We’re finally able to destroy it.

These weren’t just humans traveling in a group. They were part of the Resistance.

If only they knew they weren’t the only ones who wanted to destroy the Iron Heart.

“Your turn, Ayla,” said Hook, and it took Crier a moment to realize he was addressing her. “What did your runaway servant girl tell you?”

Crier took a deep breath. “That you’re right,” she said. “Scyre Kinok is searching desperately for an alternative to heartstone.” She cleared her throat, focusing on her accent, on sounding like the human commoner she was supposed to be. “He thinks the answer is a stone called Tourmaline. He’s trying to find it. He’d—he’d do anything to find it. If someone else gets to it first, they’d have—”

“Leverage,” said Hook.

“Power,” breathed Bree-or-Mir.

“Every leech in Zulla by the throat,” said a third rebel, a boy with an empty socket where his right eye should have been.

Crier nodded. “Exactly.”

“Well, well, well,” said Hook. When he leaned forward, the firelight turned his deep brown skin to burnished gold. “Damn good thing we saved you from the Shades, Ayla. You should stick with us, yeah? Where are you headed?”

“Varn,” said Crier.

It clearly wasn’t the answer he was expecting, but he just grinned wider. “If anyone can get you there, my friend, it’s gonna be us.”

And for the first time since running away from the palace, Crier felt almost safe.

An hour or so later, the fire had been put out and the rebels were settling in to sleep. Bree-or-Mir, who turned out to be Bree, had been assigned first watch. Which meant Crier would have to actually fake sleep for the next few hours. She’d offered to take the second shift, but Hook had told her, not unkindly, that they didn’t trust outsiders, no matter how useful. Then he’d given her a sleep pallet and a thin, scratchy blanket and bid her good night.

So Crier spread out her pallet under a wide-bellied fir tree and resigned herself to being wide awake until dawn. She didn’t want to sleep, not when she knew there were Shades out there. She wished she could have told Hook: I can see in the dark like a cat, I can hear a twig snap from a hundred paces away, and there’s no chance I’ll fall asleep. I am the perfect lookout. But of course she couldn’t.

Perhaps it was a good thing, though. In the darkness, under the cover of low branches curving down to brush the dirt, Crier pulled Ayla’s locket out from beneath her shirt, leaving its twin in her pocket. The token she’d held so many nights to give herself comfort. It felt like being close to Ayla. And she had eventually realized it wasn’t just that it had belonged to Ayla—the locket was a Made object, created by Ayla’s grandmother Siena, then gifted to Ayla’s grandfather Leo. It was always him at the center of these memories. She’d come to learn the locket—a marvel of alchemical invention—contained memories of his past, of every day he’d worn it. When Crier’s blood triggered the locket’s magick, she could relive those memories. But she never knew which memories would surface when she pricked her finger. The locket held a whole lifetime within its clasp. It held Ayla’s history, her past—and maybe, her legacy.