“Uh, you didn’t let us come,” he reminded her. “We chose to. Just like Dex chose to make you that panic switch—and he wouldn’t have done that if he didn’t want you to use it. And trust me, you were the only one Fitz wanted going after him yesterday.”
She highly doubted that, but . . .
“Even if you’re right, nothing will change the fact that if Fitz hadn’t found me that day in the Natural History Museum—or if he’d decided my weird eyes meant I couldn’t be an elf and leaped away—all of the bad things from the last few years wouldn’t have happened. Kenric. Calla. Mr. For—”
“That’s not true. The Black Swan wanted Fitz to find you. They sent Alden that newspaper article, didn’t they? If that hadn’t worked, they would’ve found another way to get you to the Lost Cities. You’re their moonlark.”
“Exactly. I’m the moonlark. You realize what that means, right?” She hugged herself with her free arm and sank deeper into her pillows. “Everything about this mess comes back to me. Good or bad—right or wrong—I’m a part of it. And no matter how hard I try to protect the people I care about, someone always seems to get hurt.”
Including herself. But that was easier to live with.
“So . . . I’m learning to focus on the things I can control,” she told him quietly. “Like who I blame. And who I trust. And who I want by my side—even if it means asking those people to risk their lives.”
Like she’d just done with Sandor.
Part of her couldn’t believe she’d done that—especially while he was standing there battered and bloody. She should’ve let him move on to a safer assignment. But . . . she couldn’t let him go.
“The Neverseen don’t get to control who I care about,” she told Keefe. “And neither do you. Even when you make mistakes, that doesn’t change how I feel about you—and you’re an Empath. You know I’m not just saying that.”
Keefe’s laugh sounded more like a sigh. “Trust me, Foster, if I could understand your feelings, life would be way easier.”
“Okay, then remember this: Your mom’s trying to get in your head. She wants you to feel like nothing you do will ever be good enough so you’ll finally give up and decide to cooperate.”
“Psh—she doesn’t need me to cooperate. I fall for her tricks every time.”
“We all fall for her tricks,” she argued, the words blurred by a yawn.
Elwin’s medicine must’ve been starting to kick in, but she shook her head to clear it.
“The Neverseen are good at what they do,” she told him. “They’re going to beat us sometimes. But that’s when we have to rally.”
Keefe fidgeted with a fraying thread on the sleeve of his tunic. “You know what scares me? I . . . can’t picture us winning anymore. I used to be able to. I used to imagine the moment where we’d finally take them out. But now . . .”
He sank back onto the cot and rested his head against the wall—right beneath the framed pictures of him and her in their embarrassing Opening Ceremonies costumes. Elwin had hung them as a joke, to commemorate their record-breaking number of emergency Healing Center visits.
Some days it didn’t feel so funny.
“You almost died,” Keefe whispered. “So did Fitz—and I mean really almost died. I’ve never seen it that close. Bullhorn was watching every breath you guys took, and Elwin was begging Tam to rush over. And all I could do was sit there, trying to figure out how I’d make the Neverseen pay. But I couldn’t think of anything. Even now . . .”
“Well,” Sophie said, forcing a smile, “maybe that’s progress. At least you didn’t race off to Ravagog and challenge King Dimitar to another sparring match. Then again, if you had, you could be joining in the Foxfire slumber party. Now Fitz and I get to have all the fun without you.”
She waited for him to laugh, or tease her, or . . . anything.
But he just thumped the back of his head against the wall and tugged on the fraying string until it snapped off in his hand.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked.
“Dex hailed Elwin and told him you’d hit your panic switch, so he should head to the Healing Center and be ready. Elwin hailed the rest of us so we’d know what was going on. Then we all got to sit here imagining all kinds of horrible things. Oh, and brainstorming ways to punish Dex for not telling anyone where he was going. His mom had some particularly brutal ideas. Remind me never to get on Juline’s bad side.”
“Dex’s parents were here?”
