Because they can't, I realize. They would. They would if they could, of course. They’d never let me—they're trapped somehow. Stuck in that fucking house.
“Let me go!” I shriek. “Help! Fire!” I’m shouting nonsense, anything, raving, desperate cries for literal attention, Campus Safety 101.
Please someone see me, hear me. Please.
“Silence,” says one of them, I can't tell which, and strikes me—slapsme with a rough-clothed hand, right against the temple and so hard that my vision sparkles and blurs.
I don’t stop.
“Kai!” I scream again, hoarse and pointless. “Kingston! Lanz!”
He hits me again.
Where are you taking me?I'm not sure I manage to get the words out loud. I kick and kick, but my muscles are heavy and tired from running and running, from bee stings, from the cold, and finally I can’t keep it up. I go slack like a rag doll, letting them pull me backwards with my heels dragging on the ground.
My vision swims with nothing by sky and tree branches.Maybe I can wait it out. Maybe they will let me go, just temporarily, just for a second, to open a door or open a car orsomething, and I can run, absolutely fucking sprint, back to Camlann, where the four of them will finally be out somehow and…
“Stand.”
The arms yank at me, forcing my legs under my body. We’re outside building I know, but have only been in once.
Administrative.
I know where we are going.
Through a plush, warmly lit hall, through a massive door that unlocks with a click and swings open, into a vaulted, too-big space, more robes, so many.
Luther Pendragon’s office.
At the front of the room, before the desk, stands the one I know is the Prior at Arms.
He looks at me as I’m thrust before him, the gauzy white mesh unseeing and yet burning into me all at the same time.
“At last,” he says. “At last, I meet her.”
THIRTY-THREE
KINGSTON
She was right there.She wasright there.
I saw her running for us. Saw her scream. Saw her screammy name—I could read it on her lips—but heard nothing but the sound of blood pounding in my ears.
That’s all I can hear, still. A rushing silence as two things repeat in my mind.
Escape. Get to Gwenna.
I have always been focused. Always been disciplined and directed and committed to my objectives. But this—she—transcends it all. There is no intellection, no reasoning, no strategy, even. There is nothing but pure, potent, animal drive to rip her out of their grasp andrun.
Nothing else matters. Nothing else.
There's a crash, and then a few thuds, as something hurls against the windowpane and bounces away, useless. A brass ashtray, hurled by Kai.
"Don't," I say. "Don't waste your strength. It's not going to work."
"You've got another idea?" Kai snaps. And yet I know he's not mad at me. Just mad. Mad at this. Mad that she's...
“There has to be some way.” He starts pacing, scratching at his neck, and one of the three nicotine patches he slapped on today. “There has to be…” A few feet away, Callahan has sunk into the couch, his eyes wide and staring at nothing. He did this. He knows it. He can barely look at any of us. But he didn't. He wasn't trapped. We all were. That's what they do, with lies and conditions and double-speak and poisonous ways of thinking, with vows.
