“You could call her now,” Lena suggested.

I shook my head. Having helped to eliminate the one person who might have led us to Ray Walker’s murderer, I could think of only one other option, and there was no way Pallas would sign off on it.

I closed my eyes, remembering Shah’s expression as we were dragged away. Shah had the best poker face of anyone I knew, but she had been trapped down there for days, surrounded by creatures who considered her little more than livestock. She hadn’t been able to hide her despair.

“It doesn’t make sense. Gutenberg knows the dangers of possession better than anyone.” Gutenberg had written the laws of libriomancy. But Chesa had been enslaved by libriomancy, and who else could command Gutenberg’s automatons? Ponce de Leon was powerful, but he was no libriomancer. Nicola Pallas used bardic magic. Deb DeGeorge’s power was fading, and she had shown no symptoms of possession. I mentally reviewed the other libriomancers I knew, but not one of them was strong enough to challenge Gutenberg.

“Power makes people believe they’re invulnerable,” said Lena.

“But why now, after so many lifetimes of practicing magic? And why didn’t anyone notice the signs?” I sagged back in the seat.

“Maybe someone did. Maybe they pointed it out to him, and he brushed their concerns aside until it was too late.” Her words were pointed, and she still didn’t look at me.

“I’m all right,” I said. For the moment, anyway. What I was planning could change that all too easily.

Within two more miles, we had traded the busy streets for an old neighborhood that felt like a ghost town. Abandoned houses watched over the road through empty, jagged-edged windows. Up ahead, a maple tree had fallen through the roof of a two-story house with faded siding. Weeds and shrubs were well on their way to reclaiming driveways and sidewalks.

“What is this place?” I asked.

She pointed to a large brick complex up ahead. The closest building was twice as long as a football field. A broken sign over the entrance read:—motive Plant of Detroit. “This is one of the largest abandoned factory complexes in the country. It was shut down decades ago. The city wants to bulldoze the whole place, but attorneys from both sides are still duking it out in the courts.”

The car lurched drunkenly as we passed beneath the old sign. The road looked like it had been bombed back to the Stone Age. Lena downshifted and did her best to avoid the worst of the gaping cracks and potholes.

The whole place had a post-apocalyptic feel. Graffiti covered the walls of the main plant and the various connected buildings. I spotted everything from simple gang tags to a full mural showing a stylized George Washington gunning down a field of robots, which was actually pretty awesome.