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"For things like this," Jax said. "They don't kill every feral they catch. Some of them get kept alive until the Council decides they have a use for them."

I felt sick at the thought. Whatever the ferals had become, keeping them imprisoned so they could be released into the Pit whenever the Council needed bodies for an examination was deliberate cruelty. Worse was knowing that Silas had once been close enough to losing himself that he could have ended up in one of those pens too.

Silas took another spoonful of porridge as though we were discussing something ordinary. "If I hold, I'm recertified and I'm free. If I slip even once, if the Red gets hold of me in front of the envoys, they cull me in the Pit. That's the rule."

"No."

His eyes lifted to mine. "It's all right."

"It is not all right." My voice rose, and I didn't care who else in the dining hall heard me. "Why are they doing this now? Oda said you were on probation until the end of term. She never said anything about an exam like this, and she definitely never said anything about Bond Night."

"End-of-term recertification belongs to the Council," Silas said. "Oda controls the terms of my probation, but the Council chooses the examination. The supervising Elder decides whether I pass."

I looked at him for a moment before the reason became obvious.

"They chose this because of Sunday."

Silas put his spoon down and finally looked at me properly.

"We put four of their men on the concrete on Sunday," he said quietly. "The three of us did. But only one of us is an Enforcer on probation, sweetheart." His mouth shifted slightly, though there was no humor in it. "This is their answer."

I knew what he meant, and I knew what connected all of it.

Me.

Jax had called me the excuse, which had sounded better than the word my own mind supplied now: common denominator.

Marion was missing. Jax had been beaten badly enough to spend the night in the infirmary. Now the Council was putting Silas into the Pit on Bond Night and surrounding him with ferals while the Red waited for any weakness they could use against him. The same problem sat at the center of every one of those things, and whether anyone blamed me or not didn't change the fact that they had all started because of me.

I didn't say any of that aloud, but Silas must have seen enough of it on my face. He reached across the table and covered my hand with his. His palm was warm, his grip firm, and after one brief squeeze he let me go.

"Eat something," he said, then picked up his spoon and went back to his porridge.

The rest of Tuesday passed without any news from Marion. Oda still had no location for her, and I went to lessons mostly because there was nowhere else for me to go. I sat through every class, took notes when everyone else did, and couldn't have repeated a single thing I had been taught by the end of it.

Every time a door opened, I looked up to see who had come through it. Whenever I heard footsteps climbing the tower stairs, I stopped whatever I was doing and listened until they passed my floor or came close enough for me to recognize them.

By evening, I could barely stand the waiting anymore.

That was when the note arrived.

A porter in gray robes climbed all the way up the tower to deliver it to me. He handed it over without saying a word, and the way he avoided my eyes told me enough to know it hadn't come through the usual channels. Someone else had gotten it onto the island. Maybe it had come through Oda's contacts, or through the man on the mainland Silas had called about Daniel, but whoever had carried it here had made sure it reached me.

The note itself was nothing more than a scrap of lined paper torn from the back of a notebook. It had been folded four times, and the creases were soft and dirty from being handled over and over again.

I knew the handwriting before I read a single word.

The letters were small and slanted, written in the same impatient pencil strokes I had seen on birthday cards, shopping lists, and notes left on the kitchen table for as long as I could remember. Back at six. Soup in the pan. Marion's handwriting had been part of my life for so long that seeing it there made my hands shake before I had even unfolded the paper completely.

I read.

Wren. Don't come. Don't bargain. They want you, not me, and I'm too old and too stubborn to be much use to them. I'm all right. The tea here is a disgrace.

I should have told you years ago, love. I was a coward about it, and I'm sorry. I thought that if I never said it out loud, they would never come. They came anyway, and I regret all of it.

Your mother was like you.

She didn't die.