Serina took a deep breath and nodded.

With her other hand, Ember held Serina’s long braid taut. Then she began sawing.

Serina closed her eyes. Her hair had been a nuisance since she’d arrived, but now it played a part in her nightmares. In her dreams, Diego used it to grab her, he used it to bind her, he used it to choke her.

She refused to give this power to him.

The cutting took longer than she expected. She had time to remember the hours her mother and sister had spent brushing her hair, all the time they’d spent together, laughing and gossiping, while they twisted it into one elaborate style after another. Homesickness punched her in the gut.

“Are you all right?” Ember asked when it was done. Her own hair was shaved close to her skull, with a longer strip of red down the center.

Serina glanced at her and then quickly away—the braid hung over Ember’s hand like a dead snake.

What would her mother think of her if she could see her now?

Serina ran her callused hands through her ragged, shoulder-length hair.

She would be ashamed.

“I’m fine,” Serina said. It was just hair, a silly thing to become attached to. She was still Grace, still the person Mount Ruin had made her—helped her—become.

Ember slipped her knife into her boot and headed into the woods to dump the hair, her purposeful stride scattering a group of younger women who loitered by the broken fountain.

Hotel Misery had once seemed hollow and frightening to Serina. Now it was a hub of semicontrolled chaos. Previously empty rooms teemed with women from the Beach, Southern Cliffs, the Cave, and Jungle Camp. The ballroom remained an infirmary, the half-destroyed lobby had become a gathering place, and the walkway that lined the stinking canal rang with voices.

At the moment, the shouting was louder than usual.

Serina jogged out to meet the returning search party, her heart sinking when she saw the body they carried.

It was not one of the missing guards.

“What happened?” she asked. The night of the first search, Maris had shot and killed Hector. But the other gunshot they’d heard had come to nothing. Diego had evaded the group that had come upon him at the stream near Jungle Camp. And no one had seen Nero, that night or since. Three days, and the two guards were still terrorizing and killing the women of Mount Ruin.

“One of the girls guarding the southern entrance to the prison building was killed,” Fox reported. Her pale swoop of hair hid one eye, but her glare came through just fine. “She walked a couple yards into the woods to relieve herself. Never came back. We found her on our search along the southern cliffs. No sign of the guards, though. The girls on watch with her didn’t see anything either. Didn’t even hear her scream.”