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“Not that I know of,” Jinfeng said, “but don’t let that make you feel bad.” Her wings vibrated with curiosity. “All right. At the end of each test is a reward, an object of power. Let’s go find out what it is.” She smiled at Kit. “Choices. That was good.”

Kit took out his own witchlight. “This feels unpleasantly like the part in the horror movie where the heroes unwisely enter the slimy basement, only to be eaten by a giant slug.”

“Slugs are rarely carnivorous,” said Ty, who was always on the side of the animal kingdom. Adjusting his backpack, he followed Kit down, both their witchlights shining like torches. The steps were slick with damp, the walls veined with a faintly glowing lichen. Kit put one hand against the wall to brace himself, wincing at the feel of wet, cold moss against his palm.

The farther down they went, the colder it got, until Kit was shivering and Jinfeng, behind them, was making little whimpering noises. Kit was relieved when they reached the last step and the stairs widened out into a cavern beneath the earth.

“We must be below the lake,” Ty said.

The cavern was bare except for a large body of water that lay before them, still and black, reflecting their witchlights like stars dancing across its surface. An underground lake. Kit couldn’t pull his eyes away from it: something about the way the water moved, the way the light touched it. The way the darkness beckoned.

“The object lies beneath the water,” Kit said in a low voice. Both Jinfeng and Ty looked at him in surprise, and he shook his head as if to clear it of fog. Feeling a little uncomfortable, he said, “It just makes sense, okay? I knew the minute I saw this place that I was going swimming.”

He started to shuck off his shoes and backpack. Then his jacket, denim lined with wool. They piled up beside the water.

“I could do it,” Ty said. “I could swim down and get it.”

Ty was shivering, his hands gripping his backpack straps, but his face was pale and determined.

“No,” Kit said, hearing his voice soften. “I think I have to be the one who does.”

“But you don’t have to do it alone,” said Ty. He slid off his own backpack, kneeling to search through it. He stood up, holding a length of rope. “We tie this around your waist,” he said. “Once you go in the water, if you need to be pulled out, just tug on the line.”

Kit hesitated, then nodded. He knew a good suggestion when he heard it. Ty approached him with the rope, sliding it around Kit’s waist. Kit found himself vividly aware of Ty’s nearness, of his soft hair tickling Kit’s chin as he tied off the rope.

Ty stepped back to examine his handiwork. Kit could already tell it was a fine knot, the rope tight but not too tight. “Thanks.”

Ty only bit his lip. “Be careful.”

Kit nodded and slid off his sweater. Goose bumps ran up his bare arms as, in T-shirt and jeans, he approached the black water. It looked thick, like an oil spill, and when he bent over it he saw the reflection of his own face, down to the shadows under his eyes and his messy hair, sticking up in spikes like the points of a crown.

Damn you, obvious metaphor, he thought; he could feel the cold rising off the water, biting at his skin like metal teeth. He rubbed his arms, took a deep breath, and dived in.

Clary

Clary scowled down at the pencil in her hand. Janus, who seemed determined to try to please her, had made sure she had art supplies: soft colored pencils, chalks, and paper. Nothing that could be a weapon, of course.

After her arrival in Faerie, Clary had braced herself for whatever mistreatment might come. But Janus had not been cruel. Delicious meals were brought to her every day by the gray-kerchiefed women of the Court kitchens; in what she guessed was the afternoon, a nixie named Dulse would take her to a secluded cavern where she would wash in the running water of an underground stream. When she woke up in the mornings, new clothes would have appeared overnight, folded in a neat pile just outside the bars of her cage. Janus didn’t sleep in his room at night, which was a mercy; she had no idea where he was spending the dark hours, and didn’t care.

Janus seemed to think all this would make her happy, and she wondered what the Clary he’d known would have thought of the same treatment. When Janus came in each day to speak with her, he was calm, but it became clearer and clearer to her that he had convinced himself that she was that other Clary. If Clary dared to ask about her friends, even just to inquire if they were still safe, he would shut down, like a robot encountering an unsolvable error in its programming.

She didn’t dare to ask him what he knew about the prophecy that Max Trueblood had discovered and passed on to her and Jace. She knew Ragnor was still decoding it, and that it was the only copy in the world—but Janus came from a different world. When he’d said that from the moment the Clave split, the fate of the Shadowhunters was set in stone, she’d realized he was clearly familiar with the prophecy’s contents. Given that Ragnor hadn’t finished with it yet, Janus might well know more than she did.

And she had only one lever with which to manipulate him: his feelings for her. Clary looked down at what she’d been drawing. Janus had given her a book called 50 Great Love Poems, and instead of reading it she had used the endpapers to sketch out a map of the Seelie Court. She wasn’t sure how accurate it was—it was certainly incomplete—but it felt like doing something, and doing nothing to facilitate her own escape would be giving up. If she had a stele, of course, things would be different. It was the first thing Janus had taken away from her upon her arrival. He wasn’t stupid—how could he be, when he was a mirror of Jace?—just delusional.

She dropped the book and slid the pencil hastily up her sleeve as the doorknob rattled. Janus, she thought. To her surprise, it wasn’t him. It was Ash.

Ash, her nephew. He looked so much like his father that at first Clary couldn’t speak—the shape of his face was the same, the hard set to his jaw, his eyes the same shade of green Sebastian’s had been when he’d lain dying, the demon influence draining from his body.

Ash closed the door carefully and turned to face her. The last time she’d seen him had been at the banquet, and he’d been dressed in royal finery. Now he was dressed in plain linen, all black. His hair, the same salt white as Valentine Morgenstern’s, stood out against his dark clothes.

“I need to speak with you,” he said.

“Is this the kind of conversation that involves the throwing of knives?” Clary asked.

“Let’s make a deal,” he said. “I won’t throw knives at you, and you won’t tell Janus I was here.”

Clary shrugged. It wasn’t like she was inclined to tell Janus anything. “Sounds good,” she said, keeping her tone light, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to be chatting to her possibly-evil nephew about a definitely-evil clone of her fiancé. She suddenly longed to tell Simon about how absurd her life had become. “What’s on your mind?”