by May Dawson
“It’s just what I said before,” he said. “She’s more powerful than I even realized. I don’t know if it’s our time in the Fae world, or our time here… it’s amazing.”
“Amazing in a good way,” I suggested, because his tone didn’t suggest amazing in a good way.
“Maybe,” Silas said.
“Silas,” I said, thinking of the conversation Maddie and I had earlier, because she could shift and I couldn’t. “If she’s more powerful than you, that’s a good thing. We need all the power we can get.”
“More powerful than me?” Silas repeated, then shrugged. “I don’t know about that. We’ll see, I guess.”
I wanted to know how exactly we would see, but Rafe called impatiently, “Let’s go.”
Silas added, “And Maddie never needed magic to be amazing. I do.”
The four of us were quiet—maybe a little shell-shocked from our dalliance with magical flying monsters—as we drove the rest of the way. We stashed the vehicle near the colony, which I glimpsed over the pines—tall black spires reaching above the greenery—and then hiked back out to the train tracks.
The four of us donned our new uniforms—prisoner yellow for Maddie and me, guards’ fitted blue uniforms for Rafe and Silas.
Then Silas spirited us onto the train.
The train ran right outside Elegiah; the cars with covered windows told everyone that there were prisoners contained within. But life seemed to go on as normal in the cars itself, where couples were drinking cocktails in the dining car and children were careening through the aisles.
No one seemed troubled by the possibility there were Rebel magicians housed around the corner in an off-limits train car, and that made me wonder why they were imprisoning them at all.
When the train came to a stop outside Elegiah, Maddie and I joined the line of prisoners disembarking. Rafe and Silas melted into the group of penal officers who were just arriving, some from leave and some checking in for the first time.
It turned out that being in prison wasn’t all that different from being at a military academy, which really made me wonder about how I’d chosen to spend four years of my life. During intake, we waited standing on lines on the concrete, and then we waited in a cold wooden house full of benches while our paperwork was processed. We were called up to review paperwork and sent to sit down again. It felt endless.
But it all made sense.
Hell would have a waiting room, right?
Chapter Twenty-Six
Maddie
I was eager to get into the camp and find Isabelle.
They started calling us one at a time to go up—and everyone they called up, then disappeared through a door behind the check-in table. No one ever returned.
When they called me up, Jensen winked at me. I wished I could kiss him goodbye, but I settled for nudging the top of my boot against his as I got up. We’d see each other again soon, I hoped.
I didn’t look back before I went through the door.
I found myself in a long hallway, and a guard gestured me into an exam room. I had a very brief interview with a very disinterested doctor who asked me some cursory questions to make sure I wouldn’t drop dead immediately upon entry into the prison. I wasn’t sure anyone cared if the answer was that you would.
Then he called toward the hallway, “Mark.”
I held up my arm, my heart suddenly in my throat in case he realized my mark was a fake. But he wasn’t even looking at me.
“Due to some of your kind’s hijinks,” he explained curtly as he made a few final notes in my file, “we are refreshing the mark for every new arrival. Just to make sure you can’t ever use your precious magic again.”
He raised his head from the clipboard and offered me an oily smile.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, even though my heart was hammering frantically.
A scream split the air; it came from down the hall, in another exam room. But it rang in my ears as if the person had just screamed beside me. I was suddenly so anxious.
Suddenly the room was full of guards. I couldn’t help it; I lashed out, fighting them. I managed to keep control of myself not to use my magic, because if they realized my mark was fake, they might investigate further. But giving into my fear enough to attack them—that was natural enough.
Two meaty guards pinned me against the table and a third got control of my hand. They forced my arm down on the table as the doctor pressed what seemed like a two-inch-wide metal stamp against my arm.
He muttered a few words, and suddenly the brand was flaming hot, and I screamed as pain rippled through my arm. But it wasn’t just searing my skin; I felt magic hot and painful racing through my veins. I kicked out and slammed a guard in the chest, and he flew back across the room, slamming into the wall.
“Let her go,” the doctor said. “She’s marked.”
“The female magicians are always so lively,” one of the guards observed as he stepped back, letting me go.
I rolled onto my side, cradling my arm. That had hurt far worse than the fake mark, and worst of all, my body felt drained and exhausted. I didn’t feel the slightest flicker of my power as a magician buried deep within anymore.
“And loud,” the other one said.
The doctor gave them both a disgusted look. Then said, “Get her out of here.”
I didn’t have much fight left; when they pulled me off the table, the room seemed to whirl and my stomach rose as if I might puke. Despite the way I staggered, they pushed me down the hall anyway. I tried to look over my shoulder, looking for Jensen, but I didn’t see him.
They shoved me out into an icy, muddy courtyard. The castle loomed over us, and smaller wooden barracks buildings stood to either side.
I’d arrived at Elegiah.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Rafe
“New officers, hm?” The young officer next to us looked us over curiously. “Welcome to Elegiah.”
He didn’t manage to welcome us with a straight face.
