1

The day will come when everything is okay again. It has to.

It has to, even if it isn't today.

I remind myself, over and over, to have hope, but Sean won't even look me in the face. He holds his daughter as if he needs to protect Grace from me, although I'm the one who held her tight and kept her safe for the entire journey back to the Hotel Celare's roof.

"Wait," Sean says, and this caravan--us, the alleged traitors, and our Outer Cura's leaders, our Procella--halts on the steps leading down into the hotel from the roof. Tuco, the Procella with the misshapen face from the 9th Cura, shadows Sean as he descends the steps to stand beside Garrett.

The brothers are no longer carbon copies of one another, with Sean's jaw so rigid and Garrett's tattoo spilling down his arm. Tuco stands, ready to defend, as Sean leans in and growls at his brother, "I asked and you didn't answer me. Where is my wife?"

The menace in his voice can't be real. It can't. Sean's been our decoy, pretending to be an Addo to keep Milo's real Addoship a secret, but looking at Sean now, gripping his daughter as his muscles jump in his jaw, I'm worried that he's not our decoy anymore. That he's actually bought into Van's deception. Sean's got to know that we're still the good guys and that Van is the real threat.

"Informants mentioned," Van drawls to Sean, "that your brother spread rumors that Teagan wasn't technically your wife, because your binding was broken in the ambush."

I want to tell my ex-principal what we did to his stupid Cache. How Zane's Free Ball busted open the walls and released all the souls The Fury was hoarding. I want to laugh in Van's face. Some Mastermind. Some leader.

But right now, Sean and Garrett stand toe-to-toe. Sean seethes. It sure seems like he's buying every word of Van's garbage. Grace remains silent in her father's arms.

"Tell me," Sean growls through a tight jaw, "what happened to my wife."

Garrett's chin dips toward his chest as he braces to deliver the terrible news of what happened to Teagan in a whisper to his brother.

"I'm sorry," he says. He gives Sean a moment to blink before he continues. "Teagan was definitely one of The Fury, but she was also an incredible mother. The only thing she cared about was keeping Grace safe. She gave her life to do it. She was a hero in the end."

Without warning, Sean's hand rises up, swings back, and I try to grab it, but Angus tightens his grip on my arms. The crack of the slap echoes. Garrett's head rocks to the side with the force, but he doesn't tense up or challenge Rolan's grasp. He just takes it. Grace begins to wail and Sean turns away, cuddling his daughter close as the tears slip down his cheeks.

"You see?" Van says quietly. He shoots snarling glances at the other Procella while he jabs an accusing finger at the six of us, as if we're a threat. Milo and Trig are still bleeding from the gunshot wounds they got in the escape, while Nok is frantically scratching in his itchy disguise. Mark and Garrett and I just aren't strong enough or skilled enough to overpower the rest of the elite Cura leaders. I'm sure that's what powers the sneer on Van's face. "They are the murderers. The Addo's wife was an innocent and they killed her."

"She was one of you!" Mark bursts out, but Trig growls for him to shut up and I hope Mark listens to him. Trig is right. We don't know which of these Procella, if any, can be trusted, and they don't know that they can trust us. We're all playing tag in the dark.

Mark listens, but he glares at Van as we pass him, led down the steps once again, into the Hotel Celare. Van chuckles, and I'd like to kill him myself.

And if I get the chance, I will.

In the back of my head, I shout as loud as my thoughts will shout, Addo! Are you okay? Where are you?

No answer comes.

But for now, we are led away from Sean, with Milo and Trig stumbling on their wounded legs, through back halls that I've never seen before.

Freddie designed the Hotel Celare for a situation just like the one we're in now: for a time when the Ianua's survival is in jeopardy. The hotel feels a hundred times bigger than it did weeks ago, when I came up to the roof while Garrett was on guard duty. These are unfamiliar hallways and even though I knew there was some kind of containment area in the Hotel somewhere, I've never seen it before.

At least, not until we round the corner.

