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I spin around in my seat, knowing that this is the one thing that should be impossible—even for a Creweler.
“I learned a few new tricks while you were away,” Loricel tells me.
“Such as how to come back to life?” I can’t keep the shock out of my question.
“Not even I can achieve that,” she says. Loricel purses her lips and stares like she expects better of me. Without her smart suit and done-up hair she reminds me of my grandmother. She looks smaller than the last time I saw her, as though the weight of things has deflated her. But I still have no doubt: she’s the most powerful woman I’ve ever known. “Did you think Cormac had the guts to terminate me?”
“He claimed he did,” I say.
“He tried, but you know Cormac. He’s a hoarder. If something shows the least bit of usefulness to him, he’ll keep it around just in case.” Loricel gives me a wink that’s anything but amused. I can tell she wants us to continue this conversation in private.
I want to ask how she escaped, but I decide to wait until she brings it up herself.
“What’s this mission?” I ask, recalling Dante’s statement.
“We’ve managed to gather some important intelligence from local sources and public records,” Dante tells me.
“Is it regarding Protocol Three?” I ask, hoping to finally have some answers.
“No,” Dante says slowly. “What do you know about Protocol Three?”
“It’s something I overheard Cormac say. It’s probably nothing to worry about,” I say. Dante doesn’t look convinced.
Jost speaks up behind me and somehow, despite everything that’s happened between us, I feel the fluttering of tiny wings in my chest at the sound of his voice. “We know where Sebrina is.”
I turn toward Jost, unsure what to say to him. His blue eyes meet mine and there’s fire in them. There’s an electricity in the air around him, waiting to be unleashed. Finding Sebrina is all he’s ever wanted, and even now, I want it for him.
“I remember she was rewoven into the Eastern Sector,” I say. I’d found the information on the night we escaped from Arras to Earth. Even then Jost had been separated from her for almost three years, believing the whole time that she was dead—a victim of the Guild’s warning to Jost’s hometown. I cried for them both the night Cormac severed the Eastern Sector.
“They destroyed most of the files when they cut this sector off from Arras,” Jax says, cracking his fingers as he speaks. “I had to get into the Guild’s mainframe to recover the information. It took me a couple days. “
Jax gives Jost an apologetic look, but Jost waves it off. “The important thing is that we found her.”
“Is she still here?” I ask in a small voice.
Dante steps forward and nods. “We have every reason to believe she’s still within the Eastern Sector.”
“Even ministers that evacuated left their families,” Jax says.
I nod my head, already knowing this. I wonder for a moment if Grady left. “I watched Cormac tell a man to abandon his family because he could get a new one.”
“You were there?” Erik’s jaw tenses as he asks.
“I didn’t want to be,” I snap. He must know I tried to stop it.
“It’s pretty clear that Protocol Two quarantines everyone in the sector who isn’t a high-ranking Guild official.”
“They must protect their secret,” Loricel says in a soft but cutting tone.
I take a step back and meet Loricel’s eyes once more. Does this mean she knew about the officials all along? Had she seen it before, herself?
When I first met Loricel, I wondered how old she was. I thought I had an idea after her short mentorship of me at the Coventry, but now I’m no
longer sure. She still has paper-thin skin, creased with age, and the same silver hair. At some point, she allowed herself to age rather than maintain the charade of perpetual youth.
“Older than you think,” she says.
It’s clear Loricel remembers every moment that’s transpired between us. And as she says the words—words she spoke to me at our first meeting—I realize she’s been telling me the truth the whole time.
