THEY TORE across the exercise yard as fireballs were falling around them, dodging flames spreading greedily across the gravel and heating the rocks to burning shards. Carol slammed through the double doors of the Maiden House, shattering the glass insets into pieces that crunched under their feet as they descended into the halls of the prison that had been Rhi’s home for a decade.
Three bodies lay in the hallway, men with heavy tactical gear, totally unconscious, smears of green across their faces. Carol looked down at them, kicking one lightly to make sure he was out, before shooting Rhi a look. But all Rhi could feel was relief—because these men, the way they were rendered unconscious, meant that Mazz was alive. That her implant wasn’t working.
“What happened here?” Carol asked.
“Mazz is kind of poisonous. Or her saliva is. She didn’t give them enough to kill them.”
“That’s handy.”
The power was out, and only the backup lights flickered down the dim hall. Rhi smelled smoke and heard yelling and loud footsteps above her head.
“Tell me where to go,” Carol directed Rhi, her hands glowing with power. “Third floor, right?”
“Yes, upstairs.”
Rhi took them two at a time, right behind Carol, climbing two flights to the third floor, but they skidded to a stop when they rounded on the corridor.
A riot of half-burnt vines blocked the hall. Slumped on the ground, tangled in the smoking brambles, was another unconscious guard, this one with a thorn as thick as Rhi’s arm speared through both his arms, trapping him to the foliage. Rhi tentatively reached out, brushing her hand over the vines; they stirred, the thorns sharpened, stretching toward her for just a moment, before pausing as if they recognized her.
“Tarin?” Rhi whispered.
The vines rustled, pulling apart to reveal a hole big enough to pass through. She and Carol ducked inside, and what she saw made her heart flip in her chest.
Tarin was sitting in the center of the hallway, alone, her eyes closed. Her ragged hair, long and matted to her head, was spilling down the back of her thin shift, her spindly arms and legs caked with dirt. And on the inside of her wrist was a patch of blue.
Hepzibah had gotten to her. She’d freed her. But where was Hepzibah—and the rest of her sisters?
“You came back.” Tarin stated it flatly, still not opening her eyes. Rhi rushed forward, kneeling down in the spread of flowers that surrounded Tarin like long-lost friends. She cupped the girl’s face, praying that when she opened her eyes…
But when Tarin finally did, her gaze slid away from Rhi’s, unfocused, fixed on a distant spot beyond her. As always, she was lost in the haze that had settled over her long ago, when the Keepers had deprived her of the plants that fed her heart and her power. Perhaps it had been silly to hope that just by freeing her power, Tarin would be freed from the pain that had stolen her sanity. But it didn’t matter, Rhi told herself. She was here. She was still Tarin.
“They came back to me, Rhi,” she said, trailing her fingers on the ground in a swirl. Flowers—daisies and violets—sprouted in their wake. “The Keepers said the flowers wouldn’t come, but look—they did.”
There was movement at her back through the vines blocking the hall from the rest of the Maiden House, and then a slicing sound—the wall of thorns tearing through flesh—followed by a guttural groan and a wet splash of blood. Rhi glanced over her shoulder, knowing it was only a matter of time before they broke—or burned—their way through Tarin’s barrier.
“I know they did,” Rhi said. “I told you they would, remember?”
Tarin nodded, her eyes sliding back to the riot of color blanketing the ground around her. She began to hum, the smell of violets and charred flesh blending in the air.
“Tarin, where’s Tynise?” Rhi asked, peering over her shoulder down the empty hall. “Where’s your sister?”
“Tynise,” Tarin echoed, a rose sprouting next to her foot. She plucked it, heedless of the razor-sharp thorns. “She’s with the skunk lady. But I wanted to come back here, so I snuck away. The thorns aren’t going to grow themselves.”
“Hepzibah,” Carol said, as Rhi gently took Tarin’s elbow and pulled her up. Tarin stood, holding the rose, still fingering the petals.
“Where’s the skunk lady, Tarin?”
A smile crept across Tarin’s face, her head tilted. She giggled, plucking a thorn off the rose. “Tables turned,” she sang out. “Now Miss Birdie’s going to learn a lesson.”
* * *
RHI DIDN’T wait for Carol. She didn’t wait for Tarin.
