I was afraid, yes, but not nearly as much as I ought to be, maybe because I wasn’t alone. All nine of us were here together, and that was more comforting than anything else in this…brand newbody of mine. I’d changed, yet again, and I was full,whole,but I still had parts that I didn’t recognize. I still had parts inside me that had yet to settle into place and make sense. Become familiar once more.
Such a strange state to be in.
And then there was the room on the other side.
There were no windows here, either, just torches and flames burning atop them, and a big square hallway with barred doors on the walls on both sides. Barred doors that kept you out of dimly lit rooms full of racks—that were full of boxes—that were full of tools and parts, all made of metal.
It smelled like oil in there. Oil and dust. The floor and the walls were made of stone blocks, smaller than the ones of that tower. No marble here, and nothing fancy—no mirrors or vases full of roses. Just emptiness, and a lot of metal.
“Whoa,” breathed Russ as he went through, and his voice echoed in the wide space. The ceiling wasn’t high, but the sound of him bounced back anyway.
“So many things,” someone said, and we all spread out deeper into the room to see beyond the bars better. The sight of them made chills rush down my back because I remembered that cage. I remembered how I’d been so certain that I was going to die when I forced myself to jump off it.
Yet here I was, still alive, still looking around, trying to find something that made sense, when…
It did.
The others were trying to open the barred doors, to get to those boxes, to find out if these devices were really out of sync, and if they could be fixed. Anything we could use to help us figureanythingout.
But the devices weren’t what Elida came here for. I knew the moment I saw the plaque on the only metal door in the room, on the wall across from the entrance. My feet took me forward without my needing to even think about it. All those bars around, but this door stood alone. The same handwriting as the one outside carved a name on the plaque attached to it:Calren Hock.
That was Elida’s brother.
The words that man at the banquet said before came backto me in a rush.Such a shame—such a brilliant, bright mind to be reduced to…to…
“No way,” Erith whispered from behind me. “Is that…”
“Her brother,” March said. They had all gathered at the door, too.
“Well? Is he in there? Go on, open it,” Seth said, and my hand moved on its own. I reached for the handle, certain that it would be locked, but it wasn’t. It moved with ease.
The door opened without a single sound, and what we saw on the other side shocked us all out of words for a good, long moment.
White walls. A bed. A table. Paper.
Paper everywhere—on the bed and the floor and the table, stuck to walls, stuck to the ceiling.
A man sat cross-legged on top of the long table, hunched over almost completely, two pens in his hands as he wrote or drew something at the same time.
Nobody breathed. Nobody moved for a while.
Then…
“She was late.”
Three words that broke whatever ice had taken over my insides. That voice that shook me where I stood, even if you couldn’t see it. My heart was yanked right out of my ribcage, then put back in place again all within the second, and the room swam before me. Tilted. Spun.
“It’s him,” someone whispered—Mimi. She stepped around me and inside the room without hesitation.
The others followed her.
I followed them.
The room was bright, a lot of lanterns burning with pale flames on the white walls. You could clearly see howlittlethere was in this room—little of everything else, that is. A lot of paper. A lot of lead. A lot of words scratched over, and numbers in no particular order, and clock faceswithout hands, and the outline of human faces with no features.
It smelled of something sweet in the room, something I was seven-hours certain I’d smelled before, but I couldn’t say where. The air was softer against my skin, too, somehow.
“Who was late?” Russ asked the man. “Your sister?”
