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“Vaughn, have you seen Florence?” Pendragon asked. She was walking down the row of cells, peering into each one.

“Florence?” Vaughn sounded surprised. “No. No one’s been down here since yesterday.”

Pendragon closed her eyes. “Right.” She looked at me, her face strained.

“We found Vaughn,” I said softly. “We’ll find Florence, too.” But we were running out of time.

Theo helped Vaughn lift his grandfather up from the bunk. I hung back as they brought him out of the cell. Pendragon had walked back to the large warehouse room. As the four of us moved back to the entrance to the room, she’d vanished. Then I saw an open door along the other side of the abandoned space, where we hadn’t explored yet. I walked over and found Pendragon standing in a small room. Shelves packed with old books and papers lined the walls and a heavy desk stood in the center, its surface covered with papers. Pendragon was already rifling through them.

“These are records. Experiments. Viktor’s notes. Blake, some of these are recent.”

“Pendragon,” I said carefully, “we need to go.”

“There are notes about blightborn. About dragons.” She picked up a piece of paper and scanned it.

“We can’t stay here. We have to go.”

Theo appeared in the doorway. “Medra, someone will be coming. Vaughn’s grandfather is sick. We need to get them out.”

Pendragon’s hands went still. “I’m not leaving without these.”

I looked around the room and grabbed a worn leather bag that had been left on one of the shelves. “Fine. Here.”

She took it and started shoving the papers inside, sweeping everything off the desk with her arms and cramming it all in.

I reached for the bag as she went to lift it onto her shoulder. “Let me take that.”

She met my eyes. Her pain was seeping out. She couldn’t hide it any longer.

“I know,” I murmured. I touched her hair, then took a deep breath. “I also know you won’t want to hear this, but we need to sleep. You’re shaking. You’re exhausted.”

We slipped back out into the streets and hailed a carriage to take us back to Bloodwing.

Chapter 26

REGAN

Hush now. Everything will be all right.

I woke up with his voice echoing in my head. I recognized the voice: I’d heard it before. The words had been gentle and unmistakably male. The presence had felt calm—but there was a strength behind it. It was the first good dream I’d had in weeks. The first I could remember at all since I’d been in this place. I hadn’t been bothering to count the days. I supposed I could have been measuring time by the number of procedures they’d put me through, keeping track of every time someone said “Hold her still” or drew more of my blood or drugged me to sleep and then sliced me open. They wanted my blood because they wanted answers. But what was the question? No one had mentioned that.

I had a new room—well, it was a cell, really, but it wasn’t in a dungeon. No, this was a clean, sterile room more like a healer’s operating theater, brightly lit with lamps that never flickered or went out. The walls were pale, white stone. Terrified-looking servants came in to scrub the floor so often that it always smelled faintly of vinegar and antiseptic herbs. But nothing could ever completely cover the terrible smells that always lay beneath.

Along one wall stood shelves of instruments—neatly arranged, gleaming, and orderly. Hooks and knives. Bone saws and glass vials. Everything scrubbed perfectly clean between uses. For such a clean room, the dead dwarves were an unexpected eyesore. There were four of them right now, stacked carelessly in a cell. Sometimes they took one from the pile and tossed it into the other enclosure, then added a new one.

The other enclosure? It was filled with infected highbloods. They crowded together behind the iron bars, their eyes blank, their mouths gaping. Some weren’t as far gone as the others. From time to time, they pressed their faces to the bars as the scent of the corpses reached them, nostrils flaring as they inhaled hungrily. The infected would eat anything, including dwarves. It didn’t have to be fresh.

Then there was the archway. It stood in a corner, like a window frame with no glass and no view. Tall and smooth and made of stone. It was the only thing in the room that wasn’t completely horrible. It only seemed decorative, but it must have been important, because Viktor wasn’t one to collect beauty for its own sake. Everything had to serve a dark purpose when it came to Viktor Drakharrow—everything and everyone.

On the far left side of the room stretched a wall of windows—tall glass doors framed in white that opened to the parapet outside. I could see the flagstones that covered the parapet from my cell. The stone railing. Part of a tower in the distance. The sky.

Freedom. So close it hurt.

The building was clearly some sort of highblood fortress, yet the room they were holding me in felt more like a hospital or an infirmary. Or a laboratory. Armed guards paced the halls and frequently checked to make sure I was still in my cell. Where else would I be?

Maybe the only bright side of all of this was that I hadn’t seen Viktor in weeks. At least, I thought it was weeks. Whatever he wanted from me they hadn’t figured out how to give it to him yet. I was lucky, really. I’d lived long enough with a monster to know that if Viktor Drakharrow was waiting for something, then it meant the worst part was still ahead.

I lay back on my cot and closed my eyes. I thought about the man’s voice in my head. Where are you? the man in my dream had asked. I’d tried to show him. But there wasn’t much to show. He’d said it was going to be all right. Of course, that was a lie. The voice probably wasn’t a good sign. I was so desperate I’d started imagining things.