“Calm down.” Mom grips my shoulders, her hold firm and reassuring. “Breathe, Taika. There we go, another deep breath. Good. Now tell me—how exactly did you manage to commune with this liekkiö?” Her eyes narrow as if she already knows.

If I tell her, the others are going to be in massive amounts of trouble.

“Yeah, how exactly did you manage to talk to a liekkiö?” Toivo strides into the kitchen. “No way you could’ve pulled that off alone.”

I want to punch him right in his smug mouth.

Mom cocks her head at me the way a hawk sizes up a mouse. “Please tell me you didn’t do something foolish.”

“All I did is prove Natalie isn’t dead yet.” I shake free of Mom’s hands. “She’s still alive and we can save her, but we have to hurry.”

“Taika, please. I need to know exactly what you did,” Mom says. “Whatever it is, you can trust me.” Her voice has gone all sugary the way it does when she’s trying to soften up a student, to get them to admit they plagiarized or performed a spell they shouldn’t have. Her tricks won’t work on me.

“Like trusting you to secure the vault?” Toivo says. “Like trusting you to keep the Sampo safe?”

Sampo? Is that what the chaos mage is after?

“It is safe.” Mom glares, her jaw clenched tight enough for a muscle to twitch near her ear before she rifles through cupboards in search of her own mug and tea bag.

“It’s safe”—MacCrone’s words echo in my head, bashing at my brain like hammers. Was the Sampo the “it” the old battle mage was talking about too? Does that mean the break-in at Svalbard is connected to what happened to Natalie?

Mom slams the mug onto the counter, making me jump. She’s annoyed but she should be shocked. I just told her Natalie appeared to me as a liekkiö and said she was kidnapped. Why isn’t Mom freaking out? It’s almost as if…

“Wait, you knew?” Anger burns through my veins. “When I came to you the other day, you already knew, didn’t you? You’ve known this whole time the norovirus thing was just some ridiculous cover-up. You knew Natalie and the others were missing. You knew they were being kidnapped and didn’t do a thing to stop it?”

“Taika, enough,” Mom says softly, and I do, zipping my lips, hoping she’ll say more.

The silence lasts all of twenty-three agonizing seconds before I can’t contain myself anymore. “Well?” I fold my arms, mirroring Mom’s scowl.

Mom sighs and massages her temples. “Yes, we realized something untoward was happening, but we didn’t want to create a panic.”

“Untoward?” Toivo laughs, the sound as bitter as black coffee. “Bit of an understatement, don’t you think?”