Niv stepped forward, stuck out his hand. “I’m deeply sorry to have brought her here. I know that it comes with a great risk. And I promise you, it will be a very short stay. We need to find a safer place where our presence doesn’t put anyone else in danger.”

“This is the safest place in the city for the othersider princess,” Radha said. She looked like she was about to cry from happiness. “I’ll protect her with my life, and so will everyone else in the Underbridge.”

“Thank you, Radha,” I said.

She bowed again, and went to prepare a pallet on the floor of the bedroom where Connor and I slept.

“Look what I can do!” Connor said, extending his fingers in front of him, until a ball of fire began to burn in the air. Ash laughed, and then he laughed, and the ball became a long, coiled dragon made of flame.

Ash smiled, held out her palm. It balanced above it, inches away, close enough to warm her without risking burning her.

The flames made her features seem so fierce, so solid. The old Ash was in there, all right. The angry, beautiful princess who would defy her mother and half the city if she thought it was the right thing to do. Politics and pragmatism be damned. I grabbed my camera off the table and took a picture. The burning dragon, the smiling princess.

“Can I talk to you?” Niv asked.

I nodded, and we stepped into the kitchen. “You asked me to find out what I could, about the ultramarine graffiti? About the armbands? Turns out, Palace intelligence is spooked. This is big, Solomon. These people—they call themselves the Destroyers—”

“As in, ‘Destroy All Monsters.’ Except monsters doesn’t just mean monsters. It means othersiders, too. It means us.”

“Exactly. They want to eradicate magic from Darkside altogether. Their leader calls himself the Shield, says he’s here to protect Darkside’s citizens from the menace of the othersiders. But the big thing, the thing that has the queen really scared, is that he’s got the support of the whole Darkside Police Department on the down low. Half of the cops are members of the Destroyers. Including Commissioner Bahrr himself.”

I stared at him, my mouth hanging open. Every othersider knew the cops weren’t friends. But this was something organized, something aggressive, something much, much worse.

“Police Commissioner Bahrr made the Shield into what he is. For years, he’s been funneling weapons and intel to the Shield. The movement’s grown ever since the Night of Red Diamonds.”

I thought of Cass, the questions she would ask. “Is there anyone who will go on the record about all this?”

“You know there’s not.”

I nodded. “It’s helpful, though. Thank you.”

“I know you don’t like me,” he said, apparently out of nowhere. “I just don’t know why.”