She bolted down the familiar hall turned strange and spooky with Tarin’s garden, a mix of plants she remembered from Attilan—ivy and blackberry brambles and flowers of all kinds— and Damarian monstrosities that snapped and twitched as she passed, their spiky tendrils reaching for her.
Several guards were slumped across the floor—just unconscious, but… at least two had come up against Alestra. They had blood trickling out of their ears.
Rhi didn’t hesitate. She ran, focused: the end of the hall. The red door.
Miss Egrit’s room. The only door without a heat sensor.
Rhi turned the knob and pushed open the door, slipped into the room, and closed it quickly behind her, afraid of what she might find.
“Rhi!”
She sagged against the door, relief knocking her knees together, stealing her breath, and filling her with the kind of joy that made her dizzy. They were all there: Alestra, her hands and dress spattered with blood. Tynise, towering over them all, her broad shoulders blocking Rhi’s view of Mazz, who rushed toward her, crying her name, and threw herself into her arms.
Rhi held her tightly, her hands cradling Mazz’s brown curls and trying not to break down. She hadn’t realized just how surprised she was to see them again, when something inside her had never expected she’d ever succeed. The rest of the girls rushed to her, embracing her tightly, as Hepzibah, Mantis, and Sona hung back, letting them enjoy their hard-earned reunion.
It was the best feeling in the world, being there with them. And the most frightening. Because this wasn’t over… and within minutes, they could be scattered in the wind again. Or dead.
After they’d come this far, she couldn’t—wouldn’t—let that happen. She had to get them onto that shuttle.
“Zeke’s waiting for us,” Rhi said, and Alestra gave out a little sob of relief, leaning against Tynise, who hugged her tight. “You all need to go out front where the shuttle’s waiting before they send more strike teams.”
“We can handle the strike team now,” Tynise snarled, holding out her arm, the blue EMP patch blazing against her skin.
“Alestra needs to get away from here,” Rhi stressed. “The baby… all of you have to go.”
“We can’t,” Alestra said. “Not yet.”
Rhi frowned. “But—”
Then the group parted, revealing what the girls had been blocking… who they’d been blocking.
And Rhi stared at Miss Egrit, bound to her chair, with tears staining her face and a gag stuffed in her mouth. She went cold and then hot, like her body didn’t know what it wanted: to be still and frozen, or angry and heated.
“We waited for you,” Alestra said.
“We want you to decide,” Mazz added.
“What to do with her,” Tynise finished.
Rhi stared at Miss Egrit, at her crushed curls—messier than Rhi had ever seen them—and her crooked skirt, and the tear in the elbow of her sweater. She remembered viscerally for a moment that day she’d met them. The first day she’d tried to break them with the myth, the way Sona had been broken all those years ago. The way all Damarian girls, human and Inhuman, had been broken.
Then she looked at her friends—at the two women who had helped bring her here, and the woman who had been raised here.
Hepzibah moved to stand behind their captive, her arms crossed, her stance wide. “I have told your friends that I will not interfere,” she said. “Your captive, your choice. It is the only just way.”
“And I made myself perfectly clear how I feel about this sort of thing to Jella and Marson,” Mantis declared with a permissive nod.
Sona said nothing, and Rhi arched a brow. Was she going to be the judge?
Sona licked her lips, her breath hitching as she said, “Your move, Rhi.”
Miss Egrit whimpered, and the sound was so much like the sound Rhi made when she’d dropped the ember gel on her skin. That bit-back, oh-so-scared but oh-so-determined-to-hide-it sound you couldn’t stop from bubbling to your lips. In Rhi, the sound had meant strength. But here, in Miss Egrit, it was all weakness.
She heard footsteps—Carol bringing Tarin back to them. Her heart creaked in her chest like a door shutting on something good. To have Tarin watch this… to have Mazz participate… to show Carol who she really was…
Could she do it? Should she?
She hooked her finger on the rough cotton gag shoved in Miss Egrit’s mouth, pulling it free. The woman spat, her pink lipstick—almost the same color as her mouth—smeared across her skin.
“You could have been kind,” Rhi said. “You could’ve been drawn to this, to us, out of the goodness of your heart. But you weren’t, were you? You wanted power. And you didn’t care who you hurt to get your shred of it.”
“Why would I be kind to things like you?” Miss Egrit shrilled, but her voice cracked on the words, and Rhi noticed her lips were trembling.