But he took us across the empty gray yard toward the black castle. A handful of prisoners were working at various tasks around the camp, and I resisted the impulse to look for Maddie; she’d disappeared along with the other new prisoners. I had to trust that she and Jensen were playing their roles and were safe enough for now. Even though I hated not to be there watching over them.
But we were a team. I wasn’t just Maddie’s lover or Jensen’s friend. They had to complete their part of the mission, and I had to trust them.
“The warden will want to meet you once you get settled,” the guard said. He stuck out his hand. “Tobias Jones.”
He looked young, with coppery hair and dark brown eyes.
“Rafe Hunt,” I said, because it was easier to use our own names when we could.
“Elias Cormac,” Silas said next to me.
We turned in our paperwork at the administration office on the first floor of the castle, where the offices were. Then we went upstairs to the officers’ barracks.
“Do you two want to room together?” Tobias asked us.
No. But it was the practical thing.
I could just use a break from Silas, now and then.
“That would be great,” Silas said, clapping my shoulder.
As we left our rooms behind and Tobias took us on a tour, I realized Silas had shifted his personality slightly, his voice louder, his posture changing.
I could believe that Silas was in fact very good at his job, and while that was a good thing, it still gave me the creeping sense of disquiet that I’d never really known Silas at all.
Had I gotten to know Silas himself over the past year?
Or a separate persona, custom-designed to fit in, the way Silas was subtly mirroring Tobias?
The warden was a tall, pinched man who for some reason struck me as the opposite of Clearborn. He was friendly enough, congratulating on us being patriotic enough to do our duty for our people guarding the Rebel Magicians.
“
So thery’re all Rebel Magicians here?” Silas asked. “I thought some of them might be common criminals.”
“No, we’ve got all the extraordinary criminals here,” the warden said. “Although some of them are being moved to the Grave Sea soon, and I imagine not long after that, the colony might be shut down.”
“Shut down?” Silas asked, giving voice to the question I had. If only some of the prisoners were being moved what happened when the penal colony was shut down?
“I don’t like to think about it,” the warden said. “We’ve built a family here, really. Hard work, yes, but we manage to have fun within the walls of the castle. We try to leave them behind when we come in the doors.”
He nodded at the courtyard beyond his office. The sun was fading outside the windows, and I could make out black lines of prisoners forming up in the dusk to be counted before supper.
“We’ll get you both assignments and you can start tomorrow,” he said. “Not much else to do here besides work, except for when you have leave, so you might as well begin.”
“We don’t mind,” Silas said.
I was trying to stay as quiet as I could, because despite our studies, I wasn’t sure I knew enough about this world to pass as a penal officer.
It was painful for me to let Silas do all the talking, though.
“We’re eager to get to it,” Silas said. We were—the sooner we insinuated ourselves in here, the sooner we could arrange escape for Isabelle, Sebastian and Keen.
“Got a grudge against the Rebels?” The warden asked.
“Not particularly,” Silas answered.
“Oh, most of the men and women serving here do,” he said. “They come from old families who lost their fortunes to the Rebels’ thievery, or they’re the son of someone the Rebels targeted.”
Silas nodded, his eyes wide and innocent. It was almost hard to believe he’d been the one who targeted some of those Establishment officials for death.
“Tomorrow, you can join us in renewing the wards,” the warden said.
“You need wards when they’re all marked?” Silas asked.
“You can’t be too careful with the Rebels,” the warden said.
Once we were out of the warden’s office, I wanted to talk to Silas about what he thought the warden meant when he talked about shutting down the colony. It gave me an ominous feeling.
But Tobias came by and asked us if we’d join him in patrolling the prisoners’ supper, then come to dinner in the officers’ mess. “All hands on deck at meal times. Then one shift goes off and the next goes on. But I’m going to help out now.”
“Yes,” I said, before Silas could answer; it’d be good to get eyes on Jensen and Maddie.
“And here I was beginning to think you didn’t talk,” Tobias said with a laugh.
He seemed pretty good natured and I was beginning to think that perhaps Elegiah was not as bad as I thought at first. The guards seemed reasonable; they didn’t seem that different from most of the men I knew at the academy.
Silas had made Elegiah sound like a death sentence. Maybe the boy wizard as Jensen had called him earlier was prone to a certain amount of drama.
We followed Tobias into patrolling the dining hall. Prisoners were waiting in line outside, shivering as the wind cut through their coats, huffing into their hands. Dusk was rapidly tipping into nightfall, with all the cold that carried out here.
I glanced over the line with a dispassionate eye, looking for Jensen and Maddie. I found Jensen, with a bored expression on his face and his hands in his pockets; I noticed him the second before Tobias did.
“Hands out of your pockets,” Tobias ordered, pulling a device off his belt that I’d thought was a flashlight at first glance. It telescoped in his hand.
Jensen glanced around as if he wasn’t sure he was being spoken to, with that arrogant look on his face that sometimes made me want to smack him, but my stomach was suddenly tight.
Tobias slammed his elbow into the back of Jensen’s head, knocking him forward, then brought the baton across Jensen’s shoulders. Jensen stumbled forward, almost crashing into others in the line who twisted to avoid him.
