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Her eyes blaze. “There are children!”

Darkness turns on her so sharply I step forward. He catches her wrist before I reach them, hard enough to hold her attention.

“And what do you think happens to those children if this house remains standing?” His voice is low, vicious. “What life do they have? What future? What choices? You think rescue is a door and sunlight is waiting on the other side?”

“Let go of me,” she whimpers.

He does not.

“You think trauma ends when the lock opens?” Darkness continues. “How sweet. How mercifully stupid.”

“Enough,” I snap.

He ignores me.

“They will be passed from house to house, ship to ship, hand to hand. If not tonight, then tomorrow. If not by these men, then by others. Some will survive long enough to become me. Some will become Edward. They will learn that the body is a room anyone may enter if they have paid enough.”

Olive’s face drains of color. The second explosion tears through the west wing and the floor jumps beneath our feet.

People scream and a painting falls from the wall and splits across the floor.

Then Darkness leans closer to Olive, his voice a blade. “Tell me, Widow. Is that mercy?”

The question hangs between them. Unforgivable and born from the darkest corner of survival. Olive looks as though he has struck her and proverbially he has. I grab Darkness by the collar and slam him back against the wall. “Let. Her. Go.”

His eyes cut to mine, I see myself reflected there. The boy I was, the monster I feared. The brother I could not save. Then his grip loosens and Olive pulls free, Lazarus catches her before she stumbles, but his face is no longer playful, no longer poetic. He looks sick.

“We have to move,” he says.

Olive shakes her head, tears in her eyes, “No. The children.”

Another explosion, this time closer. The lights flicker everywhere and smoke begins curling beneath the far door. I take Olive’s face in my hands, forcing her to look at me. “Listen to me.”

Her tears begin to escape, filled with fury, completely shattered. “Edward—”

“I know.”

“You do not.” She spits the words like venom.

“I do.” My voice breaks. “God help me, I do.”

Her breath catches.

“I know what it is to be left in a room and pray someone will open the door,” I say. “I know what it is to realize no one is coming. I know what he said is monstrous.”

Darkness smiles faintly behind me. I do not look at him.

“But if we die here,” I continue, “then The Collector wins. The circuit survives. The ships move again. The next house opens. The next auction begins.”

More tears slip down Olive’s cheek. I wipe them away with my thumb.

“We will not save everyone tonight,” I say, and the words nearly kill me. “But we will end the machine that made tonight possible.”

Her hands close around my wrists, for one second, I think she will refuse. Part of me wants her to, wants to burn here with her rather than walk away from a single crying child, but Lazarus is right. Alcott is wrong. Darkness is worse and still, the house is coming down around us.

“We go now,” Lazarus says. “Or no one goes.”

Alcott flickers back across his own face, pale and disoriented. “Edward?”