“You’re scared now,” Rhi said. “You’re thinking it through— all the things you did to us. Do you even remember them all?”
Around her, her sisters stirred as they remembered. But she could see it, underneath the terror in Miss Egrit’s eyes: she didn’t. The horrors of the last ten years had blurred together, because they weren’t horrors to her. They were just a means to power, to the only kind of freedom a Damarian woman could get.
“You should be very scared,” Rhi said. “We were.”
Tables turned, indeed. Tarin was right.
“The Council will burn you for this, just like the twins,” Miss Egrit snarled. “You’re no better than them, Number Five. You’re nothing.” The words, as always, were spoken to hurt her, to bring her low, to remind her.
They didn’t hurt her, but they did remind her. Of how she was smart. Of how she was strong.
There was an ember bomb in her jacket pocket. The one Hepzibah had slipped her. She pulled it out, tilting it back and forth, letting it catch the light. Miss Egrit went rigid, her terrified gaze fixed on the bomb, her chair rattling on the ground with the convulsions of fear wracking her body.
“I could drop this, and that would be it,” Rhi said. “A few minutes of agony as it eats through your flesh and bone, and then you would be… gone. You would feel nothing.” She tucked the bomb back into her pocket. “I don’t want that,” she said, her words directed toward her sisters, not to Miss Egrit. “I want her to suffer for much longer,” she told them. “Every day. Every hour. Every breath that she takes, I want her to remember not only what she did, but also what she’s lost: her freedom, the only thing she actually values.” She leaned forward, her voice lowered, feeling Carol’s gaze blazing down her back. “Killing is too good for you. Punishment is much crueler. And unfortunately for you, I learned from the best. Because you may not remember all that you’ve done to us, but we do.”
Miss Egrit shuddered as Tynise’s hand clamped down on her head, forcing her to stare straight ahead as Alestra leaned forward and hummed a simple lullaby into her ear.
The woman’s head dropped, Alestra’s powerful voice sending her into slumber before the last note was sung. Relief bubbled inside Rhi like water boiling over, hissing and splashing through her body.
“An appropriate punishment,” Hepzibah told her, nodding in approval.
“A leader’s choice,” Carol added under her breath, for only Rhi to hear.
Mantis stiffened next to Hepzibah. “A ship is coming,” she said. “I can feel the people inside. We need to leave this place before another strike team arrives.”
“The shuttle,” Rhi said. “It’s parked out front. Zeke’s waiting.” She shared a special smile with Alestra and then turned to her friends, her heart thumping wildly in her ears. She looked in their faces and finally said the words she’d dreamed of saying for so long: “Are you ready to go?”
Tears glittered in Mazz’s eyes. “I’m scared,” she confessed as Alestra drew her tighter against her.
“I was, too,” Rhi told her, holding out her hand. “But I’m not scared anymore.”
But before Mazz could reach out and take it, an electronic shriek sounded throughout all floors of the Maiden House, and then a crackling voice echoed out of the speakers tucked in the corners of each room.
“Rhi, I know you’re in there.”
Ansel’s voice. All the triumph that had rushed through her just seconds before, all the relief and joy, snuffed out like a candle. Rhi’s eyes widened in horror, and her jaw dropped when she saw a smile on Carol’s face.
“You didn’t kill him?” she hissed. She hadn’t even thought to ask. She’d just assumed.
Carol shook her head.
Betrayal flashed through her, so deep and so wounding she could barely breathe around the hurt. I trusted you…
Then, Ansel’s voice boomed out again, “I have her right here, Rhi!”
Umbra. Rhi’s stomach churned as she staggered out of Miss Egrit’s room to the right, where the lone dingy window was cut into the brick. She was barely aware of Carol following her out and everyone else hanging back as she stared through the glass.
Ansel was standing in the center of the exercise yard, Umbra’s arm clutched in his. The sight of her in his grasp, head bowed… it broke Rhi’s heart.
“I knew he couldn’t resist,” Carol explained, looking apologetic as Rhi shuddered. “I knew if I let him go, he’d bring her here.”
It was smart. It was reckless.
It was what a leader would do.
“I’m offering you a deal, Rhi,” Ansel continued, his voice echoing through the halls of the Maiden House. “Quite a generous one, considering how much trouble you’ve caused today. I’ll give you Umbra… if you hand over the captain.”