This hall has a black metal door. Tuco steps forward, punches in a code, and the locks slide apart inside the walls before the door finally clicks open. The sound means Veritas' locks--long metal bars that slide out from the middle of the walls and interlace in the center of the door. To rip off this door or get through without opening it, the whole wall would have to come off first. We are herded into a corridor unlike any of the ones I've seen in the hotel.

It's a hall and there are rooms lining both sides of it, but the room walls are solid glass on the hall side, so we can see into each one. Some of the transparent material is smeared, although several of the room-cells are empty, as if someone had been attempting to hide behind the blur of their own saliva.

Long and rectangular, each room has the lip of a table that juts from the walls; a straight-backed chair is tucked beneath. Some rooms have bunks bolted to the floor, some have huge beds. The ones with the bigger beds make me shudder. Why not twin sizes in all of them? There are only a few possible explanations that I can think of and none of them are good.

The placement of the showers and pedestal toilets is even worse. They stand wide open in the corners. Zero privacy.

Trig is shoved into the first room-cell, Nok in the second. Garrett in the third. Angus holds me in front of the fourth room as Sisi rattles the door knob, trying to get it unlocked. Mark is dumped in the room two doors down.

Sisi finally gets the door in front of me unlocked. Before I get shoved inside, I watch Wojtek throw open the door next to mine. Hyo loosens his grip on Milo as Rolan steps toe-to-toe with Milo.

"For the innocent Moxes you killed," Rolan growls, as he grabs Milo's hair. Jerking Milo down, Rolan brings up his knee at the same time. It slams into Milo's gut. Milo lets out a sickening oomph as he absorbs the impact. He gags and coughs as Rolan shoves him, face first, into the cell beside mine.

Angus shoves me through the fourth cell door, slamming the door behind me. I watch the Procella, the leaders of our Curas, file past, behind Van. Before I can get to the glass wall, to press my face against it, the lights outside my room turn off and the hall goes pitch black.

I focus, straining my eyes to use my Contego abilities to see, but it's useless. The glass wall of my room has a black tint that I can't penetrate. I can see around inside my room--my cell--but not out of it. When the lights were on, I could see everything without even focusing, but the glass has to be made of some special material. Knocking on any of the solid walls doesn't help either. No response comes from either Garrett's or Milo's adjoining walls. I try focusing my hearing, but all that reaches me is a thick silence that absorbs everything--even my breath.

As the fear leaches into me, I lean against the wall, concentrating on making my lungs work. I chatter through all my mantras in a fast stream that doesn't pay off. What I need isn't mantras. I need a paper bag to breathe into, or better yet, a key to get out of here.

I don't have either one. As I gasp for another breath, I press my back against the wall. I've got to get a grip.

I am Contego.

I cannot be afraid of this.

I will not be afraid.

I won't.

My family are in the cells all around me. And I think of my mother's spirit, how the brilliant mist of her shot past us, once she and a million other souls were freed from The Fury's Cache. Mom.

I am not afraid.

I'm going to get to the rest of my family beyond these walls, one way or another. And I'm not going to do it by being scared.

The chair, tucked under the crescent lip of the wall-mounted table, is the only furniture that isn't bolted to the floor. Amazing. It's not a real sturdy chair, but I figure it should do the trick.

I get to it in three strides, grab it by the bottom of the legs and spin with it like a discus thrower, heaving the chair at the glass. The chair hits the darkened window, but instead of shattering it, the glass flexes like a tight trampoline. The chair comes hurtling back at me. I dive out of the way, covering my head with my arms, as the chair slams into the bathroom sink on the opposite wall and explodes in pieces.

Holy. Crap.

Putting down my arms, there are some thick slivers of chair stuck in them. I pluck them out, grunting with each one. I sit down on the bed to do it, using the blanket there to wipe the drops of blood from my skin. This mattress is as firm as a shelf.

When I'm finished, I feel my way down the side of the bed, checking the bolts on the bed legs. They're screwed tight to the floor. Rats.

