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“Desmond kept its oaths for fifty years.”

I lean against the doorframe. My uncle sent me a birthday card with a twenty in it every year of my life, and then he went to work and kept the oaths for a monster sex dungeon.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay. I need a second.”

He gives me one. He doesn’t say anything at all while I take it.

“Okay,” I say again. “Show me the rest.”

Farther down the corridor, there’s a door that’s twice as thick as the others, padded on the inside, with a strip of silver metal running all the way around the frame. When Lenart opens it, the music cuts off like someone pulled a plug. Inside, the walls are covered in panels of quilted gray fabric, and there are symbols carved into the wood around the doorframe, the same shapes I saw light up on the Solstice.

“The siren suite,” he says.

“Sirens like the mythology?”

“Sirens like the members. Some voices have effects ordinary soundproofing doesn’t stop. The panels handle the sound. The wards handle the rest.”

“Is that to protect the people inside, or the people outside?”

“Both.”

I step back out into the hall. The music comes back on.

The last room on the corridor has a ceiling twice as high as the others. In the middle of it, there’s a structure made of steel beams as thick as my thigh, with heavy rings welded at the corners and a cross-brace that looks like it could hold up a bridge. Every bolt is polished. There’s a clipboard hanging from a hook by the door with a maintenance log on it, signed and dated in a careful hand.

I walk all the way around it.

“Okay,” I say. “But who’s that for?”

Behind me, somebody walks past the open door, ducking his horns under the frame, carrying a coil of steel cable over one shoulder.

“Me,” Tav says, and keeps walking.

I stare at the empty doorway. Then I stare at the frame. Then I stare at Lenart.

“Shall we continue?” he says.

I think about Tav at Merek’s kitchen table, apologizing to my dog over a piece of bacon. Then I think about him in this room, and I have to look at the floor for a second.

“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s continue.”

The right-hand corridor is quieter. There’s a room at the end with low beds and thick blankets, a refrigerator full of water bottles, a basket of protein bars, and a first-aid kit the size of a suitcase. Lenart says some members come in here afterward, when they need to be somewhere quiet. There’s always someone on staff who checks on them.

“Recovery,” I say.

“Yes.”

“You have a recovery room.”

“We have several.” He looks at me. “People come here to trust each other with a great deal. It would be careless to stop paying attention when they’re finished.”

That isn’t funny at all. I don’t have anything to say back.

On the way back toward the lounge, he stops at the reception desk.

Behind it, on the wall, there’s a slab of pale stone about the size of a door, set flush into the paneling. It’s the same stone as the ward stone under the bar. I’d know it anywhere now. Words are carved into it in lines, in a script I don’t recognize, and underneath each line is a translation in English, cut so deep that the letters catch shadows.

I come by my own choice.