Anton glared at her, fury and helplessness rioting in his chest. She was right. He knew she was right, and it just made him angrier. “Maybe it was a mistake to try in the first place. Maybe I need him for this. For all of it.”

“You’ll tell him the truth?”

Anton clenched his jaw. She knew what she was doing by prodding him. Anton couldn’t tell Jude the truth. That was why he’d needed to stay away from him. But staying away hadn’t protected him, so there was only one option left. Find him. Save him.

Lie to him.

“I have to go,” he said to the Wanderer desperately. “I have to help him. You know that I do.”

She pursed her lips. Anton’s heart hammered under her assessing gaze. What would he do, he wondered, if she refused him? If she insisted they ignore his vision, the churning fear in his gut, and stayed the course?

He didn’t know. And he didn’t want to find out.

“We’ll need a plan,” she said at last.

Relief ballooned inside him, so expansive he felt almost untroubled by the task that now lay ahead. “A plan. Right.”

They’d have to figure out how to get into the citadel. Anton remembered very little from his own time there, when he and Ephyra had been taken in, ostensibly for temple robbing. His stay had been brief but horrible—one night of cold, clawing fear before Hector had arrived and offered him a way out.

An offer that, looking back, had changed the course of Anton’s life. Had led him to Jude.

“The Sentry are loyal to Pallas,” the Wanderer said. “I’m not sure a simple bribe will do the trick.”

Anton snorted. A bribe was most likely how Illya had gotten past the guards to break Ephyra out.

The thought struck him sideways, and Anton had to steady himself against the gunwale.

“Oh no,” he said out loud. “Oh no. I think I have a really terrible idea.”

The Wanderer peered at him curiously.

“But I think it might work.” He met her gaze and said simply, “Illya.”

She considered this. “Why would he help you?”

“He might not,” Anton admitted. “That’s why I said it was a terrible idea. But he’s opportunistic. Remember in Behezda when he gave the Chalice to the Necromancer King? He was happy to turn on Pallas for the right price then. And now, he’s probably running low on currency with the Witnesses.”

“Which could mean he’d take the opportunity to use you as currency,” the Wanderer said. “Deliver you to Pallas to earn back his favor.”