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 spreads slower through the lungs, and it eases the drowning so she can rest. It buys time. That’s all it does. That’s all I’m asking it to do.”
Her eyes flick up to me, then back down.
“To bind it, yes,” she says,
