Chapter 7: The Needle and the Son
Theo's message arrived at 7:02 on Friday morning.
Can we talk? I owe you the truth. Library roof, 9am. Just us. Please.
Rowan read it twice. He knew it was a trap. He had watched Marcus put a syringe into Theo's hand thirty-three hours earlier, and he had heard what Marcus claimed it was for.
He typed Yes and sent it.
Then he took a small plastic syringe out of the refrigerator, checked the clear liquid inside against the light, capped it, and taped it flat along the inside of his left forearm, under the sleeve of his hoodie.
He had not slept much in two nights.
On Wednesday, after he left Halcyon with the notebook inside his jacket, he had driven straight to Priya's apartment. He sent every photograph from the basement to Detective Reyes and to Priya's flash drive before he even took his shoes off. Then he opened the notebook to the pages he had not yet decoded and started working.
It took him until three in the morning to find what he was looking for. Four pages near the back, written more hurriedly than the rest, the pairs of numbers pressed hard into the paper.
IF D-GLASS SUPPRESSES BREATHING, REVERSAL AS FOLLOWS.
Below it, a list of steps. His father had known the drug could kill. He had planned for it.
Priya had read the decoded pages over his shoulder, then gone very quiet.
"We can't test this on anyone," she said.
"I know."
"Ro. If it's wrong..."
"Then it's wrong, and I'll know in about five minutes."
They spent Thursday in her kitchen with borrowed equipment from a friend in the chemistry department, following Elias's instructions line by line. By midnight they had one dose. Just one. Enough, according to the notes, to reverse the drug if it was given within five minutes.
Before he went to bed, Rowan had sent one more message. This one was to Bex.
Can you trace a charity for me? Harrow Scholarship Trust. I want to know who funds it.
He did not explain why. He was not sure he could have. It was something about the watermark on the letter in his drawer, the narrow tower in the corner of the paper, and the brass keychain in Cassian's hand. He did not want to think about what it would mean if the two were connected. So he asked someone else to find out.
At 8:15 on Friday morning, he called Cassian.
"Theo wants to meet me," he said. "St. Aldric library, on the roof, at nine."
A long silence.
"Marcus gave him something," Rowan went on. "I saw it. I think Theo's going to try to use it on me."
"Then don't go."
"If I don't go, Marcus finds another way. At least this way I know when and where." He pinned the right cufflink to the cuff of his hoodie as he talked. "I have something with me that should reverse it. Here's what I need. You wait inside the building, below the roof. Not on the roof itself. If I press the cufflink, Bex tells you, and then you come. Not before."
"Rowan."
"That's the agreement."
Another pause. He could hear Cassian breathing on the other end.
"Understood," Cassian said. "I'll bring Juno."
The roof of the St. Aldric library was flat and gravel-covered, with a low stone wall around its edge and a view over the whole campus. At nine in the morning, it was empty and cold. Fog lay over the lower part of the city, and the bay was a gray sheet beyond it.
Theo was already there, standing by the wall with his hands in the pockets of a black coat. He looked thinner than he had at the gala. There were dark circles under his green eyes.
"You came," he said.
"You asked."
It was what they had said to each other at the gala. Theo seemed to notice, and something in his face tightened.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "About the party."
"I'm listening."
Theo looked at the ground. "There's a man. A friend of my family. He's known me since I was a kid. After the memorial they hold for my dad every year, the one when I was sixteen, he started calling me. Checking in. He was the only one who ever asked how I was." He swallowed. "A few weeks ago, he told me you'd broken up with me because you were working for the police. That you wanted to get close to Cassian and bring the whole family down. He said if I didn't stop you, I'd lose everything. My home. My name."
"And you believed him."
"I didn't want to." Theo's voice cracked. "But you left, and then you started asking about Harrow Street, and he said that proved it."
"Theo," Rowan said carefully. "That man is Marcus Vane. He's lying to you. I have proof." He took out his phone. "Let me show you what I found at Halcyon."
He looked down at the screen to open the photographs.
That was the moment Theo moved.
He was fast. His hand came out of his coat pocket, and Rowan felt a sharp sting in the top of his right arm, through the fabric of his hoodie. By the time he jerked back, Theo was already stepping away, the empty syringe shaking in his fingers.
"It's just so you'll forget," Theo said. His face was white. "He promised. It's just a small dose. You'll wake up and none of this will matter."
Rowan stood still.
Then the change began, and it was not like the gala.
There was no stretching of light. No soft blur. Instead, his chest grew heavy, as if someone had laid a hand flat across his ribs and was slowly pressing down. He took a breath. It was shallower than the one before. The next one was shallower still. His fingertips began to tingle.
