The thought was unsettling and alluring all at once. “How is it done?”
He shrugged. “I was a child. I could not tell you. Moran could not either, as I burned his laboratory and killed everyone of his assistants when I escaped. A decade of research, annihilated.”
He smiled at that, a boyish satisfaction mingled with wrathful remembrance.
“It was imperfect, anyway,” he added. “Moran would forever speculate on other methods, other uses, and what the complete restored Stele could do, if its individual parts were so powerful.”
“That is a chilling thought.”
“It is,” he agreed. His demeanor was relaxing, but he was still well and firmly in my personal space, and seemed intent on staying there.
“What were you?” I asked, pushing the conversation forward.
“Moonless,” he said. “And now I am what a Moonless became. But my mother, she was a Silver. I carried enough of her blood to gain her strength and Leeching too, with Moran’s meddling.”
I had more questions about him and his abilities, not least related to the manifestation of two kinds of Entwined. But another query seemed more important, particularly when I recalled how simply touching the orb had heightened my abilities, back in the vault.
“Why are you helping Baffin?” I asked. “If you know that the artifact has real power?”
“Because he stands a chance of bringing down the Guild.”
“Even if he kills Entwined in the City States in the process?” I pressed. “At the risk of giving him the power to makehimselfEntwined?”
“Baffin has his delusions,” Wake said dismissively. “We cannot be made, Miss Rushforth. We are like gods—we have no beginning, no end. Only greater heights of glory. Heights which our masters,allof them, would keep us from.”
A chill crept over me. “I would not go that far.”
Wake did not reply. Instead, he glanced at the window as rain began to patter a little harder on the glass. He seemed to gauge the light, then pulled me into it—the faux twilight of a storm.
My threads awoke, prickling and warm. He pushed my collar down and turned my chin with a thumb, examining my throat, then looking up at my forehead.
“Your threads are already extensive,” he observed. “The Guild must have been furious to lose you. I wonder what you would be, if they had done to you what they did to me? Moran intends to find out, I believe.”
That struck too close to home. Was that why Madge had sent me away, and released Lewis to keep me safe? Was that the division between her and her husband?
I pulled away and separated myself from Wake by a pace. He allowed it, watching and waiting.
“Did you kill Mr. Stoke?” I asked. “Did you do what you did with Geoffrey, and steal his life to save yourself?”
“I did not kill Stoke,” he replied.
There was a knock at the door—three sharp raps.
“I have somewhere to be,” Wake said. He looked me up and down, and sucked his teeth in momentary contemplation. “You are not going to confess anything in that notebook for the General, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“Then he will send someone less tactful to encourage you,” Wake told me. “If he does not lose patience altogether and throw you to the Zealots again.”
“Let him. They already failed once.”
Wake gave me a look that said, very clearly, that he thought me naive. “Well, then,” he said. “Goodbye, Ottilie.”
I waited for the door to close, then went to the windowsill, opened the notebook, and picked up the pen.
***
The Grand General opened the notebook in the door of my cell, blinked, and squinted.
