“That’s the reason for today,” the mayor is saying now. “We all mourn the necessity of the new exile policy. But we can no longer waste our precious resources on jailed criminals. We can no longer hold ourselves to a due process standard that doesn’t work. We have purged the island of mirror dealers; now we must make certain that our city will no longer be an environment that allows new ones, or any criminals, to flourish.”

My head snaps back to the mayor. A slow horror ices through me at the look on her face, that awful, familiar steel-and-bone expression. She’s standing at the bridge’s entrance, surrounded by the Valkyrie warrior statues as if she has any right to a place among them. At her back, a few yards in front of the fog, every cop on the island stands shoulder to shoulder, weapons drawn, eyes on—

—on the prisoners kneeling in front of them.

The pit of my stomach drops. There are dozens. There’s one middle-aged woman I recognize from a few months back, who got caught stealing beans out of the dispensary and was jailed for it. Next to her are two college-aged guys—one with a black eye, one who’s silently sobbing—who I’m acquainted with through my black-market contacts. They sell fish illegally, I remember. But they never got caught. They’re way too slippery to give the cops the proof they’d need to exile them. Then again … I guess the cops don’t need proof anymore.

Rations are getting low, and the mayor is desperate, Elliott told me at the boardwalk. Apparently that much wasn’t a lie. She’s going to exile all these prisoners in the middle of a hurricane no matter how trivial their crimes, because she doesn’t want to waste supplies on them for even one more day.

A helpless anger burns through me, and I try to swallow it down. These people don’t matter to me. I shouldn’t care what the mayor does to them; two dozen fewer people on the island is two dozen fewer people for me to try to wake up. But I clench my jaw anyway, imagining the screams that’ll echo over the bridge in just a few moments, the way they’ll cut out one by one. There are mirrors up there, in the fog just past the Valkyrie statues. That’s how the residents of Cisco Island get rid of any reflective materials that can’t be ground up into powder or discarded safely in the mines. It’s also how they ensure that exile results in a suitably horrible death. Like the kind I’m facing, if I fail.