Gill shoots her a quelling look, but there’s fondness at the edges. “Stand down, Chen. Considering how new you are to everything Legendborn, you were downright tranquil.” Gill turns to me. “Your best friend here handled herself well. When we heard from Alice and couldn’t get in touch with you or William, we tried to find Sel. No dice. The last time you were seen by anyone was six days ago, when Lark drove you to the Rite. The word has been that you and William were prepping to join the search party after Nick, but if that were true, the Lieges would know about it. So we did some digging. Heard through our network that the full Council had been gathering at the Institute, and we put two and two together, crewed up, and made a plan.”

“Five minutes,” Lyssa calls from the front.

“But you’re Lieges,” I say, confused. “You’re part of the Order. Why did you…?”

“We may be of the Order,” Samira says in a low voice, “but we are not the Order. We are Legendborn. Our allegiance is to one another.”

“The lies will keep the Regents in power for now,” Gill adds. “If no one else knows that Camlann has come, that the Shadowborn have risen, there will be no calls for the king or for the Table to gather. The other chapters have been kept in the dark. We’re on our own here.”

A buzzing sound interrupts us from the front seat. Lyssa curses and pulls out a cell phone, barking, “Yeah?”

Samira and Gill exchange glances.

“Got it,” Lyssa says, shaking her head. “Yep. We’ll be ready. Out.” She ends the call with a tap of her thumb and looks at us in the rearview. “The Guard found the extraction point back at the Institute, are on the road now. They know there’s only a few places we could go.”

“How much time do we have?”

“Ophelia said thirteen minutes, tops.”

Samira nods sharply. “Let’s act like it’s ten. This is the Mageguard we’re talking about. Their ears are probably good and healed now, so they will be extraordinarily angry.”

I blink. “Their ears?”

Alice grins. “Supersonic bombs. Samira set one off near all six of the Mageguard keeping the barrier up. They were already distracted, and then they became the distraction.”

“Six very wounded, blood-streaming-out-of-their-ears distractions,” Gill says, shifting in her seat to pull a box from her back pocket. “That’s the number of Mageguard required to keep that particular barrier up. Those six had to heal and recover to raise it again. Takes full focus to merge a construct that big.”

I cringe. “You… blew out their eardrums?”