I sit there on the edge, trying to MacGuyver a new plan, when something rattles. A wave shoots across the mattress, as if an animal is struggling inside. I leap off as Nok's face, or at least his disguised face, pops out from beneath the bed. I shriek.

"Nok?" I drop onto my knees as the rest of him flops out from a slit in the bottom of the mattress. "How did you do that? How did you get in there?"

"Hoes," Nok says with a grin, as he slides out and hops to his feet. He points to the edge against the wall, and then, beneath the bed. "There, there."

"Holes?" I repeat. I don't really care how he got here, just that he is here, and that I feel so much better now that I'm not alone. I want to throw my arms around him.

"Holes," Nok repeats, pronouncing the word slowly. Then he does something else I've never heard him do. He starts a conversation. "Hard stopping with speak like Veritas. You talk longer. More talk to say. More words."

I try to keep my jaw from dropping. Veritas only speak one word at a time, two tops, but I don't want Nok to stop talking now. My brain scrambles for something to say to keep him going.

"Is everyone okay?" I ask. He nods. When he doesn't offer more, I say the first thing that pops into my head. "You can talk to me in whole sentences now?"

Nok ducks his chin and his face clouds over. "It wrong for me to do. I am Veritas. It shame my people, to turn from silence."

If Sean was here, and still talking to me, he'd give me the whole scoop of why it's such a big shame, but without him, I have to pull it out of Nok myself. "Why is it wrong for you to talk?"

"Our talk, simple exchanges," Nok says. "Thoughts uncluttered. Less unnecessary conversation in world. But what I do now--wrong. I choose side. I choose Ianua. I ask the moon to move tides. Very wrong for Veritas to do. All of it wrong thing to ask, but I love my Veritas too much."

"Are you talking about your family? Do you have family somewhere?"

"Yes, of course," he chuckles.

I never thought of the Veritas as having families. I just thought of them as tiny, Asian-looking monks, so independent and wise and almost alien in their abilities that I can imagine them being hatched in some wisdom patch on Pluto and storked to Earth in pods. Their work--balancing the world with their thoughts--seems so huge and important that I can't even imagine them living like the rest of us, with our everyday lives. It's comical to think of Nok having to cram for an algebra test or having a back ache or disagreeing with his mother.

I forgot that Nok can hear my every thought, until his voice pops up in my head.

We different, he says, but we still love same.

I smile at him and he continues to speak, but out loud again.

"Veritas say wrong to love any being, more than love universal plan. Plan is love. Plan is for beings. But I still choose different. I cannot let all die."

"Are you talking about fate?"

Nok throws his arms wide. "Yes, big fate. Big plan. But in plan, I live too, so I have choice. Veritas say no choice, but choice always stay, even if Veritas ignore. So, I choose now. I choose: not allow."

"You can do that? You can change the Cusp? You can change fate, Nok?"

"I try." He pauses and repeats carefully, "I will try."

"How are you going to do it? Can you get us all out of here?"

"Not all. You. I return, if can."

I'm supposed to leave the hotel on my own? I barely made it back from the looting trip I'd taken with Milo at the Cache. The world is a different place now. People are different. The idea of being alone out there fills my bones with ice. I'm as ashamed as I am grateful that Freddy's design of the hotel makes it pretty much impossible for me to escape.

I pump my jaw to speak, but no sound comes out. I'd keep trying, but Nok suddenly pauses, cocking his head to one side and looking past me, as if he can make something out beyond the glass wall of my cell.

"Do you see someth--" My voice tumbles off its own whisper as Nok drops to his knees and scuttles beneath the bed. He is inside it before I can even finish my question, the mattress trembling with his movement in it before he disappears into the wall. I glimpse over my shoulder to the glass. The lights inside and outside my cell pop on, all at once. I creep closer to peer out at the wide outer hall, to see what scared Nok away.

What catches my eye is not the hall, but what lies on the opposite side of it. Across from my cell, now illuminated, is a whole other row of room-cells. They were dark when we were brought in, but now I can stare into the one directly across from me.

And what I see is worse than anything else I could imagine.

