and Leena’s horrifying new curse.

  For their grief, they could only live through it.

  For the ghosts, Leena and Rami tried everything to ward them away. They hung garlic cloves and dried thyme over the door, burned incense. Leena lost weight. Dark circles marked the area beneath their eyes. Any knowledge they stumbled on was accidental, through trial and error. Charms did nothing. But ghosts were repelled by the strike of two copper coins hitting each other, and the sound of humming disturbed them.

  She’d learned that phantoms were at their strongest at noon and midnight, their forms taking clearer shape, their lost eyes at once alert, as if being pulled back into the world of the living. Leena learned to dread the hollow chime of twelve church bells.

  It was Rami’s idea to encircle her bed with salt; he had read it in an old book from the lending library. By that point, Leena was past the point of exhaustion, her skin so gray that she looked phantom-like herself. When she realized that ghosts could not cross the unbroken circle of salt, she burst into sobs. Every night, the phantoms lingered on the other side, various faces of the departed—some wrinkled, some starved with protruding eyes and bloated bellies, others with manacles and chains around their wrists. They watched her, still as scarecrows. They didn’t pace, they didn’t stir, they merely waited.

  It was the first relief she had had in months. She wouldn’t leave the salt circle except for her toilette. She kept the curtains drawn and the windows shut, muffling the sounds of life happening outside that she could not join. Rami silently brought her food, then took away the unfinished plates without a word. One day, he left an Algaraan book on the bed.

  He cleared his throat. “If you study hard enough, you can find employment in the Algaraan consulate or you can translate in the refugee camps. You could even translate Mama’s poetry books. You cannot hide behind your salt forever.”

  When she looked up at him, she noticed that her brother also looked haggard. Guilt bloomed in her chest.

  Before this, she had grown up speaking Algaraan like a foreigner, in the same way many of the immigrant children born in Morland did, stumbling in and out of both languages, not being able to find a home in either. While her Algaraan had been heavily accented, she had learned to read Morish in the schoolroom with ease, and spoke it eloquently as if Morish—and not Algaraan—was the language of her heart.

  She began studying linguistics, burying her pain in her books, then took her first tentative steps out her front door. Eventually, she found work in a laundry factory—a far cry from when she was employed as a lady’s companion. For a while, things were better.

  Until the night she woke up to a phantom hovering inches from her face, wild-eyed, skin mottled, as he tried to bludgeon his soul into her body. She fought him, humming frantically, reaching for the coins she kept under her pillow. She yanked and writhed, finally gripping the copper pieces and striking them together. The ghost lurched away, and Leena scrambled out of bed to find that a mouse had run through the salt, breaking the circle.

  She never slept easy again.

  * * *

  —

  Whether it was the effects of her weakened body or not, the nightmares that plagued Leena’s fevered sleep were disturbing. She didn’t think they were possessions. Several times throughout the night she’d stumble out of bed to ensure the salt circle remained unbroken, but it was as if her fever allowed remnants of the spirits to claw into her subconscious.

  More than once, Leena had nightmares of running out of her house and into Margery’s, petrified she had given the old lady Sweeper’s Cough, only to find her on the floor, long dead from the illness. She’d awaken with a silent scream curling in her chest, only calming herself once she remembered that Margery had told her that she’d already had the disease and could not catch it again.

  Leena also dreamed of the dead, their memories sinking teeth into her.

  She was a little boy on the beach running from a foaming, rabid dog that snapped its jaws at her shoulder. She felt the agony of the bite as if she had experienced it herself, and she jerked herself awake with a cry. The flickering candlelight threw shadows across her small chamber, and beyond the salt circle was the little boy, his shoulder a mangled wound, his eyes unfocused from the effect of the virus. Leena reached for her copper coins, feeling comforted by the metal cooling her skin.

  Afterward, Leena was an old woman on her deathbed. Her joints ached, and she felt the cancer eating her abdomen. Her husband was not beside her, the sheets crumpled but empty. She heard muffled movement from another room.

  “John?” Leena called out in the old woman’s croaky voice.

  She heard a muffled response, then a sudden crash, the sound of a heavy body falling to the floor.

  “John?” The old woman tried to stumble out of bed, but her bones were too weak. She crumpled onto the rug, her cheek pressed against the rough fibers. “John? John?”

  She continued to beg weakly, each time her voice growing fainter and fainter as no response came. Leena, in the old woman’s body, inched toward the door, but by the time she reached the threshold her consciousness had begun dimming. All she hungered for was to see John one last time, but she could not reach the knob.

