Rain splattered a small window as the Grand General situated himself in a chair across from mine. He leaned back, allowing Wake to light the cigarette pinned between his lips. He puffed, set his elbows on his knees, and considered me.
I crossed my own legs at the knees and hooked my handcuffed wrists over them. Wake—his wounds miraculously healed—retreated to the door, leaving the Grand General and I in an open space.
I felt his lingering gaze like a cold draft.
“So?” I prompted. “This is not your house, and I became rather disoriented in the back of the truck. Where are we?”
“The Old Citadel,” he replied, tapping off the first round of ashes onto the wooden floor. There was no rug, nor was there any décor on the plaster walls. The room looked as though it had been abandoned until recently, when it had been scrubbed clean. A room without personality, without markers or identification. A prison cell, despite its lack of stone and iron.
Thunder boomed beyond the window.
“Where will your companions take the artifact?” the General inquired.
“That entirely depends on which companion you are speaking of,” I said, trying not to show just how deeply I cared about what he might say next. Alone as I had been at mycapture, I had no way of knowing whether anyone had escaped. “We are not what you might describe as a cohesive fellowship.”
“Your Starlit sister. She certainly has the skills to intercept the artifact between when Mr. Wake saw you pick it up and when we met in the foyer,” Baffin said and took another draw on his cigarette. His gaze was calculating. He knew precisely the information he was giving me by inferring Pretoria had escaped, and it made me nervous.
“Well,” I said, taking pains to hide my relief. “Pretoria and I are not as close as we once were.”
Baffin’s expression was grave. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small notebook and a pen, and placed them on the windowsill. “I will leave this with you. What you write on these pages will determine what I do with you. Tell me what you know of the artifact. Tell me about your companions. Judge for yourself what will save your life, or end it.”
With that he rose. Wake opened the door, and Baffin stopped on the other side to look back at me.
“A foretaste,” he said, and waved a dismissive hand at Wake. “Leave her hands intact.”
Cold fear prickled up the back of my neck as Wake closed the door and turned on me. I stood up quickly and put the chair between us.
“Mr. Wake, I am already quite aware what you are capable of, there is no need to demonstrate,” I said, palms out to ward him off. “We need not be enemies.”
Wake took the center of the room, crowding me back into the window.
“Wake,” I said, unable to keep pleading from my voice. “I hate the Guild as much as you do. I am not your enemy. Tell me about Moran, tell me—”
At that, he leapt the space between us and screamed directly in my face. It was a visceral sound, an inarticulate burst of rage that was raw and pure and wholly terrifying.
I am not ashamed to say that I turned away, cringing into my shoulder.
“Why would you hate the Guild?” he hissed, his voice a blanket of fog over a raging sea. “Tell me.”
“My mother,” I said. I scrounged the courage to meet his eyes again. “She was devastated when the Guild took us. It nearly killed her.”
Wake’s upper lip trembled in a brimming snarl. His glare was unsettling, raw with what might have been comical intensity—had it not been entirely genuine. “Not. Enough.”
“Emeline,” I added. “Emeline Rosenthal. They killed her. The Glass Coffin.”
Wake continued to glare, but I detected a minute flicker of his expression. Given his age and connection to Moran—obscure though that still was—there was a chance he had known Emeline, or at least of her execution.
“And the children,” I added. I found I could meet his eyes again, not because I had in any way calmed, but because the intensity of the moment and the truth of my words had somehow arrested my terror.
There were dangers beyond this room, as this very conversation reminded me. Threats other than Wake. And there was a life I was still determined to claim, though the how of it was increasingly uncertain.
“Because I will not let them take my children,” I stated. “I will not be bred. I will not be traded. I will not be broken as my mother was.”
“Then allow me to add fuel to the flame,” Wake said lowly. The looming threat of him did not lessen, but the rage in his voice shifted, I sensed, away from me. “The Guild has known about the artifacts for thirty years. Yes, artifacts. The Landsdown Trove, and its Stele. A puzzle to which the Guild already has several pieces. Your Mr. Stoke had another, the one which brought us all together. But the pieces are not what Baffin believes.”
He had said as much at the museum, but I did not remind him of that. “Then what are they?”
He lowered his voice still more. “Perhaps they do have the potential to turn human into Entwined, in their proper, united form. Dr. Maddeson believes so, with his texts and translations. All I know is that when one of those artifacts is used on an Entwined, it makes us something more. Permanently amplified.You, for instance, would exist forevermore in a state of twilight.”
