[

humeur

|

scared

]

I should be sleepy. I am tired, but I have no desire to sleep, and it isn't just because of the fear I always feel aboard any kind of boat, that if I am trapped in my coffin and something goes wrong, no one will even be able to save me, and I will wake and die at the bottom of the sea. It isn't true that I don't breathe, though even Séverine cannot hear it; it isn't true that I don't need air, and even if I didn't, there is nothing to do at the bottom of the ocean but starve. I suppose fish have blood, but I've never attempted to drink it.

I should be sleepy...but I'm not. The sky is growing strange and grey and light but not with sunlight. We are surrounded by mists. We've been befouled in Juliana's handiwork; Séverine has never confirmed that for me but I know it--I know what she would have done for Michel, in whose death I have never myself quite managed to believe (but how can I? at times it is hard for me to remember that he is no longer the twelve-year-old who redacted Placidus' tables of houses). How very ironic that we of all people should be caught in a trap that she made to protect us all.

We would have been safer if we had travelled as mundanes. Séverine did try, I know.

[

humeur

|

hungry

]

The only thing worse than being trapped in a hole during daylight with a bunch of bleeding soldiers is being trapped in a hole during daylight with a bunch of bleeding soldiers and a sixteen-year-old girl who thinks she’s a vampire hunter.

They took my research. I still can’t believe they have Ker-Ys, and that everything in my laboratory that I wasn’t able to destroy has been moved to Transsilvania. The Germans will continue it; I’m sure of that. I don’t think I want to know what they’re doing. I should have destroyed it all. But I’ll be the one who has to set everything right when it’s done, because it’s my fault. And if they do learn something, what do I do? If they learn something, and we use the knowledge, does that justify what they did? If we don’t use the knowledge, does that compound the insult to all of the people they’ll have tortured and killed before we can stop them? I wish I knew. I should have stuck to astronomy and stayed away from medicine, but if there’s anything I have more than enough of, it’s time.

That girl’s eyes burn into me like sunlight. She has no idea who I am, what I do, what I’ve done. She only knows I’m a killer. She knows, because she’s one too. The only predator more efficient than a human being is a formerly human being.