  When Leena awoke, it was to see the gaunt, jaundiced face of the old woman outside the salt circle, still on the floor, still reaching.

  Finally, Leena dreamed of her mother.

  Leena remained herself this time, except she was no more than five years old, growing wild in the refugee camps that bordered the shores of Morland.

  Her parents had fled Algaraa when she was still in her mother’s belly, months before civil war had broken out. Another professor at Baba’s university had threatened to report her father for lecturing anti-monarch sentiment to his students. The punishment for that would’ve been swift—death not only to him, but to his entire clan.

  Mama had been nearly seven months pregnant when they were smuggled out of the country, then onto a rickety boat to weather the tumultuous Westin Ocean to reach Morland. She knew some Algaraans had chosen to endure the deserts that surrounded the country, in the slim hope they would reach the lands beyond, but most had died of thirst and sunstroke on that journey.

  There in the camps, in a state of transience, Leena was born. Rami would follow in two years.

  Leena’s recollections of the camps were brief. She remembered the salty sea air bringing cold gusting winds to rattle their tents, the constant gnawing hunger, the watered-down stews, her parents forcing her to practice her Morish letters while the other children played.

  This time, in her dream, she was back in her tent.

  She was a child again, sitting barefoot as she practiced reading from a book, A Guide to Botany. She remembered Baba’s excitement when he managed to procure it for her from one of the camp overseers, and the hours she and Rami had spent marveling at the detailed pictures of trailing vines and thinly veined petals drawn in ink.

  Grimvines for inflammation, Marigolds for cuts, Dew Roses for heartsickness.

  Her mother sat beside her cross-legged on the floor, her dark-brown curls so much like Leena’s own. She was darning a sock.

  Leena sounded out the letters as she read aloud to her mother. “Deathgrip, also known as Death C-comes to Wolves, in large q-q-quantities can para-para-er…paralyze, but in small am-amounts can be used to treat…wo-wounds?…It has been his-torically used to hu-hunt wolves…” She trailed off, staring longingly at the rare sunshine, wishing to play with the other children, and frowning when she saw Rami toddling after the bigger kids. Why was he allowed outside when she was forced to study?

  “Continue, Leena,” Mama warned, catching that wistful look.

  Reluctantly, Leena looked back at the book, but the words had disappeared and the page was now blank. Only the ink drawing of the Deathgrip remained, and beside it the detailed illustration of a dead wolf struck down with an arrow dipped in the nectar of the flower.

  “Continue reading,” Mama repeated.

  “I’m trying to.” Leena’s voice was high and childlike; she was unable to tear her gaze from the dead wolf. She jerked upright, a sudden panic clawing her throat. “Is Rami still sick, Mama? Where is Baba? Is he alive in Newtorn Prison?”

  Her mother’s tone was exasperated. “Leena, hayati, you can go play after you finish your lesson.” Suddenly, there was a flickering in Mama’s expression, an odd change that transformed her pretty face into something subtly inhuman. She lurched toward Leena, grabbing her in a tight grip. “Leena, my love, you must listen to me. The Wake will take Baba. You must save him, my brave girl. I know you have suffered so much, but you must save him, hayati.”

  Leena cried, and when she looked down she saw that the book had disappeared from her hands. She looked around, unable to find it anywhere in the tent. She began bawling now—great hiccupping cries that tore through her small frame, afraid that her mother would scold her.

  Mama cradled her to her body, as if desiring to return her child back into herself. “Beware the promise of Weavingshaw. All Avons are demon-kissed, my love—”

  Leena jolted awake, panting as she lay alone in her bed. Her neck whipped back and forth as she searched for her mother, but the room was empty of all ghosts tonight.

  Mama had died when sickness spread through the camps—perhaps a punishment on the displaced for daring to leave their homeland. This was the first time since Mama’s death that Leena had seen her in any form; even her dreams had shied away from resurrecting that dear face. Leena held a hand to her aching heart, willing the tears to stop, willing those brown eyes to look upon her once more.

  Leena remembered that she had lost the book, and had been so distraught about it that Mama had had to go fetch Baba to calm her down. They had later found it by the foot of an old tree near where the children usually climbed, and Leena had kept it close ever since. She withdrew it now from beneath her mattress to trace over the etched letters on the cover. But it was such a minuscule memory, it felt unfair that her brain had decided to take her there rather than the thousand times Mama had hugged her to sleep, holding her like a precious bird, or Mama nuzzling her forehead when she came in from playing.

