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“Indeed.”

I had pictured us here, trembling in the dark again. I hadn’t pictured us gathering on the beach in the fog, bleeding into a bowl together.

Priya looked like she was ready to argue with the universe.

“What’s the risk?” she asked. “To us.”

“Nothing is free.”

I resented her lack of explanation. It made it so much worse. But then, after she’d let that sink in, she continued:

“A working of this size does not go unfelt by women who have spent a century listening. If they take notice before you finish, you will not finish at all. And if they learn afterward whose hands did it, then understand me, girls, the dead cannot protect you from the living. So you must be quick, you will be silent, and you will be forgettable, and when it is done you will go home and be ordinary women for as long as it takes them to stop counting. That is the price.”

Callie let out a small broken laugh between tears as I repeated it.

“Any other rules?” Priya said, holding herself together.

“The number is fixed. All four. No one replaced, no one excused. You called me. I answer for you and no one else.”

I told them what she’d said.

We looked at each other.

“You at the center, through the locket. And no man inside the circle. Ever. The one who buried the fox. The one who loves you. He waits outside, or there is no working.”

A current went through me, scalp to heels. I only relayed the first half.

Jess’s eyes flicked to me, as if she’d seen what I had been given and hadn’t passed on.

“And I require total willingness,” Clemency said. “From every woman. For every moment of the working. The instant one of you stops being willing, it fails, and at the harvest he will be awake. Failure is death.”

“Death?” The word jumped out of me, adrenaline chasing it up my arms.

“You leave yourselves open to him when you falter. Do not falter, and you will live.”

I repeated that, too.

“And if we panic?” Callie asked.

“Then you will die badly,” Clemency said.

I whispered it. Callie and Priya made small, strangled cries. Jess said nothing at all.

“And hear this last.”

I wasn’t sure I could survive another sentence.

“I felt a weakness the moment I crossed into your circle.” Her voice went very precise. “One of you is not what she is pretending to be. Neither to you nor to herself. I felt her flinch the way I felt all of you flinch the first time. She does not know that she is flinching, which is a much more serious matter, because she cannot choose to stop.”

Every muscle in my body locked.

I made myself look up, slowly, like I was only taking in the room. The marigold’s stem was still green. Whatever was wrong in here, the house wasn’t going to tell me.

Callie was blotchy and shaking. Priya was tipped toward me, starving for whatever I was hearing. Jess was very still, her face gone almost smooth in the low light. Her sleeve had ridden back when we joined hands, and Soren’s little silver flame hung against her wrist. She’d left the cuff in the car. She hadn’t left that. My eyes hit hers, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

It wasn’t proof of anything. A glance in a candlelit room is not proof. That was what I told myself.

But I understood, standing there, that I had a choice to make in the next two seconds, and that I’d have to live with it either way. If I said it out loud, she felt one of us flinching, and I think it might be you, in this cold dark room, with everyone already at their ragged edge, it would blow the four of us apart before we ever reached the beach. And I had nothing but a feeling and a dead woman’s warning I couldn’t pin to a name.