There was some separation into like groups, but they all ate the same food, it seemed, going to get it themselves at a hatch, leaving bowls and plates to be cleaned up by boys in that rough blue Palace livery.

For someone who had to learn to navigate the maze of twisting tunnels of a mine, finding his way around the “allowed” area was child’s play. Herald Caelen made it very clear that there were places he was not supposed to go, and Mags had no interest in trespassing. Instead, as he obediently went about where he was directed, collecting the things he was told he would need and bringing them back to a room that was going to be all his, shared with no one, he committed to memory every bit of the buildings and grounds that he was allowed in. And as he did so, another strange thing began to happen.

He knew this place. He knew many of the people he saw. He knew them, because Dallen knew them.

It was disorienting in a sense to share Dallen’s memories now, for these were not just the memories of putting name and purpose to things he didn’t recognize, these were immediate and personal memories. Dallen had lived here for a very long time, it seemed. It was a shock to recognize people he didn’t know, and to sense Dallen’s memories just waiting to be brought out. And every time that happened, it eroded his certainty that people could not be trusted, that these people were certainly hiding something dire and sooner or later he would find it out.

Not all the memories were “good.” He would have distrusted that, now that he was thinking for himself, everything that seemed so perfect only alarmed him the more. Except . . . except . . . these were a lifetime of memories, or at least, enough to equal his lifetime. How could you make all of that up?

So as he made up his room—his room, with a door he could latch from the inside or the outside!—he thought about all of this. As he slipped in as unobtrusively as possible to eat and clean up, he thought about it. And when he laid himself down in his bed, sleeping alone for the first time in his memory, he thought about it. How . . . why this had happened, he could not begin to imagine—but happen, it had. And he was forced to come to the conclusion, by himself, that nothing in the world was really the way he had always thought it was.

Still, he trod warily. He woke to the first bell, dressed for the first time in one of his new uniforms, and again slipped in quietly to get food, and eat it sitting in the most remote corner he could find, watching everything and everyone as he did so. However, he was not permitted to remain in obscurity.