“Only his mom. His dad stayed home with Rex, Bex, and Lex, probably so they couldn’t break everything.”
“Good call.”
Dex’s triplet siblings could cause more chaos in five minutes than a pack of saber-toothed tigers.
“How long were you guys waiting here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It felt . . . endless. And then Wylie showed up first, and he had Fitz. And Sandor stumbled in with Grizel and Lovise. And there was still no sign of you or Dex, and blood was everywhere, and Bullhorn was screaming, and for a second I thought . . .”
He twisted the loose thread around his finger, pulling tighter, tighter, tighter.
“I’m okay,” Sophie reminded him.
“For now. Umber’s smart. She wouldn’t have wrecked your pendant unless they had other ways of tracking you. Probably something else that’s going to turn out to be my fault.”
“Please stop saying that. But you might have a point about other trackers.” The last word was swallowed by another yawn, and she had to blink to fight the fresh wave of drowsiness. “Maybe Grady should test all of my stuff with reveldust. And if that doesn’t work, maybe we can convince the Council to let us—”
“Please don’t say ‘talk to Fintan,’ ” Keefe interrupted. “Sorry—I know you think he’s the answer to everything. But . . . come on, Foster—have we ever gotten anything useful from him? In fact, have we ever gotten anything useful from anyone in the Neverseen? I mean . . . I lived with them for months, and I can’t even tell you Umber’s real name or what Ruy looks like!”
“You can’t?” Sophie asked. “Ruy . . .”
She closed her eyes, searching for the words to describe him. But . . .
“I don’t know what he looks like either.” Which didn’t make any sense. She’d helped capture him. There was no way she wouldn’t have pulled back his hood and seen his face—and she had a photographic memory, so . . .
“He wears an addler,” Keefe explained. “Like Alvar wore the day you saw the Boy Who Disappeared. Though his doesn’t look like an addler, so no one can tell he’s wearing it. He bragged about it. A lot.”
Addlers were gadgets that made it impossible to focus on someone’s face.
“Well,” Sophie said, struggling to wrap her weary mind around that. “That’s . . . weird. But we know his full name is Ruy Ignis, so we just have to look up his registry file—”
“Won’t help. He told me he had their Technopath wipe any records of his appearance. Don’t ask me why he cares, but . . . yeah. And you know what else we don’t know? Who their Technopath is. The only other member of the Neverseen I met is Trix—and the only things I know about him are that he’s a Guster and Trix isn’t actually his name. See what I mean? All this time—all our planning and scheming and searching. All the risks we’ve taken. All the times we’ve almost died. And we still don’t know anything about our enemies or what they’re planning or what they want. We don’t even know who’s actually in charge right now! And we’ve never figured out what the Lodestar Initiative is—or maybe I should say was, since we also don’t know if they’re still going by it. Just like we don’t know why Fintan was keeping a list called Criterion, or why they made all those barrels of soporidine, or what the Nightfall facility my mom built was supposed to be used for, or why Vespera and Fintan abandoned it and moved to the facility under Atlantis—we couldn’t even find my mom’s stupid Archetype, remember?”
Sophie definitely hadn’t forgotten.
The last tim
e they’d seen the thick book that supposedly outlined all of Lady Gisela’s plans, Vespera had been holding it in Nightfall—and Sophie had been sure they’d find it when they went back and searched the facility. But the Black Swan had scoured every nook and cranny, and there’d been no sign of it.
No sign of anything, except broken mirrors and empty halls and the last remaining gorgodon—the hybridized creature Keefe’s mom had created to be her guard beast. It was huge and ugly, with giant claws and fangs and a scorpion-like tail—and it could fly, breathe underwater, and climb walls. So caring for it was an adventure—even with it being kept in a very secure, very isolated pasture.
And yet, somehow the deadly behemoth was the least of their problems.
“I’m with you, Foster,” Keefe said, gesturing to her frown. “It’s like . . . could we fail any harder?”
