"He's not stupid, Lise."

"I don't think he's stupid. I think he's lying. He never intended to go to the west coast. The west coast plan was bullshit. It was designed to be bullshit."

"Maybe," Turk said. "Does it matter?"

"The story was supposed to derail anyone who came after him. But do you see what that means? Dvali knew Genomic Security was looking for him, and he must have known they would come after my father.

Turk, he sat not a foot away from me and told me he knew my father was principled and loyal and wouldn't tell DGS what they wanted to know—except under extreme duress. Dvali could have warned him as soon as he heard DGS was in Port Magellan, if not before. But that's not what he wanted to do.

My father disapproved of Dvali's project on moral grounds, so Dvali hung him out like a red flag."

"He couldn't have known your father would be killed."

"But he must have known it was a possibility, and he certainly would have expected him to be tortured. If it isn't murder it's the next best thing." Murder by indirection—the only kind of murder a Fourth could commit.

She didn't know what she could do with this thought, which had begun to burn like a brushfire in her mind. Could she face Dvali again? Should she tell him what she'd guessed or pretend innocence until they escaped this place? And what then? Was there any real justice for Fourths? She thought Diane Dupree might be able to answer that question, or Sulean Moi…

If they were still alive.

"Listen," Turk said.

All Lise could hear was the canopy of the Dark Forest rattling in the rising wind. She and Turk were back at the loading bays now, back where the creepy hedge of eyeball flowers had grown, but there wasn't even that maddening scratch-tap sound, because—

Her eyes widened.

"It stopped," Turk said.

The digging had stopped.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Avram Dvali was collecting canned food and worrying about the rising wind when the sound of digging abruptly ceased. He stood upright, chilled.

His first thought was: the boy is dead. The Hypothetical trees had stopped digging because the boy was dead. And for one long heartbeat it seemed not just an idea but a black-bordered truth. Then he thought: or they found him.

He dropped what he was holding and ran for the dig.

In his haste he almost blundered into the hedge of ocular roses. One of the tallest of them turned to inspect him, its eye as indifferent as a dark pearl. He ignored it.

He was startled by how much the digging trees had accomplished since the last time he'd looked. The spatulate roots were slow, but the sum of their groping and picking had exposed an intact wall and, beyond it, leading inside, an opening in the banked rubble.