Along the way, other black-eyed slaves emerged from where they were doing their various jobs. Prindi and Reza were there, and others whose names Thisbe still didn’t know. They piled into the elevator and waited as one of the Revinir’s soldiers counted them. When the last black-eyed slave arrived, the soldier used the controls to raise them into Dragonsmarche.

Thisbe stared straight ahead. She wanted to look around as they surfaced to see if anything had changed in the months since she and Rohan had flown through here on a ghost dragon’s back. But she couldn’t risk it. All she could see was the scaly underbelly of the Revinir. Thisbe took the opportunity to search the front side of the dragon-woman’s body for weak spots, not having had a good look from this angle on her ride here. The scales were a little sparser on the woman’s elongated neck, but there were no clear spots that looked as though a weapon could penetrate.

The black-eyed children filed out of the elevator into the market square. Thisbe purposely stayed away from Rohan, even though she knew the Revinir had no reason to suspect them of communicating. She stood in the back row, and as she turned, she swept her eyes over the others, counting them. Dev, Rohan, Prindi, Reza, and four others. That made nine of them altogether, including Thisbe. One day soon, if everything went according to the plan, these nine would no longer be slaves. They’d be the new rulers of this land.

Thisbe couldn’t concentrate on that right now, though. She was busy acting as if she were under the Revinir’s mind control. And that task became especially hard when the dragon-woman put her snout directly in front of her face. For the first time Thisbe could see that the Revinir had developed sharp dragon teeth, and her face had elongated to look more dragonlike. Her scorching, rancid breath was enough to make Thisbe flinch, but she fought it and held steady as the Revinir studied her stare and inspected her scales.

“Hmmm,” said the ruler, sounding dissatisfied and suspicious. She moved on to the next slave and checked that person. And then the next. When she got to Rohan, Thisbe’s vacant gaze flickered. His scales weren’t real like everyone else’s. Would she notice this time?

“Why aren’t there more?” the Revinir mused. “There should be noticeably more scales after the last dose. I don’t understand.” She came to Reza and studied him carefully and seemed satisfied this time. Perhaps he’d been the one to get the actual dragon-bone broth. It made Thisbe more determined than ever to not only stop the horrible practice of making her fellow slaves become more controlled, but to reverse this terrible, intentionally administered disease.