  Was this merely a murky dream left by her fevered state, entwined with a long-forgotten memory? But how could it be? Leena had never heard of the Wake before.

  She was sure that Weavingshaw and Lord Avon had laced themselves into the alcoves of her mind, rising to the surface when the fever broke in, and yet—

  The urgency of her mother’s voice as she whispered The Wake…It didn’t feel like the stab of a memory, but the infliction of a living fear.

  Leena felt the constant throb in her head turn into a more blinding headache. She could not coherently think past it, or the need to close her eyes again and sleep deeply.

  All she knew, Leena thought groggily as she laid her head down upon the drenched pillow once more, still gripping the botany book in her hand, was that the phantoms that existed in her mind were far worse than the ones that haunted her just beyond the salt circle.

  On the third day of her illness, Leena cursed St. Silas to every imaginable hell.

  He’d lied. He’d given them the wrong medication. It was not working. They were dying.

  On the fourth day, Leena’s fever broke completely. The rash that was spreading across her body changed to a faint pink color and the first signs of hunger began to assault her. She stood without fainting. And she cursed St. Silas once more, for now she was certain he’d fulfilled his end of the bargain.

  Leena took no joy in her own recovery, however, when Rami’s was much slower. He stayed in bed, asleep most of the time, although his temperature had finally broken as well and color had returned to his cheeks.

  It was on this day that Leena made her first venture to the Old Market.

  Leena had never once stopped to consider the varying smells of the bazaar, but the odor of frying fish mixed with the pungent smell of human flesh pressed close together was like a fist to her stomach.

  Leena had seen the market grow ostentatiously since its foundation nearly twenty years ago by the first Algaraan immigrants; now it was even frequented by the most reluctant of Mors. She remembered that when she was a child, the market had consisted of only a few tents and wares placed on dusty sheets on the ground. Now it snaked along the coast, starting at the harbor and moving inward, with multicolored tents, caravans, shop fronts, and people of varying wealth and class thronging together. Over the years, Leena had seen every form of merchandise being traded and haggled over—herbs and medicines that were said to be able to bring about children, handmade clothes with intricate stitching that would far outlast any factory garment made in Morland, and even imported artifacts from across the world that held prestige and grandeur.

  The crowd today was far thinner than usual, most people barricading themselves at home until the current wave of Sweeper’s Cough had settled. Of those who were out, most wore scarves on their nose and mouth to ward off the infection. Leena had also covered half her face to avoid spreading the contagion further.

  She was not surprised to find a growing line by the medicinal tents. Leena herself had stood there not long ago, spending precious coins on Mr. Martin’s Medical Cure for Contagious Diseases and Sweeper’s Cough. Yet, in spite of its popularity, it had not worked for Rami, forcing her to seek the Saint of Silence instead.

  Leena weaved through the familiar caravans, dodging both the overzealous shopkeepers waving her in and the insistent ghosts that always trawled the market calling for her attention. She kept a steady pace, avoiding eye contact with mostly anything that moved.

  Yet she could not avoid the pamphlet that was forcefully shoved into her hands.

  Since the rapid boom of the printing press, flyers had become commonplace in Leena’s life. Every other day was an advertisement for the unreal and fantastical. It was the same ruddy-faced man she’d seen all the times before, who often stood at the corner between the tents that sold rugs and the chai stall.

  Leena glanced at the paper, taking a moment to decipher the smudged black ink.

  The Saint of Hunger Spotted on Mount Syke!

  Expedition to Explore Such Sighting to Take Place on the Morrow.

  Join Us at Daybreak at Ankler’s Inn.

  “The demons are stirring again,” the man whispered to her, his eyes wide and twitching in his face. “And the Saints have returned to banish them back to their hellish world.”

  Leena thanked him with a polite nod while pocketing the pamphlet carefully, wanting to preserve the paper as intact as possible. Later on, she could write in the margins rather than spend a precious farthing to purchase new paper to practice her translations.

  Her thoughts shifted when she passed a girl no older than her, with short blond hair hidden by an overworn bonnet and a scarf over her nose, handing out flyers. She wore a red twine of rope pinned to her lapel—a sign of the Morish rebels.

  This pamphlet Leena did not take, for she had already kept one concealed at home, reading it at night when the candle was at its dimmest. She had the words memorized by now: