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"I know."

"Do you?" Her voice wasn't cruel, which somehow made it worse. "Because you packed a toothbrush."

I looked down.

She sighed and bumped her shoulder against mine. "I get why you want to believe them. I do. If somebody told me I could fix everything just by walking into a room and letting them take me, I'd probably want to believe it too." She set Marion's letter carefully on the bed between us. "But Marion literally told you not to bargain."

I closed my eyes.

Don't come. Don't bargain.

"She knew what they'd try," Tamsin said. "And she knew what you'd try." I rubbed at my face. "She's basically your second mum, isn't she?" I nodded. "Then she didn't spend eighteen years raising you just so you could hand yourself over to the people holding her prisoner."

I looked down at my coat.

I had done the buttons up wrong.

For some reason, that was what finally broke through the misery of the morning.

I laughed.

It came out wet and ugly and halfway to another sob, but it was a laugh.

Tamsin looked down at the buttons. "Oh, babe." Then she started laughing too.

I undid them and did them up again, properly this time, and felt something in my chest that had been clenched all night begin, slowly, slowly, to let go.

Not disappear.

Just loosen.

"So what do I do?" I asked.

Tamsin considered this. "I don't know."

I looked at her.

She shrugged. "What? I'm emotionally insightful, not omniscient." I snorted. "But I do know you're the cleverest person I've ever met," she said. "You find things out. You ask annoying questions. You don't give up when men in high collars tell you the reading room's closed." A tiny smile pulled at my mouth. "So maybe don't make a decision yet," she said. "Not until you actually know what your choices are."

That made more sense than anything had since Marion's name appeared in the announcement.

Tamsin stood, brushed the crumbs from her sweater, and pointed her fork at me. "Go find something out. But eat your cake first."

I looked at it. "Why?"

"Because if we're going to hell, I'm not going on my own."

I went to the Archive at nine that night, just as the closing bell was sounding through the reading room.

Ronan Ashgrave was still at his desk at the far end of the room, bent over something he was mending beneath the last lamp left burning. The rest of the Archive had already fallen into darkness. When the great door opened, he looked up, and whatever he saw in my face made him set his brush down carefully.

"The reading room is closed, Miss Hale."

"I know. They've taken Marion."

His expression changed only slightly, but it was enough. He already knew.

"I don't want you giving me pieces of this anymore." I crossed the reading room toward him, passing between the dark shelves until I reached his desk. "I don't want whatever happens to be sitting in the books anyone can pull off these shelves, and I don't want to keep figuring things out from what you won't say. I want the Hollowing records. All of them. I want the ones behind the iron gate in the restricted section, including whatever Master Crewe decided we weren't supposed to learn."