Page 3 of Zenith Tower

“Are we going to?”

“When it matters.”

“And you’ll know?”

“Yes.”

They came for me a few minutes later: a different woman, younger, with a soldier’s stillness. She led me down a corridor,its walls damp like the tunnel’s, and into a round room with a basin at its center and no chairs. The basin’s water sat black and motionless, nothing like the moving channels outside.

“Sleeve up,” she said.

I pushed it to the elbow. The three lines looked dry and unremarkable without water. I studied them instead of her: silver, green-gold, and rain-dark. One bond complete. Two still open.

She didn’t touch me. She read the Mark as Juno used to, eyes moving along each line without her hands ever coming close. A second woman stood by the door with a ledger and pen while the reader murmured to her. I caught only fragments that sounded like measurements.

“How long has the third line been present?” the reader asked, still not looking at me.

“You have that information already,” I said. “You’ve had it since before I got here.”

“We have a record,” she said. “I asked you.”

She wanted to compare my answer with whatever was in her file. I wasn’t going to make it easy.

“Ask Quill,” I said. “He was there for most of it.”

At Quill’s name, the second woman looked up. A moment later she bent over the ledger again, but she didn’t write anything.

They put us back together in a corridor about an hour later. By then my legs ached from standing, and the air in the small room had gone stale. Kieran was upright, barely, with Hale supporting most of his weight. Caspian’s jaw was set. I’d seen that look outside Quill’s office the night everything started. He was angry enough that speaking would make it worse.

“Well,” Kieran said when he saw me. “You’re still you. That’s promising.”

“Definestill me.”

“You’re annoyed and suspicious.” He managed a weak grin. “I’m relieved.”

“You look awful.”

“I feel worse.”

“How was yours?”

“Uninteresting. They asked whether anything about my Mark had changed.” He made it sound trivial. Hale’s arm tightened around him, and none of us asked more while we were still in the corridor.

Marrow appeared at the end of the corridor before anyone said more and walked toward us.

“Rooms are assigned,” he said. “One block. Adjoining. The four of you together.”

“How generous,” I said.

“It’s easier to watch you together.”

He turned and walked off. We stayed where we were until Marrow looked back. Then we followed.

Caspian

The room they gave me held a narrow bed, a low lamp, and a shallow rectangle cut into one wall where a window should have been. No glass. No view. Only a paler square of stone and the sound of water moving somewhere behind it.

I stood in front of the false window with my coat still on. My bare wrists felt conspicuous without the cuffs my father had sent for the formal. Refusing them had been easy while he was watching. Alone, I could still feel the weight they would have added.