Such a Daring Endeavor by Cortney Pearson Read Free Book Online

moment, considering the doors, the crumbling walls and marble floor. I’m not about to go back to sleep. Not now that she’s allowing me out. So I follow her.
    Dircey leads me down the stairs and into the kitchen area. A dismal amount of cupboard space joins a sink and small black fridge. It looks as if this could once have been a break room of some kind. Dircey sits at one of the two small, round tables in the room’s center while a food-warmer slowly rotates to heat something that smells of blueberries. Glowing near the light switch, the canteen’s levels dissipate the slightest bit as the machine beeps.
    A girl with ice-white hair twisted into several braids across her head, with the remainder pooling down her back, rises from the other table, leaving a book, a pair of glasses, and a steaming mug behind. She cuts me off on her way to retrieve her blueberry pastry from the food-warmer.
    “Morning, Ayso,” Dircey says to the girl.
    Ayso gives Dircey a wave. “Morning.” Then with a small smile in my direction and a slight limp, she takes her pastry back to the table.
    Dircey clears her throat, capturing my attention. She directs her hand to the empty seat beside her, at a completely different table.
    A smell I can’t exactly place swirls from the steaming cup in her hand. Dircey mixes a few things into her drink and chugs it back, hacking at the taste.
    “Tastes bad?” I ask, sitting across from her, trying to think of a way to broach the subject.
    “This keeps me from just breathing,” Dircey says, tipping the cup toward me to display a grayish-green liquid.
    “You mean…” I’m not quite sure how to ask the question. It keeps her from
just
breathing?
    “Without this I’m like a shell, all motion but with nothing on the inside.”
    “Oh.” Disappointment settles in. I hoped to find someone else like me among them. Someone who could feel regardless of having magic. But so far it looks like I’m the only one.
    “And you sell that?”
    One of her delicate brows rises. “I came up with it—I keep it,” she says.
    Dircey gestures to Ayso whose attention is currently trapped by the book next to her half-eaten pastry. She’s restored the glasses to her nose. “Ayso has been growing the basole plant for some time now, so she takes it too.”
    My brows furrow. “I thought that plant was deadly.”
    “It is deadly,” Ayso says, speaking for the first time since I entered the break room. She pushes the thick-rimmed glasses onto her nose with her middle finger. “When ingested without being primed first, anyway. I strip it of its prime.”
    “Its…prime?” I don’t remember reading about that.
    “The deadly parts,” Ayso explains. “Plants have a primary element that makes them what they are. Basole is poisonous; I just help Dircey de-poison it.”
    Dircey gulps down the last of the drink before tossing the cup into the garbage behind me. “Treasures aren’t meant to be shared,” she says with a wink. “And Ayso is a treasure, with the way she can work the magic out of plants. Don’t know what I’d do without her.”
    Ayso ignores her praise and resumes eating her breakfast and poring over the dense book beside her bowl. I hoped to talk to these people, to see what makes them similar to me, why we can all feel. I should have known their emotions were manufactured.
    Ren stops in the doorway, his hands on either side of the jamb. His mouth drops as if he wants to speak but isn’t sure what to say. It’s no wonder he’s surprised, waking up to find me gone and his prison door for the past three days suddenly open.
    “Morning,” says Dircey with a grin.
    “What’s going on?” he asks, stepping in. “I thought you didn’t trust me.”
    “They believe us,” I say before Dircey gets a chance.
    Ren rubs a hand over his chin, which prickles with several days’ growth. “Okay…” he says as if waiting for more. “Good, ‘cause I’m starving.” He struts toward the fridge and checks