A much paler and thinner version of Larson stands in the center of the room, wrapped in a jacket with long sleeves that are secured at his back. He is standing, only standing, and staring at the solid wall of his room. I wait for him to move, to turn his head, to see us all here in our cells too, but he doesn't. His mouth is slack, his gaze fixed.

A shiver bursts up my spine and I have to push down my fear as if my soul wears cleats. Milo was right. He'd told me that Larson would be traded back to the Ianua if he wasn't dead. But after The Fury had put Larson through the Jamb and ripped his spirit Connection away from him, I thought he was dead. Looking at him now, he's still not far from it. Milo said going into the Jamb could kill a Contego, or it could drive them insane. Larson looks half way between the two.

I look around his cell, at a tray of untouched food, wilted and old, on his table. His clothing is soiled. He drools as he stares at the wall, his muscles sagging off his face. Larson is what zombies are afraid of becoming.

A shadow drops across the floor and startles me away from the glass. I battle the fear, intending to step close to the glass again, but I end up backing up so far, the pits of my knees hit the bed.

A hum erupts overhead. At once, a voice and a face appear in my window. The shock knocks me onto the bed, but I spring back up the second my brain kicks back in and recognizes who I'm looking at. Her hair hangs over one eye and the other, a sinkhole of beautiful black eyeliner, winks at me. The silver box that had hung by a long string in the middle of the hall is in her hand.

"Are you an Emen or a mouse?" Robin asks, her thumb on the button of the silver box she holds to her mouth. It's an intercom. The air rushes out of me and my shoulders drop as I skitter over to the clear wall of my cell. She smiles at me. Robin.

"How'd you get in here?"

"Hey, training with the Emen has its perks. It's not like my skills only work when I have to retrieve dead bodies." The idea of it sits between us as solid as the wall. Robin skips over it. "So how's it going?"

But before I can answer, she looks away, darting a sour frown at one of the cells to the right of mine.

"I can hear everything you guys say," she says. "Or fart, Mark. You can hear me, but..." she lifts her finger off the side of the silver comm. "You can only hear me so long as my finger is on this button."

I poke my finger in the direction of the surrounding cells. "Are they all okay?"

Robin winces instead of answering. She sweeps her index finger in a semi-circle in front of herself, signaling for all of us to shut up and wait. After a pause, she drops her finger and starts again.

"Listen, I can hear all of you and you can hear me, but you can't all hear each other talking at once like I can. So don't talk unless I talk right to you. Otherwise I'll go deaf and I can't hang out here forever without getting caught."

I bite my lip to stop myself from talking. I wish I could hear Garrett's voice.

"Ok, so what's going on is this," Robin begins, her tone drops flat. Her gaze takes turns between our cells. "You guys are traitors. Just hang on, Mark. Hang on and let me talk! During the ambush, the way you guys barreled out of here, the Outer Curas started questioning how things went down."

Robin swipes her bangs over to the side, but they fall back over her usually-hidden, black-hole eye. The other visible eye cuts sharply down the row of our cells, far away from mine. "Of course, we know you guys aren't traitors...our Cura knows better...but the Outer Curas don't. Probably because a load of them have gone crooked themselves." She drops her eyes. I've never seen Robin show much as far as emotions go, so seeing her lower lip quiver as she swipes something, almost angrily, from the corner of her eye, sends up red flags for me. "I don't know if anybody told you guys yet, but we lost Carducci. And Mrs. Neho. I'm so sorry, Trig. I am so, so sorry."

The air rushes out of my lungs in one whoosh. I put a hand against the glass as I double over, trying to catch my breath. Mrs. Neho--gone? My brain insists that it can't be true. Our tough little Oriental woman, with her blunt brilliance and her funny broken English, has to be hiding down the hall or in one of the rooms, ready to pop out and save us from this terrible joke.

But the quiet stretches on as Robin wipes at her eyes again. All of her attention is pointed down the row, probably at Trig's cell.

