“Will you tell me what this means now?”
“The triquetra.” He traces the symbol with his other thumb. “The symbol literally means protection, but it’s used for tracking.”
“Tracking?”
“Everyone has them. It shows what magic we’re doing and where.”
“They could find you based on this?” I ask, trailing a finger over the symbol again.
“Yes.”
His words ring in my head.A different kind of subjugation.“A wall of your own then.”
I can sense the surprise ripple through him. “Exactly. A wall of our own.” He’s quiet for a few minutes before he asks, “Where would you have gone? If you’d made it out of Samore? You said you weren’t planning on going back to Eden…”
I hesitate long enough that he asks, “Passing?”
It seems silly to hide it from him after everything we’ve been through. Perhaps he would even be willing to help me someday… “Div said there were other noughts out there…”
“Div,” he sighs. “I told you, you can’t trust him.”
“But surely there are…I mean we can’t be the only ones left.”
A thorny silence unravels between us. “There has to be…” I mutter disbelievingly.
“There are no other noughts left,” Sitri says heavily.
“Even that man, Drurian said there were a lot of noughts—that there were many of us!”
Sitri looses a sigh. “There used to be. Noughts used to outnumber Magi by a long shot. There is no longer.”
“But—what about—what about beyond the Ouroboros. They said Magi were escaping. There has to be more noughts out there somewhere.”
“There’s nothing out there,” Sitri says sharply. “There used to be before the Flood. The Gods protected the Ouroboros from the Flood with the boundary and now we’re all that’s left.”
“The Flood,” I murmur. “That was a part of our history too.”
“Then you know I’m telling the truth.” He sounds suddenly testier than normal after being so easygoing all day.
“B-but then where are the Magi going?”
“They’re not going anywhere. They’ve just found a way to remove their triquetras so we can’t track them and have evaded capture. Morin’s just paranoid.”
“Then…there has to be noughts hiding somewhere on the Ouroboros. Div said so.”
“Div is a liar,” Sitri snaps. “He intentionally misleads people. I’ve told you this. There are no noughts left.”
I snap my mouth shut.
No noughts left…at all.
But that means that even if I did find some way to escape then…there’s nowhere for me to go.
“I’m sorry,” Sitri heaves. “I realize I should’ve found a nicer way to say that.”
As much as I want to doubt him I can’t deny that it wouldn’t make sense that my kind went through the trouble of building a wall to save themselves for no reason. Of course, any left outside of it would be gone.
“I’m sorry, pet.”
