I curled my fingers into my palm and followed as he took me down a stairwell without explaining any further about where we were going.
He showed me the lower passage, the locked archive door, and the stair that led back toward the main floor without stopping long enough for questions.
Then he took me through the main hall.
It was the largest room I had seen in Zenith Hall so far, and the dining hall had been the biggest room I’d seen in my life to that point. The ceiling disappeared into shadow above the beams, dotted with more celestial patterns that probably meant something to someone who could read the constellations, and the far wall held a set of doors that gave me the chills for no reasonI could understand.
Dark wood banded in black iron, set beneath an arch carved with Marks I didn’t know how to read. No handle on the outside. No keyhole I could see.
At hip height, on the right side of the frame, people had cut symbols into the wood.
One of them caught my eye.
A curved line met a straight line, and at the junction of the two lines someone had cut a small circle. The cut was deeper at the curve than at the line. The circle had been done last; the wood was lighter inside it than outside it.
It wasn’t my Mark.
Not exactly.
But it was close, and my body knew it.
The lines under my sleeve gave one small pull, as if something in the wood had called them by the wrong name.
I thought of Rev in the kitchen.
It looks like Sadie’s did.
The hall felt colder after that.
I looked at the cut mark without intending to look at it for as long as I did.
Hale stopped two paces ahead of me.
Then he turned.
He saw where my attention had gone and waited.
“What door is this?” I asked.
“The west door.”
“That sounds official.”
“It is.”
“Where does it go?”
His eyes moved once to the symbol cut into the frame.
“Not somewhere you want to be sent.”
“Was Sadie sent there?”
Hale’s attention snapped back to me.
For one second, he looked less like an instructor and more like a man who had just heard someone yell fire in a crowded room.
“How do you knowthat name?”
