The Matron has noticed. She’s having me watched. The window is closing.
I look at my hand. The blood has dried now, brown and flaking. Kharvek’s blood. Sera’s blood. The blood of the men he killed in the tunnels. All of it mixed and crusted across my palm, a map of tonight’s violence.
I should wash it off. Should return to my quarters, sleep, prepare for whatever comes tomorrow. Should be smart, be careful, be the controlled and calculating harvester I’ve spent a decade pretending to be.
Instead, I stand in the empty corridor and think about Kharvek’s smile.
Think about the promise in his voice when he said he could destroy the Matron.
Think about how his hand felt around mine—hot, bloody, strong enough to crush me and gentle enough not to.
Ten years of planning. Ten years of patience.
The right moment is coming. I can feel it.
And it terrifies me almost as much as it thrills me.
TEN
KHARVEK
The bone garden stretches before me in the dark, a mile of arranged death glowing faint crimson beneath the starless sky. I’ve walked through this place a hundred times. Never once thought about the bodies that became these monuments. Tonight, I count ribs. Femurs. The small, curved skulls of children posed in prayer.
Imara chose this location. Of course she did.
I find her at the garden’s heart, standing between two figures frozen mid-scream, their jaws wired open, their empty sockets aimed at what only the dead can see. The residual magic casts her face in shifting red light—there, then gone, then there again. She doesn’t look at me as I approach. Doesn’t need to.
“You’re early.” Her voice carries no inflection.
“You expected me to be late?”
“I expected you to circle the perimeter twice before committing to a meeting point.” She turns. Her gaze finds mine without wavering—steady, assessing, giving nothing away. “You only circled once.”
She’s been watching. Of course she has. I file this away—useful information about a potential ally. Or a potential threat. The line between those categories blurs when I look at her.
“Satisfied?” I stop three paces from where she stands.
“That you can follow directions? Barely.”
A sound escapes me. Not quite a laugh. I haven’t laughed in years—the mechanics feel foreign. But something about the way she speaks pulls at muscles I didn’t know I had.
She reaches into her robes and withdraws a folded cloth. Spreads it on the ground between two skeletal hands reaching up from the dirt. The cloth reveals a map—hand-drawn, detailed, marked with symbols I recognize and some I don’t.
“The Sanctum.” She crouches beside her work. “Every entrance, every blood-ward anchor, every patrol rotation for the past six months.”
I crouch across from her. The map is impressive. More than impressive—it’s comprehensive in a way that speaks to years of careful observation. She’s been planning this longer than I’ve been questioning orders.
“The drainage tunnels.” I point to unmarked space beneath the Sanctum’s western foundation. “You’re missing the access points.”
“Show me.”
I pull a bone shard from the earth beside us—part of someone’s finger, from the thickness—and scratch three marks into the dirt beside her map. “Here. Here. And here. Maintenance routes. Tomek uses them.”
“You know Tomek?”
“I know everyone who might be useful.” I set down the bone shard. “Or dangerous.”
Her lips press flat. Processing. “He’s mine. Part of my network.”
