“You think I haven’t tried?” Malachite insists. “We’ve been together for five years. He knows all my tricks. He’s not going to stop until he finds out what you and Varia are doing down there. If it’s something dangerous—”

“You can tell him exactly how dangerous it is,” I insist. “Tell him the truth—it’s a valkerax.”

“That won’t be enough for him, and you know it. It doesn’t make any sense,” Malachite argues. “What is Yorl doing to it? Why are you talking to it? I get it—you’re Heartless, so they’re using you. You drink its blood, and then you can understand it. But what are you talking to it about?”

I blink. Its blood?

Malachite sees my confusion and frowns. “Haven’t they told you? If you get enough valkerax blood in your digestive system, you can understand them. But it kills you almost immediately after you’ve ingested it.”

So that’s what the serum is based on. I had no idea valkerax blood could do that to someone.

“Thank you.” I offer him the flower. “For your wisdom.”

He bats the flower aside, the blossom hitting the cobblestones. “You can thank me by telling me what in the afterlife you’re talking to a valkerax about.”

I start to walk away, Malachite’s grip breaking as I finally wrench my wrist out of his grip.

“Zera, please!” He grabs my shoulder, and I see something I’ve never seen in his eyes before. Fear. “Lucien is…going through it right now. Please just make his life easier this once.”

Why is he scared? What is he scared of? Lucien himself? They’re like brothers. Why would he fear Lucien?

“Sorry, Mal.” I force a grin. “I can’t.”

“He and Fione are never going to give up!”

“Then that makes three of us,” I say. He’s quiet, letting me go slowly, a hardness materializing on his face.

What is a Heartless, with their heart returned? A human? No—not entirely. They’ve tasted the hunger. They can still remember what it feels like to die, to be cut up, to be burned.

A Heartless with their heart is a human who’s been injured and has injured in return. And though the wounds have been healed magically, the memories still remain, stabbing and slicing better than the instruments of pain.

Heartless are an instrument of pain.

Who will I be, when my heart is returned? I consider it as I eat a lamb’s lung and sip a mug of chocolate drink to cover the repugnant taste in the dawn, on Varia’s enclosed balcony.

a murderer, a liar.