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ht against you in a fair fight. He will not go to the Halls.”
Lila nearly laughed. She could not remember any poison nor any man who might have come for her, but she knew that such a man hardly cared about some imaginary afterlife spent feasting and drinking and recounting sagas from—
With a start, Lila realized that she couldn’t remember what else people did in the Halls. She’d tuned Chef out whenever the workborn had begun to speak about them.
Her mind backtracked, pondering the oracle’s words. “Then I am dead?”
The oracle turned away. She prowled along the windows, her disdainful eyes piercing the glass to judge the garden beyond. “This room is a coffin. You feast daily inside it, all the while locking yourself away from the beauty that grows on the other side of these walls, and yet you worry now about being dead?”
“It’s only the one room.”
“I am brought to battlefields. You bring me to the table.”
“I’m rather fond of tables.” Lila kept her distance while the oracle paced and glared at the world outside.
“We don’t have much time,” the woman said at last, pausing before the center pane of glass. She studied Lila, her eyes dropping from her face to her boots like a scanner. But rather than search for weapons, she seemed to search for some small modicum of usefulness.
Lila wondered if she found any.
“You have whittled away years in this place, wasting time on things that do not matter.”
“My family does not matter?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll be sure to send them your regards.”
“What will you tell them? You do not even know me.” The oracle crossed her arms over her chest, seeming all the more imposing as her biceps hardened. “I would succeed where my sisters and brothers have failed. Perhaps that means I must defer to the daughters of Sileas this time. When you wake, you will go see the one in your village. You will listen to what she has to say.”
“You want me to go see the oracle?”
“Yes. You have seen her before.”
Lila cringed. Alex had dragged her to the New Bristol oracle as a teen, but only as a lark. The pair had waited for five hours in the temple, both hiding their palms as they watched movies, both trying not to snicker whenever a lilac-robed women flitted by, telling everyone to pray until the oracle called them.
Lila hadn’t obeyed. She’d had better things to do than pray to storybook figures from other people’s imaginations. She’d never had time to watch movies, and she’d finished two before the pair had been called.
“I saw her mother before she died. I’m guessing her daughter has learned the same parlor tricks. I bet she even gives the same prophecy to every heir who steps into the temple.”
“Go again.”
“I’d rather not.”
The woman drew her sword in one deft movement, the blade hissing against the leather.
Lila drew faster.
“The nerve. You would point a weapon at me?”
“You drew first.”
Lila’s grin faded as her Colt shivered in her palm. A searing heat burned her hand. Lila dropped the gun, her hand weak, her skin burning.
The weapon landed at the oracle’s feet with a dull thunk.
It was the oracle’s turn to grin, but she didn’t. The woman merely raised her nicked blade to Lila’s throat. “When you wake, you will go see the oracle. You are running out of time, Lila of New Bristol. You are all running out of time.”
“All?”