I can't even imagine what's happening with him. Mrs. Neho, Ruka, was his wife. Trig had thought he won the lottery when Teagan took his place, sacrificing herself to launch the Free Ball. He hadn't planned on coming back and he said Mrs. Neho would be proud of him for it. But now, he's returned and she's dead.

My eyes find the only Contego I can see, besides Robin. I stare out at Larson, still frozen in his cell, across the hall. He hasn't moved a centimeter. He's still drooling. I wonder if he can hear Robin's voice like we can. Or if he even understands what words mean anymore.

I don't know how much more death, how many more set backs, how much longer I can stare at Larson without unhinging. Worse, I don't think I have any choice. The rest of the fear I had in me dissolves. What I feel now is dangerous.

There is us and them. Them, the people that committed to the Ianua and in silent cowardice, deceived their own people. Traitors are worse than enemies. They know your secrets, so they can get in closer to the bone. All I know now is that I have to figure out how to get to the rest of us--any us that might be left--so we can take out as many of them as we can.

Robin's eyes are still rooted far down the line of cells. When her eyes finally rove away, she says into the comm, "You bet, Mark. They are going to pay for this for sure. And Milo, you can just plug your corn hole. I don't need to hear any of your pious crap. Nothing's more important than avenging them right now. Don't act like you're here for any of us or for any bigger picture. You're not fooling anybody."

I open my mouth and close it. My first instinct is to defend him, to let Robin know what the rest of us know, that Milo is our real Addo and that Sean has been protecting him by playing decoy. But I don't. I don't know who else might be listening and I don't really know which program Sean is getting with anymore.

"We're working on some things..." Robin's voice trails and her head jerks to the side, listening. She jams the comm close to her lips and whispers, someone's coming, before the speaker clicks off.

She vanishes before I can blink. There isn't a puff of smoke or anything and the comm isn't even swinging. It's dangling down from the ceiling in the center of the hall, dead still. I press my forehead against the glass and try to locate her in the hall, but she's gone.

In her place, Tuco, the Procella from the ninth and most crude Cura, creeps in.

It doesn't matter that Tuco is a hulking bookcase of a man with a hunch that makes him look like he's keeping a fist full of black hearts close to his chest. It's not his size or his weird posture that makes me uncomfortable. It is his face.

Tuco's head looks like a squash that was forced to grow with inconsistent rain. His forehead is almost a light bulb on one side; his tiny, charred eyes are sunken beneath it, as if they are in hiding. He swipes a long finger across the end of his crooked nose as he walks to the comm, a satisfied sneer tacked to his lips. The hard chips of his eyes glance sideways at me, and the glare seems to burn as he grabs the comm.

His voice pipes into my cell like a sticky, black muck.

"Listen closely," he growls. His eyes flash along the row of our cells. "The old rules that protected scum don't apply anymore. Not for me. Our resources are precious and while I do not mind filling the bellies of friends, I would rather cut the bellies out of my enemies than allow them to lick the crumbs from my floor."

I try to swallow the hard knot of dread sitting at the back of my throat. We are trapped in these cells and the Ianua playbook, which used to protect prisoners from being tortured and killed in custody, is no longer in effect. Maybe the Hotel Celare isn't even under Ianua control anymore. The only thing I know for sure is that I have no idea what is happening, or what the allegiances are, beyond the walls of my own skin.

But I do have the distinct feeling that we're totally screwed as Tuco licks his lips to speak.

"I will give each of you one chance to tell me which side you are on, The Fury or the Ianua. Then I will give you one chance to tell me something that will prove it." Tuco's eyes flash to my left, focusing further down the row of cells than I expect. "No, Milo, I do not offer the Rings. You must choose now, without relying on second chances. If you cannot prove your alliance to me, I will kill you, burn your unblessed Memory, and scatter it, so that you will be lost forever."

The comm pops off momentarily as Tuco lets it sink in with us. Then he lifts the comm to his mouth again.

"I will come tomorrow, at night, to hear what you will tell me. If no one else has killed you before then."

He drops the comm and walks away, out of my field of vision.