“Hey—we’ve done some things,” she argued. “We saved Atlantis. And we caught Fintan and Alvar. And Mr. Forkle killed Brant. And we have the key to your mom’s Archetype—and even figured out the trick to piece it together. And . . .”
Wow.
Was that really all they’d done?
There had to be more. . . .
“I know we’ve done stuff, Foster. But it’s not even close to enough. And the scariest part is how little we know. I mean . . . I can’t even tell you if I’ve gotten back all the memories my mom erased. Meanwhile they know everything about us: where we live, where we go to school, what our abilities are, who our friends and family are, how to find us—do you need me to keep going? Because we both know I can.”
“No . . . I get it,” she mumbled, wishing she could come up with a single argument against what he was saying.
But Keefe was right. They were hopelessly and gloriously out of their depth. Far more than she’d ever let herself admit.
“So what are you saying?” she asked. “You want to give up?”
“Of course not. I just . . . don’t know how to beat them. Everything I try only makes it worse—even when I think I’ve been so careful, it turns out I played right into their scheme.”
“That’s because they think we’re predictable,” Sophie informed him. “And they’re right. We always do what they expect. We have to break the cycle somehow. We have to . . .”
Nope.
She had no end to that sentence.
And as the seconds dragged by, she realized there was freedom in admitting that. Power in letting her heart sink to that absolute low.
Maybe hitting the bottom gave her something new to stand on.
Or maybe the medicine was seriously starting to mess with her head.
Either way, something was stirring inside her—something that went against everything she’d been telling herself to resist.
“I’m tired of being weak,” she whispered, remembering Gethen’s taunts in the desert. “I want to fight back—and I mean really fight.”
“Like . . . with weapons?” Keefe asked.
She nodded, waiting for the queasiness to hit.
When it didn’t, she told him, “Yeah. With whatever it takes.”
TEN
GRIZEL’S BEEN TELLING ME FOR weeks that I should be learning goblin battle tactics,” Sophie explained, “but I’ve been focusing on inflicting—and that’s exactly what the Neverseen expected. They showed up prepared to block me, knowing I’d take Sandor down in the process. And if I’d used the throwing star I’d been holding, I could’ve taken one of them out.”
“Okay, but . . . that still would’ve left two more, right?” Keefe asked.
“Maybe not. They fled the second they realized Ruy’s force fields weren’t working. So they probably would’ve done the same thing if one of them went down.”
Keefe narrowed his eyes as he studied her. “And you’d be okay ending someone like that?”
Sophie forced herself to picture what it would be like before she answered. “Yeah. I think I would. Is that terrible?”
“No. But I’m probably not the right person to ask.”
“Why?”
He sighed. “Ugh, I shouldn’t tell you this, since it’ll just make you think I’m even more messed up than you already do—”
“I don’t think you’re messed up,” Sophie interrupted. “But go on.”
He sank back onto one of the cots and closed his eyes as he said, “I feel like . . . fighting comes easier for me. I used to think I was just angry about some of the stuff that’s happened. But sometimes I wonder if it’s part of my legacy. Maybe that’s why my mom let my dad be so hard on me—maybe she was trying to desensitize me. Or maybe she did other stuff I don’t remember. All I know is, weapons and blood don’t bother me the way they bother other people, so . . . yeah. Feel free to think I’m super creepy—”
“I don’t,” Sophie promised. “I’m serious! In fact . . . I’ve actually been thinking that Project Moonlark might’ve done the same thing to me. Grizel said she thought I was a natural when we saw how good my aim is—and at first it freaked me out. But after what just happened? I don’t know. . . . I think it might be a good thing. I mean, someone has to fight the Neverseen, right?”
She did a quick gut check and still couldn’t feel any hint of queasiness.
