“Because there’s going to be a drop in a few days.” I project the scanned pages of Ensi’s notebook onto the wallscreen. He squints.

“I have no idea what any of this means.”

I walk him through what I found in the planner. He also has no idea what the link between the Hearth and the Ratel could be, beyond inheriting occasional men and women without identities that Ensi can brainwash into working for them.

“We still don’t definitively know if that’s what they did,” I say, thinking of Adam, the way he’d smile more on one side than the other. The way he loved to play with the younger children, and how he loved to go swimming in the lakes with the others, turning back to wave at us as we watched from the shore, unable to join him. He’d never harm another person.

Everyone has a darker side.

I still think there must be more to it than that. Adam was sixteen when he supposedly died. How could he change that completely? I suppose being torn from everything you’ve grown up with could do that. I remember how confused Tila and I felt. How it was like we were drifting, unanchored, in this strange new world we knew nothing about. Is that enough?

“Verve,” Nazarin says. “He’s rewriting personalities.”

Rewriting personalities. I still don’t know if I believe I changed Mia in any way in the Vervescape. Maybe it was only my words that got through to her, rather than a deeper sort of push. Imagine not remembering who you were. Becoming exactly what Ensi wanted you to be. A weapon. An assassin. A tool.

The only reason he didn’t do it to me in the Test is because it doesn’t work on lucid dreamers.

“You can’t do the Test,” I say.

Nazarin’s eyebrows lift. “You think he’ll change me.”

“Of course he will. Your loyalty doesn’t matter if it’s not completely guaranteed. He can make sure you never dare to cross him.” I think of the Zealot lounges where he experimented. “I worry he might have found a way to reprogram people on a wider scale via Zealot lounges by now. He’d start with his own people and then cast his net wider, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s what my superior says. He has other sources in other areas. We are certain he can expect them to amass an attack sooner rather than later.”

“We still haven’t been able to get any coverage. All recording devices were dampened in Xanadu, and they’re dampened in the Verve lounge. We can’t pin anything on him, even though we saw him gun down insurgents and splatter us with the blood.” I look up at the wallscreen. “Does the notebook help?”