She froze.
“What?” Domenic asked uneasily.
“Hanna,” she breathed.
He snorted. “You’re suggestingHannais the traitor? I don’t know… If Hanna wanted to destroy the country, believe me, it’d already be ash.”
It did seem preposterous. Hanna had given more to the Order than almost anyone. But as Ellery searched for another suspect, she struggled to let the thought go.
“She’s theonlymagician with a Living Wand who hasn’t been questioned.”
Domenic paused tucking in his shirt to study her incredulously. “Well, no shit. She’s the one doing the questioning.”
“And yet after all this time, we’ve made no progress. She could tell us anything, and we’d believe her. Everyone trusts her word. She knows all about the Order’s plans, its defenses, its weaknesses…”
“You can’t tell me you’re really considering this,” he hissed. “Hanna would never betray the Order.”
“We have to consider everyone—”
“Hanna would never betrayme.”
Ellery reflected on her conversation with Hanna in Nordmere. How Hanna had seemed not just suspicious of Ellery, but deeply bitter. How much the burdens of Hanna’s own duty clearly weighed on her. How, like Ellery, so much seemed buried below her surface.
“I know it’s a horrible thought.” Ellery rested a hand gently on Domenic’s chest, right above his heart. “But she’s our only lead. And we’re running out of time—”
“Exactly. And this would only be a waste of it.”
“Do you have a better idea?” she demanded, drawing away. “Because we can’t just do nothing. The cataclysm ishere. And it’s only going to get worse.”
Domenic stared, haunted, out the window at the oncoming storm. Then he dragged a hand down his face, smoke leaking from his nostrils.
“Fine,” he surrendered. “We’ll find her. We ought to, anyway. Because once we prove it isn’t her, we could really use her help.”
XXXIXDOMENICWINTER
By the time Domenic and Ellery arrived at the Citadel, the scurge had worsened. Frost hurled through the wind in whole, daggeredged shards, and blackness choked the city like a dense smog. The figures who sprinted throughout the Citadel’s atrium resembled specters, their shapes blurs, their fluorescent-orange NDC gear rendered sepia within the gloom. Nature magicians positioned themselves at every entrance. Enchantment magicians cast extra protection atop armor, extra fortifications across the Citadel’s grounds. Corporeal magicians readied healing stations, while battlefield medics bundled to follow soldiers into the storm.
Domenic and Ellery bolted past them all, cloaked from sight. They couldn’t afford to slow down, not for morale, not even for aid. The Order’s only true hope of surviving the cataclysm was the Chosen Two obtaining the next prophecy piece and learning how to defeat it.
They ducked inside an empty elevator. But as Ellery reached to press the top button, Domenic immediately slammed the lowest.
“Wouldn’t Hanna be with the Council?” Ellery asked.
“She isn’t,” Domenic said. “I can feel her.”
He fixed his gaze on the closing doors to avoid the suspicion in Ellery’s eyes. Whatever reason Hanna had to be in the subterranean levels while the rest of the Order prepared for war, it was a legitimate one. Hanna would help them find who the real traitor was. Then they’d stop this nightmare. They’d save everyone.
As they descended ever deeper, Domenic glanced at his hands. He was trembling.
He reached for Ellery’s own. They locked their fingers tight.
The doors opened into the damp tunnels of the Citadel’s underground. They ran past the vigil chamber until Domenic slowed at the Vault’s entrance. Even amidst all the magic within it, he could sense Syarthis’s suffocating, feverish heat.
“Hanna!” he shouted. “Hanna!”
Silence.
“Dom,” Ellery said warningly. “Why is she here? What could she possibly be doing?”