“And honestly, if you really think about it,” she added, “most of our group pushes the limits. Fitz has been training with Grizel for weeks. Dex is always making things that explode. Biana charged after Vespera all by herself without hesitating. Linh took out half of Ravagog with a tidal wave. Tam knows how to break through force fields. Even Wylie looked ready to stomp the Neverseen into the ground. I don’t know if that’s our way of responding to all the scary, dangerous stuff we’ve been through, or if it’s something we just naturally have in common and that’s why we ended up friends. But . . . I think it’s time we all push ourselves to see how far we can go with it. It might turn out to be the best asset we have.”
“You sound like you really believe that,” Keefe noted.
“You don’t?”
“I don’t know.” He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. “I mean . . . even if we trained all day every day, it’s not like we could ever hold our own against an ogre. They have two hundred pounds of muscle on us—and claws and fangs. And they train from, like, birth.”
“True. I’m guessing that’s why the Council’s always put so much focus on our abilities . . . and I think we need to get way better with those, too. I’m supposed to be this powerful moonlark thing, and Umber crushed me. And I’m sure if I’d thought to use any of my skills, the Neverseen would’ve beaten me at those, too. Didn’t you say they had you train every day?”
“Yeah, an hour on skills and at least an hour on abilities.”
“Then we should be doing the same thing . . . and weapons and combat training, too, and Grizel could teach us goblin tricks, and Ro could cover ogre stuff, and . . . hopefully the Exillium Coaches would be willing to work on our skills . . . and then we could ask our ability Mentors to push us harder in our sessions, and maybe Dex should make us stashes . . . but I think we should carry them with us to save time, so . . . we’ll need pockets. Why do clothes never have enough pockets? There should always be lots of pockets . . . the more pockets the better!”
“Easy there, Foster,” Keefe said. “I think you’re sleep-scheming. Your eyes aren’t even open right now and you keep trailing off. Plus, you’re talking a lot about pockets.”
“Am I?” She blinked hard, smacking one of her cheeks a few times to wake herself up. “Okay, but what I said makes sense, right?”
“It does. Especially the part about the pockets.” He winked. “But, you realize all that stuff takes a long time to make a difference, right? The Neverseen are years ahead of us.”
“I know. But we’re never going to catch up if we don’t even try. Plus . . . if they’re doing two hours a day and we do eight, that has to start closing the gap, right?”
“You want to do eight hours of training every day?”
&nb
sp; “That’d be the ideal—two hours for each part of the program. But . . . the real goal would just be to train every day, for every minute we possibly can. I’m sure progress will be slow. But I still think it’s the smartest plan, since it’s the last thing the Neverseen will expect. You know what they’re thinking right now? They’re waiting for us to do what we always do—spend every waking minute trying to figure out what they’re up to. They think we’ll search Wylie’s memories until we learn everything we can about Prentice and Cyrah, and then hunt down the missing starstone—and I bet you anything they’re planning to ambush us the second we get close and take it for themselves. They want us either wasting our time or doing their dirty work—or both. And . . . I’m done with that. I’m done scrambling to get ahead and then ending up even more behind. I’m done trying to beat them at their own game. I’m done . . . focusing on them. I want to focus on us—on getting strong. Learning to fight . . . Doing whatever it takes to be ready . . . for the next time they show up.”
“Okay, your eyes are closed and you’re trailing off again, so I have to make sure this isn’t delirium talking: Are you actually saying you don’t want to keep trying to figure out what my mom and Vespera are planning?
Sophie gave her cheek another smack—much harder this time—and tried leaning her head forward to fight the pull of the medicine. “I’m saying I don’t want to waste any more time. It’s not like we have any solid leads. The caches are fake. Odds are we won’t find anything at Everglen. And like you said: Talking to Fintan’s probably a waste. Wylie and Prentice are already working on memory exercises together, so they can keep doing that to see if they learn anything—and if they do, we’ll change gears. But until we have something to go on, doesn’t training sound better than having the Black Swan tell us to go read a bunch of boring books?”
“Actually, I was thinking it’d be smart to spend some time learning everything we can about the history of ogre weaponry.”
“Seriously?”
He cracked a smile. “Nah. Just wanted to make sure you were still awake.”
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