Page 145

Along with pain. So much pulsing, throbbing pain.

My hand shot out to grab hold of my subconscious’s hand—too late.

A horrible lurch later, I was blinking against the bluish light, trying to distinguish the shapes that were forming in this haze of pulsing pain that had sucked me up and wrapped me tight like a casket. A vulture?

No. I blinked again, and found none other than Mrs. Smetlar staring at me from the opposite seat of a carriage, sandwiched between two other elites.

I scrabbled at my neck to find it bare. My necklace gone. I was still in the torn, stained remnants of my dress from the Element Wielder ball, but the familiar clamp of my knife sheath was missing from my thigh.

“If you try anything,” Mrs. Smetlar said, “they will obliterate you.” She nodded at the elites on either side of her.

They sat like rigid statues, concentration etched in their foreheads. Holding me hostage with magic, I realized. My Object Summoning hands couldn’t seem to move, as if the one on the left was using his own power to keep them tied behind my back. And my Mind Manipulating power was still bathed in a nothing kind of darkness, as if the one on the right was actively blindfolding it with his own.

Beyond that, though, something about the carriage seemed to be muddling my sense of magic with each jostling bump as we tilted upward—definitely not flying as I’d expected, but rolling up in a great, sweeping spiral.

Slowly, my neck aching with the movement, I switched my sights to the windows. Frost clouded the edges of the glass. Beyond them, skeleton-like trees spiked up beyond the road, all of them covered in casts of shimmering ice and silent. Much, much too silent. The air itself swirled with flecks of bluish snow.

An unnatural chill swept through me.

We were heading to the prison, alright. This was Bascite Mountain.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” Now that Mrs. Smetlar was sure I wouldn’t attack her, she’d relaxed into a more casual position, legs draping over each other like drooping wings. “Now that you’re facing the consequences of your own actions, I bet you wish you could go back and redo it all, don’t you? But there is no going back now.”

I surveyed her through the fog of my own pain: my skull still pounding, my skin stinging with various scrapes, my muscles stiff and sore, as if they’d run me over with this carriage before throwing me in.

None of it compared to the swell of loathing I felt when I looked at my History instructor. Especially when I pieced together the things I’d never realized had anything to do with each other before.

How the false Gileon had claimed he’d been “sleepwalking” lately… to cover up the fact that he was leaving in the middle of the night to visit someone else. The way it was Mrs. Smetlar who’d been standing in the middle of the Wild Whisperer foyer… but only after Gileon’s impersonator had betrayed us. Had they planned Nuisance’s death together? I could only imagine an elite would have found the rhinoceros beetle an annoying part of the disguise. Would have wanted Mrs. Smetlar to get rid of it in a room full of witnesses so that no one questioned the fraud himself.

“You were working with him, weren’t you? Gileon’s impersonator?”

My throat croaked out the words, my tongue coppery with dried blood.

“Of course I was working with him,” Mrs. Smetlar snapped. “He was my idea, and Dyonisia Reeve thought it good enough to provide me with what I needed to get it done.” She puffed out her chest. “Oh, I knew you and your little friend group were up to something even before you ran off after that disaster of a Branding. Somebody needed to keep an eye on you, and what better way to do so than through the eyes of that oversized waste of space?” She sighed. “I don’t even know why they let someone without a brain attend the Esholian Institute when he’s bound to fail his Final Test anyway.”

I bristled. Wished I could scream and rage and snap her neck, too. She’d done something to the real Gileon, replaced him with a fraud, and was now talking about him as if he was no more than roadkill she could pick clean.

But without my magic, all I had were my words.

“I’ve been in your head, you know,” I rasped out. No point in hiding my Mind Manipulating anymore. “I’ve seen your memories. You failed your Final Test—”

“Stop,” Mrs. Smetlar said suddenly, stiffening up.

“And instead of realizing how unjust the system is,” I continued, “you made it your mission to try to fail as many others as you could—”

“Stop.”

“—so that you wouldn’t feel so alone.” A sneer cracked through my lips. “But look at you now, just as alone as you’ve ever been, heading back to the same place where they locked you up with only your own failure to keep you company.”

“MAKE HER STOP.”

I braced myself for a fresh wave of pain, but the elites on either side of Mrs. Smetlar simply broke their rigid statures long enough to glance sideways at her with slight sneers of their own.

“We don’t take orders from you,” the left one said.

I might have laughed in her face if my throat hadn’t been so dry—and if the carriage hadn’t just lurched to a sudden halt.

Chest heaving, Mrs. Smetlar hitched up a smile when she glanced out the window. “Ahh, we’re here. Dyonisia Reeve is going to be so intrigued to find out about that brand on the back of your neck, don’t you think?”