So I nod, numbly.

“Wonderful. Reed?” The General looks behind me. “Give her a few minutes with the baby. Let the full weight of the situation register.”

“Yes, sir,” Reed replies.

“And Delta?” he adds.

I force myself to look at the General. His voice is even, but there is a smile in his eyes. He’s enjoying this.

“Tonight is your last evening in your quarters. I’m short a fieldworker now, and you will take your mother’s place at first light.”

He whistles for his falcon, and it sweeps into the nursery to land on his shoulder. As the General strides out with his two guards, the bird watches me with a gleaming golden eye.

I’m not certain how I remain standing, not when the earth has given out beneath me. Ma, dead. My remaining pack-members all facing the same potential fate, even Bay. And my new work assignments. How will I keep my head when I’m moved to the fields? I doubt the shanties have water pitchers. There will be no way to set up an inverted well.

Everyone in the nursery is staring at me. I spot Wren, Brooke’s girl of just four, fiddling nervously with the end of her braid, her eyes wider than the moon.

This was a calculated move on the General’s part. He could have let me watch my mother’s murder from his own room or the meeting chambers, or anywhere in Bedrock, but it took place here in the nursery so that these children see what happens when you cross him. If they are not gods touched, they will end up in the General’s fields or army. He is teaching them with fear and threats, cruelty and submission. He is bending them to his will now so that they are easier to control later.

“Here,” Reed says gruffly, nudging me toward the cradle.

I glance down, and there she is, eyelids fluttering open. “Hey,” I whisper, crouching beside her. “Hi, Bay.” Her gaze flits around idly. “I am going to get you out of here. I don’t know how, but I will make it right. I promise. The Oracle told me not to make promises that I can’t keep, but I have to keep this one. I won’t be able to live with myself otherwise.” Bay wriggles, arms popping free of the swaddle. I touch her small hand, let her fingers curl around my pinkie.

I think of the stories Ma told me when I was little, passed down from her ma and the ma before that. Stories about water—rivers and streams, coves and canals, oceans and inlets. So many formations lost to us, so many we wish the gods would resurrect.