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And had thereby produced the only wound Erik hadn’t noticed.

I dragged my gaze forward and willed it into focus. The others wouldn’t find me before we departed. There would be no Perla with her lockpicks, no Keil with his Wielders. This time, nobody was coming to save me.

It didn’t matter.

I would be enough.

My heartbeat pounded with my resolve, the sound rising like a battle drum in my ears.

I grabbed the chain that connected my manacles to the ceiling and pulled slowly, testing the sensation. My wrist twinged, and I gasped.

It was going to hurt. But I could not scream.

So I shifted to sink my teeth around the fabric of my blouse. I tightened my grip around the chains, their metal loops digging into my bandaged palms.

Then, before I could talk myself out of it, I backed off the stone block.

Pain blinded me.

I moaned into my blouse, darkness filling my vision. But horror at the mere thought of passing out kept me lucid enough to breathe deeply, to think past the sensation of the manacles scraping my wrists bloody.

My toes strained an inch from the floor, and hot tears streamed into my collar, the wetness indistinguishable from my full-body eruption of sweat or the fresh blood seeping from my rupturing stitches.

I couldn’t tell how many agonizing seconds passed. Couldn’t tell if I was shaking from the pressure on my arms or from the terror of being caught like this.

But I knew when the dullroot had been expelled from my blood.

My power shuddered upon release, weakening further as I bled. It was an awful irony: To drain the dullroot was to debilitate myself in a different way.

Without the luxury of creating thin enough tendrils, I dragged my specter toward the manacles in one great sludge. It lapped like tar into the iron locks, filling them up, and my vision darkened at the corners again. But another rustle outside jerked me into awareness.

Then twin clicks sounded.

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And I slammed to the ground.

The world was a haze of red on gray, the blood slippery against the stones. I allowed myself no reprieve before I compelled my power toward my locked ankles.

My teeth rattled as I worked, and I couldn’t hear through the ringing in my ears. Couldn’t tell if anyone had noticed the crash of my fall.

But I was still alone as the shackles unlocked from my ankles.

Breathing heavily, I crawled to Marge. I didn’t look as I pulled the knife from the soft flesh of her stomach. I slashed a length from her dress and tied the fabric around my ruptured stitches. Then I similarly bundled my bloodied wrists and briefly touched Marge’s cheek. I didn’t want to leave her here. But I didn’t have a choice.

So I grabbed the knife again and forced myself to stand.

Then I staggered for the door.

The moment I pushed it open, a sharp wind lashed at me, howling through loose stones. I was high up, surrounded by dilapidated arches that exposed the corridor to the blustering elements.

I stumbled to one of the arches and found a frothy river thrashing the base of the building, a bank of craggy foliage sprawling beyond. And there was that smell again. Sickly and rotten and—

Sulfurous.

I remembered Keil’s conversation with the sentry at the gambling den, how they’d laughed about the stink on one of the islands: Neyamay.