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I lay on the floor, unable to weep, and wept.

Roake’s story took forty minutes. I counted them. It gave the poison time.

I felt it as a kind of tide, a heavy cold ocean pulling me down, and I felt the outlines of myself go soft. I felt the old animal in me, the thing with the fangs, stir and sink and stir again, roused by the smell of my own blood and the sound of his voice. It was hungry and furious, and it wanted to rise and tear the throat out of everyone in the room, but it could not.

I thought: if I cannot move, I cannot protect him.

I thought: if I cannot protect him, then what am I?

And then I heard the scalpel.

It was a tiny sound: a click, steel on steel, as the doctor lifted it from its case. I heard Roake’s footsteps cross the floor. I heard Lex’s breath catch.

No.

I threw everything at it. I will not pretend it was courage. It was simpler than that. It was the same blind thing that makes a mother lift a car. Every cell of my body strained toward the sound of his voice. I felt the poison push back. I felt the paralysis ripple, a tremor across the surface of a pond, and the smallest muscle in my jaw twitched.

A word. I could make one word.

It came out as a whisper, a rag of breath: Down.

And Lex, who trusts no one, who obeys no one, who has never once done anything he was told, dropped like a stone.

Then came the noise.

A crash, a scream, the whistle of a thrown blade. A wet cough. A woman’s voice, high and cheerful and murderous: Sorry I’m late. There was a fence.

Sabine.

I could have kissed her feet.

The room exploded with the sound of boots on concrete and a shout and a curse in a language I recognized as Sabine’s worst. A gun went off with a flat report, and a bullet whined through the racks. Someone fell across me, a heavy man, gasping, and rolled off. I smelled blood and silver and fear and gun oil, and above all of it, honey and bread.

He was crawling toward me.

I felt his hands on my face, wire-cut and shaking. He was on his knees beside me, hair in his eyes, wrists still bound behind him, and he had somehow, God knows how, thrown himself across the floor and got his forehead against mine.

“Maksim,” he was saying. “Maksim, Maksim, Maksim.”

I am here.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Stay with me.”

I am here. I cannot speak.

“Sabine!” he shouted. “Sabine, the knife! It’s in his back, it’s the thing that’s holding him, I can’t— my hands—”

“Coming!”

A pair of boots. A flash of steel: she had cut the wire on his wrists with a single slash. I felt him surge up, felt his hands come away, and then a great, warm, terrified presence bending over my back.

“This is gonna hurt,” said Lex. His voice was shaking. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you. Okay? I love you. Hold on.”

He said it.

He said it in the middle of a warehouse, with his hands on a silver blade, to a man who could not answer, and I heard it as clearly as I have ever heard anything: not the cry of a boy in a panic but the plain, ordinary, bone-deep declaration of a man who had finally found the word and was giving it away.

He pulled.