Plague Saint

Chapter Seventeen: Our Saint is a Liar

Winter laid on the ground in the dark, her ear pressed to her bedroom door. Her parents talked quietly in the dining room for nearly an hour before going to bed. After that, she waited another hour to ensure they were asleep before dressing in all black, bundling up as well as she could, and creeping out of her room.

Midnight was dragging ever closer. The snow had picked up, but it wasn't enough to deter Winter. She waited nearly half an hour for the trolley—late night service was even more hellish than daytime—and rode it all the way up to Phoebe's stop.

The bag was where she'd left it. It was covered in an unidentifiable liquid that smelled awful, but it was there. Winter picked it up and stalked the streets until she found a bench under a streetlight. Her hand occasionally drifted to the pocketknife at her side, but she didn't see another soul.

She started with the letter from the mayor. It was dated from the day before, and it was short. Any useful information that could have been gleaned from it was clearly based on private conversations.

Mr. Blackburn,

Apologies for the letter, but I have meetings all day with the council to explain the new laws.

We are delighted to have you helping out the city council. The city meeting at the end of January will be very important, so we're hosting an "emergency" general assembly meeting Thursday night. Dinner and drinks will be served, which will serve our purposes nicely.

Gordon's death is unfortunate, but also serves as a reminder of what we have to do. Forrest said he would be happy to buy out Gordon's factories.

We are looking forward to the meeting, let me know if you need more supplies by Tuesday.

Mayor Atherton

The only remotely useful information was the assembly meeting in a couple of days. But that sounded more like some sort of celebration than an actual meeting. The note about Forrest buying out the factories was interesting, but not exactly surprising. Winter had expected something of the sort. She needed a better way of stopping the mayor from filling a building with sick people and working them to death. But how?

She moved on to the journal and started by decoding sentences here and there, trying to get a sense of what information each page held. The chart with the five plagues listed turned out to be a description of combinations of the plagues, not unlike the combinations she'd made herself to kill Adams and Gordon. Average time to show symptoms, average time to death...how many people had he experimented on?

The rats, Winter remembered. He had to have been using them too. In addition to patients, undoubtedly.

Disgusted, she flipped a few pages. She'd seen a lot of this, and it mostly turned out to be failed recipes, from what she could tell. She moved to the back of the book, to pages she hadn't examined yet. More graphs, lists, ingredients—

Whoa. A boat?

She squinted at the drawing. There were a few notes scribbled next to it. Equipment fits. Not all cages can go, kill off the rest.

Maybe he'd moved his stuff here after clearing out his other lab. Winter frantically translated the entire page, but there was nothing about location.

Well, it had to be on the river somewhere. Winter stood up. Fatigue tugged at her eyelids and her limbs, begging her to go home, to sleep. But she thought of River in his hospital bed. All the people she'd seen die in two weeks, leaving grieving loved ones.

She set off toward the river.

Marcus would have had to strike a balance between putting his lab within reasonable walking distance and keeping it away from prying eyes. The closest point of the river wrapped around the northeast edge of the city, like the place behind the hospital where Winter had thrown his unconscious body.