She approached the table, leaning her walking stick against it. Then she reached for her daggers, pulled them out, and placed them right in front of him. Saint Vivia’s relic showed her his shadow move closer so he could look at the daggers.
“If you uncovered your face...” he murmured.
“I won’t do that, though I should. You deserve to see what my face looks like after you and your friends gouged my eyes out.”
There was a sharp intake of breath, and that told Seraphina it was coming back to him. That day in September 1816, when he, Viktor Eisengrau, and the two other men whose names she hadn’t yet learned had attacked the carriage she and Matteo were traveling in, killed the guard who stayed and fought, then killed Matteo and did unspeakable things to her. They’d left her in a ditch, covered in mud, semen, and her own blood, and taken Matteo’s body with them.
“You,” he said.
She laughed. “No, that’s my line.”
Rune moved closer. She felt him at her side.
“Is he one of them?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“There are papers on the table,” Rune said. “And a ledger.” He reached for it, and Mayer didn’t stop him.
Seraphina was more focused on the fact that she was about to get her revenge on this man. And once she was done with him, there were three more to follow.
“Captain Mayer,” she said in the sweetest voice. “Do you know what today is?”
“No.”
“Today is the day you die.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
It wouldn’t change them, they would survive this.
Rune pulled the ledger toward him and started leafing through it.
“What is this?” he asked Mayer.
Of course, Mayer didn’t respond, and Seraphina had to prompt him. She was impatient, wondering how they were going to do this, and she had to push her boiling anger down in order to get information from Mayer. He knew things she and Rune needed to get out of him before they could end him.
“That is Project Prometheus,” Mayer said. “The physicians and surgeons working on it noted down all the revenants and the parts they were made of.”
“The parts were chosen intentionally?” Rune asked as he kept turning pages.
“Yes. It was so each revenant was capable of specific things, the Constructs more than the Sentinels.”
Seraphina inclined her head, watching Rune’s shadow through the relic, trying to determine how he felt as he looked through the heavy ledger.
“Construct and Sentinels,” she said. “Elaborate.”
“The Constructs were the first experiments. Up to Construct-Six, they were failures. The first three died within hours or days from creation, and the next three had to be put down. Constructs Six through Twelve were successful – strong, fast, and able to perform complex tasks. The Lord Harvester put them in the dungeons and used them as he saw fit. The Sentinel series was different. After the surgeons perfected the method through the Constructs, they were ordered to create perfect soldiers, and those were the Sentinels, One through Twenty.”
“I am Construct-Twelve,” Rune whispered. “And these pages are about me.”
He set the open ledger on the table and placed his hand on it, his fingers curling and wrinkling the page. Seraphina thought he was going to rip it out, but he didn’t. His shoulders shook, as if he were sobbing, then he cleared his throat and steeled himself. He removed his hand and started reading.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“It describes the process of how I was made. It started on September 14, 1816, and ended on October 3rd, 1816.”
“This means–”
