Sophia cleared her throat. “Enne happens to be in possession of a coin that used to belong to Veil, who turns out was also her dad. It apparently has Veil’s talent locked inside—”
“Itwhat?” Harrison croaked, grasping and squeezing his white sheets. The heart rate monitor beside him did a tiny whirl. Sophia put her hand on Harrison’s shoulder and pressed him down before he could attempt to sit up.
“I know it sounds shatz,” Sophia told Harrison calmly, “but there was this...vision of Veil in the House of Shadows. And he told us—”
“Shatz?” he repeated, still sounding strangled. “Veil is dead. I went to his execution. Believe me, I heard his neck snap.”
Roy gave Sophia a wary look, but Sophia ignored him. Roy didn’t know Harrison’s history, but Sophia had expected him to react this way. Veil was responsible for orchestrating the worst months of Harrison’s life, which Harrison was reminded of every time he looked in the mirror. Even now, he unconsciously reached toward his eyepatch, as though the scar faintly throbbed.
“It’s a shade,” Sophia continued gently, “there was a shade on Enne and Levi, in addition to the one in the game. I know it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but they think if they talk to Delaney, they might be able to...”
Before she could finish, the door swung open again, revealing someone Sophia had never seen before but instantly recognized. Her long neck, her beady eyes, her gray-toned skin were all exactly as she appeared in the newspapers. Josephine Fenice, the Chancellor of the Republic.
Two burly secret service men in suits flanked her either side. They each pointed a pistol around the room.
Sophia yelped and put her hands up, her heart rate spiking faster than even the beeping of Harrison’s on the monitor. The Chancellor was the one who’d ordered Hector to kill Harrison. But she couldn’t kill him now, could she? There’d be dozens of witnesses in the hospital. And Sophia couldn’t lose the last chance at family she’d ever have.
“Madame Chancellor,” Roy said, his voice a squeak, “you can’t—”
“I hear Hector is dead,” Fenice said coolly. She had an eerie monotone quality to her voice that suited her appearance.
“He was a friend of mine,” Harrison said dryly, as though he could possibly mourn the man who’d shot him. But then again, Sophia mourned her siblings. Grief didn’t play by the rules of should and should not. “You didn’t have to do this. If you wanted my card—”
“It’s about more than the game!” Fenice said, her cold exterior cracking. “You cannot surround yourselves with this city’s criminals and expect it not to have ramifications. The pardon of the Mizer was—”
“You’d execute an eighteen-year-old girl?” Harrison asked flatly.
“The Bargainer is back!” Fenice fumed. “All Malcolm wanted—all I wanted—was for the Revolution to end. But this violence...it has to end somewhere, Harrison.”
“I believe we’re in agreement there,” he said.
“But we aren’t,” she snapped. “It hasn’t been that long. I remember, you remember... All it would take is a push, and things could go back to exactly the way they were. Too many sacrifices were made for me to let this world fall back into tyranny. And if the price of that is more blood, then let history remember that I gladly paid it.”
Sophia didn’t pretend to understand the horrors of the Revolution—she hadn’t been alive then, nor had any of her friends. But in her opinion, Fenice had acted ruthlessly enough to claim the title of tyrant herself.
“No one wants to go back in time,” Harrison said. He lifted his hands, like he was trying to talk her down.
“You think any of us wantedthis?” Fenice laughed mirthlessly. “You think we wanted all the Mizers dead? None of us were so terrible. But we didn’t have a choice. Nor do I now...”
Just as she turned back to her two guards to give what Sophia imagined was a killing order, several people screamed from the hallway.
“Sir, put the man and the weapons down,” someone barked.
“Don’t take a step closer!”
“We have orders to shoot!”
There was the echoing of rapid gunfire, followed by more screams. Even with a wall between her and the commotion, Sophia instinctively ducked from her chair to the floor, so terrified she thought she might vomit. She’d thought she’d left the violence behind when she’d burned Luckluster.
Roy reacted first, lunging away from Harrison, but before he reached the door, a tall figure appeared at the threshold. The man wore a long, oversize wool coat that swept across the floor with the effect of a cloak. Pinned beneath him was a young man Sophia didn’t recognize, with white Dove hair and a wild, frightened expression. The point of a scythe pressed against his neck, and in the tall man’s other hand, he carried a machine gun.
Fenice’s servicemen fumbled to point their guns away from Harrison to the man.
“Lower your weapons,” one of the officers commanded pathetically.
To Sophia’s shock, Scythe did—but only the gun. He switched on its safety and dropped it gracelessly to the floor, and it made a thump quieter than how heavy it looked.
The other officer took an uncertain step forward. “Your other weap—”
