Chapter 11
Serenity
“It’s going to be okay.”
Five words every soldier fears.
You can rephrase them, elaborate on them, parse them down, but the meaning is always the same: you’re fucked.
It doesn’t help that the royal physician—Dr. Goldstein, the man who administered the antidote to my memory loss—says this while wearing a hazmat suit. He’s already swabbed my cheek and taken a sample of my blood for testing, and now he’s cleansing my arm for a shot.
What no one’s mentioning is that the king’s pills should’ve prevented me from catching plague in the first place. Or that the plague has run its course in this region of the world.
“What are the odds that the shot will work?” Montes asks from where he holds me down alongside his guards. I’ve obviously been a little too transparent with my hate for doctors.
I don’t fight them too hard, however. The king and his men have quarantined themselves with me inside this room in the palace, and judging from the bits and pieces I’ve gathered, they could be at risk.
Even the king.
It’s unlikely, considering that prior exposure to the virus means their bodies should have the immunities needed to fight it, but it’s not impossible.
The doctor’s shaking his head. “Decent, though I’d need to see her bloodwork first.”
He slips the needle under my skin, and now I do jerk my limbs.
“She can take a bullet, but not a shot,” the king murmurs. I think he’s trying to lighten the mood. He shouldn’t bother. I know the odds. Despite what the king said last night, Death and I are old friends, and he’s decided to pay me a visit.
Two hours later it’s clear the shot hasn’t worked. I’m drenched in sweat, yet I have the chills. No wonder this plague killed so many. It has a swift onset and it escalates quickly.
My head pounds, my brain feeling far too swollen for the cavity it rests in. For once, there’s no nausea, just an ache that’s burrowed itself into my bones.
Montes sits at my side. “You’re okay,” he says, taking my hand.
My teeth chatter. “Stop saying that.”
His lips tilt into a smile, and he brushes the hair back from my face. “This wasn’t how I imagined getting you on your back.”
“You’re such an asshole,” I say, but my lips twitch at his words. He understands that I don’t want pity. I’ll drink up his strength.
Unlike the others, he hasn’t bothered donning even a mask. My eyes prick. Illness unwinds the last of my defenses. The immortal king risks his own health to be by my side. I’m too sick to wonder about this, but not too sick to be moved by it.
Montes wipes away a tear that leaks out the corner of my eye, staring at it wondrously. “She cries.”
“Put on a mask, Montes.” I can’t think about the fact that I’m actually concerned about his wellbeing.
“I’ll be fine.”
I want to place my hands over his lips to stop him from speaking, but that might just increase his chances of catching whatever I have.
“Please.”
A knock on the door interrupts us. A moment later the doctor, who had left to run my bloodwork, returns, clad once more in a hazmat suit.
One look at his face and I know whatever he has to say won’t be good.
“Montes,” he says, not meeting my eyes, “a moment please?”
The King
Dr. Goldstein pulls me to the edge of the room.
“I sent Serenity’s bloodwork to the lab,” he says when I approach him. He looks tired, which is not the expression I want to see on his face.
“The lab confirmed that the queen does in fact have the plague. However,” the doctor looks more than a little concerned, “this strain … it’s new.”
“It’s new?”
How does a new strain of plague show up out of thin air and choose my wife as its first victim?
“Where did it originate from?”
“One of your laboratories—the one stationed in Paris.”
It takes me a moment to register his words. I’m expecting him to say a general region like the Balkan Peninsula, not a specific location, and definitely not one of my labs.
“From what I was able to gather, it matches a strain of plague your researchers have been testing.”
The news is a shock to my system.
“They’re in the initial stages of creating an inoculation for this strain,” Goldstein continues, “but an inoculation won’t do Serenity any good now that she’s already caught it. We’ve already given her the antidote for the old virus.”
“What good is an old antidote if this is not the same illness?” My voice is rising. I pinch the bridge of my nose and pace. “And how the hell did this get leaked?”
Heads are going to fucking roll. Now I just need to figure out whose those will be.
“Your Majesty, we have no idea. No one at the research station in Paris has reported a contamination, but that could be a failure in oversi—”
“Don’t feed me that bullshit.”
This was a deliberate attack. Someone went into one of my laboratories and harvested a super virus to kill my queen with.
I run a hand down my face. I’ll torture all those technicians one by one until I have my answers, and then I will hunt down whoever did this and I will kill them slowly. A point must be made: those who dare to turn my weapons against me and my own will die, along with many innocents.
“What’s the kill rate?” I ask.
“Pardon?” Dr. Goldstein says.
“The kill rate. How lethal is this strain?”
“Your Majesty—”
“Just give me the goddamn number, Goldstein.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Your researchers in Paris didn’t know, but they thought it was somewhere around,” he takes a breath, “eighty percent.”
Eighty percent.
Eighty percent.
I’ve turned away from him before even realizing I’ve done so. I rub my mouth at the horror of it all. Four out of every five victims die.
I glance over at Serenity just as she lets out a wet, rattling cough.
“What happens at this point?” I ask, returning my attention to Dr. Goldstein. “Do we move her into the Sleeper?”
Goldstein shakes his head. “The Sleeper specializes in trauma, not illness. It won’t work for this, just like it won’t cure Serenity of cancer.
“Your Majesty,” he continues, his voice already apologetic, “this is out of our hands. If the queen is to live, she’ll have to beat this on her own.”
Serenity’s condition worsens. By the evening, she’s strapped to several different monitors, and I tense at every beep.
No one else in the room contracts the plague. It’s not too surprising given that on this end of the hemisphere, people have either survived the plague once, or been inoculated against it. Goldstein speculates that this mutated strain is much less transmutable, meaning that while lethal, it won’t readily spread. This only strengthens the argument that someone deliberately infected my wife.
And Serenity, who’s never encountered the plague before, has no defenses against it. The pills that should’ve protected her from this pathogen, the pills that prevent me from aging, she hasn’t taken since the bombing on the palace, which was a month ago. Any she took before then have long since been purged from her system.
I watch her toss and turn in the hospital bed.
I brought one of the victims of my war into my house, and she’s brought the world’s blights in with her.
I run my hand over hers. Scars mar her knuckles; it’s the same hand that wears my rings. Love and war—they battle it out across her skin. I thread my fingers between hers and bring them to my mouth.
Serenity doesn’t react to the touch, but I do. My hand trembles, and I can’t be sure whether fear or fury are responsible for the palsy.
Even as I sit here, my researchers are being interrogated and punished.
It’s not enough to slack my need for vengeance. Not nearly.
Serenity lets out a moan and tugs against my grip. Only then do I realize I’ve been squeezing her hand so tightly my knuckles have whitened.
That night in Geneva, when I first held her under the stars, I told her all the ways she was unexceptional—how she wasn’t the prettiest, or the smartest, or the funniest person I’d encountered. I didn’t bother to tell her that she was the most ferocious woman I’d ever met, or the most tragic. I didn’t tell her that whatever combination of pain and hardship she’d endured, it enthralled me completely.
She’s not dying. She can’t. Serenity’s final act is not succumbing to fever in a hospital bed.
Serenity will live—she must. I rely upon it, and humanity relies upon it. Otherwise, I won’t rest until the world burns.