I TURNED MYSELF OVER TO the consort with the scent of Simon clinging to my skin and his words tucked close to my heart.
“When we enter,” said Rose, “it’s important you don’t fight. They’ll take us into custody immediately. If you resist, they’re likely to use force.”
“They’ll use force anyway,” I said, remembering Monty’s cell in the oubliette, the wincing stiffness of his movements. Smart, I thought, to have passed on the coffee this morning. My stomach twisted.
Rose didn’t disagree.
The city was gray—gray pavement, gray buildings, gray sky. The cars sprayed gray water along the sidewalks as they sped past. The pivots that gave Chicago its familiar pulsing rhythm sounded muffled and low.
“Does it sound like there are less of them?” I asked.
“It’s been a long time since I was here,” Rose said. “But it would make sense that they would start the Tacet close to home.”
“When will Prescott and the others come?”
“Hard to say. We’d planned to move quickly, but I would anticipate the Consort has enacted new security protocols. It will take time to find a way around them. In any event, I can’t give up information I don’t possess.”
“I thought you had people inside.”
“We do, but we can’t risk exposing them too early.”
“Yeah. We wouldn’t want them to go out on a limb,” I said.
The smooth, familiar edifice of CCM came into view, and Rose’s demeanor changed. Her spine straightened; her chin lifted—the exhausted woman I’d seen at the table was suddenly the cool, defiant leader once again. “They’ll separate us, of course. Hold us individually, question us and try to match up our stories.”
“What should I tell them?”
“Anything you like.”
I must have looked startled, because she shrugged. “They’ll get it out of you, Del. You haven’t been trained to withstand an interrogation. You don’t have the clearance to know anything truly damaging.”
“I know about Simon.”
“Not his location. Not the extent of our plans.”
“That’s why you said I was a security risk.”
“It’s the one thing we couldn’t let you give away. Every Walker in the Consort will know about Simon soon, but we need the element of surprise.” She tucked my hair behind my ear and straightened my collar, the way my mom always did. “Nothing you can tell them will hurt the Free Walkers, Delancey.”
Frightened people tend to hyperfocus. They think staring down danger will hold it at bay. But that focus locks them in place, like a deer in the headlights, blind to the wolf sneaking up from behind.
Rose was frightened, no matter how calmly she was marching through the Loop. Intent on protecting the Free Walkers, she didn’t consider there were others who needed protection—or she didn’t care.
“Addie and Eliot will be in danger,” I said. “And the minute they figure out who Simon is, they’ll go after Amelia.”
Rose shrugged. “Simon is smart enough to move Amelia to safety. As for your sister and the rest . . . you offered them a choice, and they stayed behind. It’s regrettable, but the decision was theirs to make.”
They were pawns. I’d fled in part to protect the people I loved, to take them out of the battle. My return endangered them all over again. I’d thought this would be a simple solution—painful, but effective. Instead I’d made things exponentially more complicated.
She sighed. “Your best bet is to be as forthcoming and consistent as you can. If Lattimer believes you’re telling them everything of your own volition, he may not feel the need to dig deeper. Your biggest asset is that people consistently underestimate you, Delancey. They think you’re a reckless, impulsive girl.”
“And what do you think?”
“I agree.” Her smile was humorless but not unkind. “It makes you dangerous, your willingness to act out of passion and belief. And it makes you powerful. I wish . . .”
“What?”
“I wish we’d had more time,” she said softly. “For all that we can play with the fabric of the world, time eludes us. It’s like bottling starlight. I would have liked to get to know you, Del. Monty was looking for me, but he was also trying to save you from a life as a Cleaver. He wanted better for you.”
Somehow I doubted this was the future he’d hoped for. “What’s he going to do now?”
“I’ve left him the location of the safe house. He’ll take Simon there, then wait out the attack in the First Echo.”
Rose was kidding herself if she thought he’d sit idly by. But wondering about Monty made me think about Simon asleep in the bed, our future playing out in dreams, waking to find I was only a memory. He must have figured it out by now. He must be frantic and furious and sick. I could envision it, because it was exactly how I had felt when he’d cleaved Train World.
“Del,” my grandmother said, bringing me back to the moment, with its muffled pivots and damp concrete and gray skies. CCM stood a few feet away.
I nodded.
“Be brave,” she said, and pushed open the door.
• • •
I’d expected CCM to be on some sort of lockdown—extra guards, a deserted lobby, tension ratcheted unbearably high. But we walked in, same as I had every week for the last five years. The only sign of a change was the quiet intensity of my classmates’ conversation as they huddled in the corner, waiting for their weekend training to begin.
“Remember,” Rose said. “Don’t fight.”
The problem with abandoning your family for almost twenty years is that when you come back, you don’t know them at all. You don’t know, for example, that the surest way to get me to do something is to tell me not to do it.
“Rosemont Armstrong for Randolph Lattimer,” Rose said, stepping up to the guard desk and laying her hands flat on the counter. “I’m afraid I don’t have an appointment.”
END OF SECOND MOVEMENT