Three days until the tribute. Jin and the others should be on their way back by now.
The man grunted as he faced her again. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“Y-yes,” Flick said. She gestured into the direction of her room. “I’m—”
He smothered a laugh, and she noticed he was looking toward the room directly across from hers. “That boy thinks he’s putting up a fight, a’right. A high captain, my arse. More manacles ought to do the trick. Have fun, eh?”
Have fun?Flick swallowed her disgust, wishing she could throw the manacles into the dustbin. She didn’t realize there were otherprisoners here. Then she remembered the sounds of a scuffle she’d heard earlier. She tried to imagine who else her mother would need to interrogate.Chester!No, it wasn’t any of the boys. Whoever that was sounded older, and Chester, Felix, or Reni wouldn’t allow themselves to get caught as Flick had.
Don’t write yourself off so soon, love.
Indeed. She was still standing, still breathing, and as the man walked away, she exhaled in relief because she’d just passed her first test.
She looked down the hall to either side of her, wishing she could walk straight up to one of the Ram’s men and ask to be escorted home. She recalled her notes from the ledger and headed in the direction of the room with the pill-shaped things, keeping her eyes from swiveling through her surroundings too obviously.
She tried the door to her right, surprised to find it unlocked. It was a storeroom, and she was about to close the door again before Arthie’s voice crept into her thoughts, reminding Flick that anything could prove valuable. She slipped inside and tugged on the light.
An array of vials and chemicals were spread out across the shelves, but her hands wouldn’t stop trembling to make out what they said without giving her a headache. As far as she knew, chemicals were used for cleaning and poisoning and, if one was a scientist like Jin’s parents, creating. Then there were boxes filled with tubes that she first thought were pens before realizing they were stacks of dynamite. Flick’s heart leaped to her throat. She shouldn’t have been surprised, but what did her mother need with explosives?
A thud echoed in the shadows of the storeroom. She held her breath, listening for movement, but could hear nothing over her pounding heart. Had she imagined it? She wasn’t going to wait to find out.
Flick rushed back into the hall, nearly slamming into a pair of men marching past. They gave her a strange look but didn’t stop, and she didn’t stop either, walking across the hall as though she belonged here.
The place was oddly built, sounds muffled, walls strangely thick. The ceilings were low, beams running every which way to hold everything in place. Flick didn’t think she’d ever been in a place like this.
The door at the end of the hall opened, flooding the space with sunlight. Daylight. Footsteps thudded down what seemed to be stairs.
That was her way out, once she finished her snooping.
If she lived, that was—footsteps were heading her way. Flick froze, pressing herself as flat against the new door as she could. Shadows sliced back into the hall, outlining a silhouette in the last of the light.
The Ram.
Flick held her breath, hoping the Ram had no need for the room behind her. Or was that a better option than the Ram walking back into Flick’s room and finding her gone? Flick held still, refusing to breathe, until the Ram passed her by.
Flick didn’t wait; she flung open the door and, for whatever reason, glanced back at the Ram. As if she could feel the eyes of the girl she had calleddaughterfor the past eighteen years, she began to turn around.
Flick leaped inside the room, closing the door behind her with the quietest thud.
And immediately knew she wasn’t alone.
It wasn’t the eyes that she felt on the back of her head, or voices that made it clear she wasn’t alone, no. She felt the presence of others in an eerie, muffled sort of silence.
With a sinking feeling, Flick knew, before turning around, what she would find.
A sound lurched from her throat.
The kidnapped humans.
The space was as large as Flick had assumed from the ledger sketches, but there were no pill-shaped cylinders here. Only a cage, massive and dismal.
Full of girls and boys close to her age.
There were twelve, all alert, some rocking back and forth on the floor of the cage with their arms around their knees, others standing as straight as the cell bars. Their mouths were bound, but the room was blanketed, and Flick realized that it was to muffle any who might scream.
They stared with wary eyes, as though she wasn’t to be trusted.Of course you aren’t, she scolded herself. She was dressed as one of the Ram’s men. Flick pulled the covering from her face.
“I’m like you,” she whispered. “I was trapped in one of the other rooms.”