Jensen looked at Tobias as if he might pull a Silas and tear his head from his shoulders. His jaw was tight with fury, his golden eyes smoldering. Tobias was already walking ahead into the building, as if assaulting Jensen was nothing to him. Perhaps it wasn’t.
Jensen didn’t even look twice at Silas and me as we followed Tobias, all of us pretending we didn’t know each other. But the memory of Jensen wincing once Tobias wasn’t looking, reaching to rub his shoulder, would stay with me.
Inside the dining hall, prisoners hurried through the line, quickly filled in the tables, and began to eat; they had bowls of soup and dark bread.
“If you don’t give them much time to eat, they don’t get as much time to plot,” Tobias said. “These ones you always have to keep moving. Since it’s all Rebel Magicians, we have the trickiest colony of all.”
He sounded as if he were boasting, and I tried to smile even though I was fantasizing about killing him, at the moment.
I glimpsed Maddie, shoulder to shoulder with some other females at a table. She said something softly to someone and then I caught sight of her handing her bread over; I wondered if Maddie had been threatened or made a deal or if she was just being generous. I hated not knowing exactly what she was up to.
I hastily averted my gaze before I could alert anyone to what she was doing, and possibly draw attention to myself for not stopping it. God damn it, Maddie. This place seemed like they punished anyone for stepping out of line. Knowing her, I didn’t think the odds were good Maddie would get out of here without getting hurt.
The prisoners were rushed in and out; after that was shift change.
When we headed to the mess hall for dinner, Tobias was friendly and joking, introducing us to everyone.
The fact that he acted as if he could have been any of the shifters I knew back at the academy was no longer a source of comfort. Now it bothered me.
“The warden mentioned that the colony might be closed,” Silas said after a while. “I didn’t hear that before I signed on or I might have taken an assignment to Corium instead.”
“Why didn’t you?” Tobias asked, before taking another sip of his hot coffee, steam curling into the air. It must be too hot to drink but that didn’t seem to stop him. “Most people would choose Corium unless they had some grudge against the Rebels. This isn’t the easiest place to work—we’re so isolated.”
“Isolation has never bothered me,” Silas said. I wondered if that was true before he went on, “I heard there’s good hunting out here.”
“There is,” Tobias admitted. “But the forest’s dangerous these days. More and more rips.”
The officers’ mess was the opposite of the bare bones, chilly wooden structure where the prisoners ate. The colony’s penal officers were waited on by prisoners themselves. When Silas expressed surprise, Tobias pointed out that not only had they lost their magic and were under guard, but they were considered to be the lucky ones because they spent their work days in the warmth of the castle.
“It is a risk. We’ve had them take advantage,” he admitted, “but we execute them for it, which as it turns out, is a pretty good incentive for good behavior.”
Some of the other guards at the table laughed.
Tobias finally seemed to remember what we’d been talking about originally. He glanced around then lowered his voice. “And don’t you ever read a paper? Of course the colony will be shut down eventually. It’s expensive keeping these Rebels alive.”
A chill ran through me.
“When?” Silas asked.
“Not for a while. You’ve got plenty of time to get some hunting in.”
“Why are you whispering?” Silas asked him.
Tobias jerked his thumb at the prisoners who were serving the meal. “Wouldn’t want the poor bastards to know their days were numbered.”
; “They must know that because they’re here,” Silas said.
“Different once you put a name to it,” Tobias said. “Hope keeps everyone alive…and compliant. If they ever know we plan to burn their cells down with them in it, odds are good we’ll have violence.”
So that was the plan to shut down the camp. My mouth was suddenly dry. What if we couldn’t get Maddie and Jensen and Silas’s friends, and get out of here in time?
And even once we did… it felt as if we owed it to these Rebels to free them all, even if we had to wait until after our mission. If we dared.
What if the warden shut down the colony while we were busy with the shield?
“So how do you know that you know?” Silas asked Tobias. “If I were the warden, I’d keep my plans a secret so there was no risk they’d overheard.”
“The warden’s not like that,” Tobias assured us. “He trusts all.”
Well. What a warm and cuddly place, then.
When Silas and I went to our room, I wanted to talk to him about what we’d heard, but as soon as we made eye contact, he shook his head. As I heard voices murmuring out in the hall, I realized how thin the walls were.
Silas pulled a tin out of his jacket and said, “Want to smoke with me?”
I wasn’t sure when Silas had taken up smoking, but I said, “Sure.”
He smiled as if he knew how much playing the silent one and letting him do all the talking was driving me crazy.
But when we went out to the ramparts, we were alone. Just to be sure, Silas and I wrote our messages back and forth on rolling paper, pretending we were playing tic-tac-toe.
I wrote to him: The warden plans to kill them all when they shut down the camp
Silas gave me a wry look and wrote back: Mission first
I stared back at him, wondering if he really thought I was so callous. He ignored me as he drew a map, trying to plot out just how we’d walk out of here with our friends, in tiny letters. I studied what he’d written. I wanted to get them and get out of here now, but he was right; we needed to escape cleanly, because if we didn’t, we might have Establishment following us when we left to steal the shield.