“She’s an innocent in this!” I exclaimed when they took their break. “How sick do you have to be to do this?”

Sheridan chuckled. “No one’s truly innocent—at least not around here. But if you do believe she is, it makes it that much sadder that you’re letting her suffer like this.”

I stared at Emma and felt torn with indecision. How could I give up all my plans? And yet, how could I let this go on? My deliberation was read as defiance, and they resumed the procedure. I couldn’t handle watching it, and when the next break came, I blurted out, “What do you think I was doing? I was looking for the way out!”

Sheridan held up her hand to halt whatever unseen torturer wielded the controls. “Did you succeed?”

“Do you think I’d be here if I had?” I snapped. “The only thing I saw was in your reflection control room, and you’ve got that pretty well guarded.”

“How did you move around without being seen?” she demanded.

“I evaded your cameras,” I said.

At Sheridan’s nod, Emma was subjected to more pain, her body flailing like a ragdoll’s as it tried to cope with the waves of agony coursing through her.

“I answered!” I exclaimed.

“You lied,” Sheridan returned coolly. “There’s no way you could have avoided all of them. No one noticed anything on camera at the time, but after extensive review, we found one small clip that shows what looks like a stairway door opening—just barely—by itself. We almost missed it and only noticed on later replays. Explain.”

I stayed silent, thinking I could endure watching Emma be tortured again. But I couldn’t. Not when it was because of my actions. Her screams seemed to fill every part of the room, and she bucked against the restraints in a desperate effort to alleviate the pain. I tried reasoning with myself as those shrieks went on and on, that this was only a temporary discomfort, that Emma had known what she was signing up for when she started helping me. Surely the greater good was worth one person’s suffering?

That cold logic almost had me convinced until I finally saw tears streaming from her eyes. I cracked.

“Magic!” I yelled, trying to make myself heard above her cries. “I did it with magic.” Sheridan signaled for the torture to stop and looked at me expectantly. “I moved around with magic. Human magic. And if you think torturing her will get me to tell you more about that, you’re wrong. You can torture her and everyone else in this place, and I won’t say another word. Talking about it involves people on the outside, and next to them, the people here mean nothing.”

It was kind of a bluff. I didn’t know if I could truly stand against mass torture of the other detainees, but Sheridan either believed me or had bigger concerns.

“I didn’t think it’d happen again,” she muttered.

“It always happens. Eventually,” said her colleague. He gestured one of the assistants in the darkness forward to Emma. “Get her up and back to her floor. There’s no telling what kind of damaging propaganda’s been spread. We’re going to have to do a mass re-inking.”

My heart sank. I’d only gotten to about half the detainees! The rest of the ink was still hidden in my bed.

“I didn’t convert anyone if that’s what you’re worried about,” I said.

“I told you, there are no innocents here,” said Sheridan. “Get Emma back to her level, and get Sydney back on the table.”

“I’ve told you everything I’m going to tell you,” I protested as the assistants came forward. Emma was dragged away. “Your torture didn’t work on me before.”

Sheridan gave a low throaty laugh, and all the lights went out again. “Oh, Sydney. Now that I know what you are, I don’t feel bad in the least about really turning up the intensity. We don’t know everything about human magic users, but there is one thing we’ve learned over the years: They’re remarkably resilient. So let’s get started.”

CHAPTER 16

ADRIAN

WHEN A SECOND NIGHT WENT BY with no contact from Sydney, I knew something had definitely gone wrong. I could tell Marcus was worried too, but he did his best to try to put me at ease.

“Look, she said there was some gas in her room that knocked them out, right? Maybe the Alchemists discovered it was off and just fixed it again. She lived that way for three months and wasn’t in trouble—I mean, not in more than the usual trouble of re-education.”

“Maybe,” I allowed. “But even if that’s true, don’t you think they’d wonder how it got broken in the first place? She could be punished by association.”

Marcus’s phone rang before he could respond to me, and I waved him off to answer. He’d been on the phone nearly nonstop since we’d gotten the hit on Death Valley, always coordinating with some agent or another. We’d arrived in the area yesterday, discovering that there was really no place to stay in Death Valley itself, which kind of made sense. Our base of operation had therefore become a motel in a rundown town fifteen miles away from the state park. There were no restaurants, so we got all our food from a convenience store across the street that was run by a kindly woman named Mavis, who constantly worried about me because of my complexion. “You need more sun, darlin’,” she kept saying.

What you need is blood, Aunt Tatiana had remarked at the time. Not from her, of course. We have standards. She’d been right on the first count. It had been a few days since I’d had blood at Court, and although I could go a few more before noticing any major physical discomfort, it was a problem I’d need to eventually remedy.