“Withthe Council? You think we’ll bow back down and let you idiots plow Grace Loray into the depths of the ocean? No, sweetheart—thisis the future now, like it or not. Your way didn’t work. Our way—”
“It doesn’t matter!”
Lu whirled. The voice yanked the crowd with her, all whipping to the entrance of a tenement and the mangled, bloodied people who stumbled out into the road.
Edda hobbled—holding on to Vex, oddly, a gash through her cheek and across her leg. Tear trails left bright streaks on Vex’s face, and as he helped Edda sit on a crate, his eye leaped up to Lu’s.
The sense of fogged wrongness contracted.
Behind Edda and Vex, Gunnar came with a body sprawled over his shoulder. He dumped the person into the road, an unconscious moan breaking the man’s lips.
Lu staggered. Jakes.
“It doesn’t matter,” the voice said again, carrying out of the tenement’s door. Ben followed it, emanating a level of fury Lu had not yet seen on him. Hands in fists, eyes aflame, he marched forward and stopped over Jakes. “You’re arguing about a future thatwon’t exist—we saw Elazar’s light tonight. He showed hundreds of Port Mesi-Teab’s citizens what he can do when he used Menesia to make Cansu Darzi submit to him.”
“What?” Fatemah went still. “No. Menesia only erases memories—it does not allow someone tocontrolanother person. You are lying!”
Lu stepped forward a pace, her heart dragging her into the middle of the clearing. “I don’t think he is,” she spoke up. Fatemah’s lips flattened into a line. “One of Elazar’s servants said he discovered something that Argridians can do to Menesia. They have figured out a way to manipulate it—not permanent magic, like the Mechts do, but it must be this. They have a way to make Menesia let them control another’s actions.”
Fatemah went still. Nayeli wavered back, back again, stopping when she hit Kari, who grabbed her arms and said something low and quiet to her.
Vex was next to Lu, looking at the ground. At the dirt beneath his boots.
Her heart swelled. Pressure building.Wrong, something is wrong.
“Lu,” Vex whispered. “He’s—damn it, wetried—we went back. We fought. But they got him. They took—”
“You mean to say”—Fatemah’s voice was ice and death—“that not only did you leave Cansu there, but she now does Elazar’s bidding?”
Ben turned to Fatemah. “We failed. Your people—Mani, Zey—they died trying. And—” He paused and Lu went forward another step, hearing both Ben, distantly, and Vex, even farther:
“Elazar is holding a child as ransom,” Ben told Fatemah, the crowd, “for our surrender. He has two raider Heads now, bowing to him. His coming light is a dangerous sort of mind control, separate from permanent magic, and I don’t care what in the Pious God’s hell you all disagree on regarding Grace Loray’s future—there won’tbea future, for either of our countries, if you don’t stop and—”
“Teo.” Vex’s voice was soft. “Defensors got Teo. They were planning to follow us back to where he was and take him, but he was there. They took him.”
Lu’s vision blackened. The pressure in her heart ruptured, spilling horror into her soul.
“There is another piece at play,”Tom had said.“You won’t want me to use it.”
Lu put a hand to her mouth. Without Milo’s ministrations, how best to control her? By ripping away someone she loved. By taking the remaining source of innocence in her war-torn world.
Her father had taken Teo to force her to submission.
“Lu?” Vex stepped closer. They were in the center of the clearing, Kari and Fatemah arguing a few paces away, Nayeli at the edge, Ben standing over Jakes’s body, and dozens of eyes, raiders’ and refugees’, watching, judging, fearing.
Lu looked at Vex. She hadn’t realized she was so close to crying, but a tear fell, hot and heavy, on her cheek. “Why was he there?How?”
Vex shook his head and reached for her, but she recoiled.“Lu—god, I’m sorry. He hid in the boat. I should’ve taken him right back, but we had to go in. We had to find out what Elazar was doing, and I—I’m such an idiot, such a—damn it, Lu, I—”
“You took him”—Lu’s voice ached—“into Elazar’s gathering?”
Vex tore his hands through his hair, sobbed, and the world broke.
Edda pushed out of the crowd, hobbling on her injured leg, pain contorting her face. “It ain’t his fault,” she tried, but Lu spun on her, shock drowning under a gush of rage.
“You,” she spat. “You let him do this? You both—after everything, I thought the one thing I didn’t have to worry about anymore was your responsibility with Teo. How could you—how could you do this—”
Vex reached for her again. She slapped him away, and shame sent him reeling back, hands up, surrender and apology and a hundred things she had no strength to acknowledge.