Breathing rate dropping. Respiratory depression. Onset under one minute.
It had taken him perhaps twenty seconds to be sure. This was not a dose meant to make him forget. This was a dose meant to stop him breathing.
He sat down on the gravel, because falling would waste time. He pushed up his left sleeve, pulled the tape free, uncapped the syringe with his teeth, and pressed the needle into the muscle of his thigh through his jeans. He pushed the plunger all the way down.
Then he pressed the silver cufflink on his right sleeve and held it. One. Two. Three.
Theo was staring at him. "What are you doing? What's happening?"
"He lied to you," Rowan said. Each word cost him air, so he used as few as possible. "This wasn't to make me forget. It was to kill me. And you'd be the one holding the needle." He breathed. "Call 911. Now."
For a second, Theo did not move. Then he dropped the empty syringe as if it had burned him and pulled out his phone with shaking hands.
Rowan lay back on the cold gravel and looked at the sky and counted his breaths.
Eight a minute. Seven. Seven.
Come on.
Eight. Nine.
Something in his chest loosened, very slightly. The hand on his ribs began to lift.
Ten.
The door to the roof stairwell banged open. Cassian came through it first, then Juno behind him with a medical bag. Juno dropped to her knees beside Rowan, two fingers on his throat, her other hand already pulling out a stethoscope.
"What did you give yourself?"
"Reversal agent," Rowan said. "Homemade. Ninety seconds ago."
Juno listened to his chest. "Well," she said, "it's working. You're lucky, and you're insane, and I'm going to yell at you about it later."
Cassian had not come to Rowan. He had stopped a few steps away and was looking at Theo.
Theo stood by the wall with his phone still pressed to his ear, tears running down his face. When he saw Cassian, he started talking very fast. "I didn't know. He said it was just to make him forget. He said..."
"I know," Cassian said.
His voice was very quiet. Rowan, lying on the gravel, could hear something break in it. But Cassian did not move toward his son. He did not raise his hand or his voice.
"Go with Juno when the ambulance comes," he said. "You're not safe from him either. And then you're going to tell the police everything. All of it."
Theo nodded. He was crying too hard to speak for a moment.
"The party," he managed. "At Aldercrest. He gave me that too. He told me what to put in Rowan's glass."
Cassian closed his eyes briefly. Then he opened them and nodded once.
While they waited for the sirens, he finally crouched down beside Rowan, on the side away from Juno, and did not touch him.
"You pressed it," he said.
"I said I would."
"I was on the third-floor landing." Cassian's voice was level, but his hands were clasped very tightly between his knees. "I stayed there. It was the longest eleven minutes I've spent in a long time."
"You stayed," Rowan said. "That's what I needed."
The paramedics took Rowan to the St. Aldric University Hospital, where a doctor who did not quite believe his story ordered a full set of tests and told him he would be kept for forty-eight hours to monitor his breathing. Theo went with Juno to give a statement to Detective Reyes. Priya came at four with a bag of clean clothes, including his old moss green hoodie, and stayed long enough to tell him, in detail, what she thought of people who injected themselves with untested medicine on library roofs. Then she hugged him hard and left for her evening shift. By five, the room was quiet.
"Where's Theo?" Rowan asked.
"With Reyes. He'll stay at Juno's tonight. She has better locks than I do." Cassian looked at the window. "I should have seen it. He was lonely in my house for years, and I was too busy keeping everyone else safe to notice. Marcus noticed."
"He's not a bad person," Rowan said. "He was used."
"I know. That doesn't make it better. It just makes it mine, too."
Cassian sat in a chair beside the bed. Not by the door this time. Close. But he kept his hands on his knees.
Rowan looked at him for a while.
Then he took his right hand out from under the blanket and held it out, palm up, on the mattress between them.
Cassian looked down at it. Then up at Rowan's face, as if checking something.
"I'm asking," Rowan said.
Cassian took his hand. His palm was warm and dry, and he held it carefully, the way he had held Rowan's elbow on the dock: firm, but ready to let go at any moment.
Rowan closed his eyes. For the first time in many days, he fell asleep without counting his heartbeat.
When he woke, it was dark outside, and the chair was empty. A note on the tray said Getting coffee. Back soon. C. His phone was buzzing on the nightstand.
It was 12:06 a.m. The message was from Bex.
You asked me to trace the Harrow Scholarship Trust. I found who pays for it. You should probably see this yourself.
Below it was a screenshot of a bank document. The name of the account holder had been blacked out by some earlier privacy filter. But at the top of the page, printed small beside the trust's name, was its logo.
A tiny brass-colored lighthouse.