“Why? What happened? Why didn’t you kill it?”

“It’s not the amplifier.”

“How can you know that?”

Neither of us answered.

“What is going on?” she shouted.

“It’s Mal,” I said finally.

“What’s Mal?” asked Harshaw.

“Mal is the third amplifier.” The words came out in a rasp, but solid, so much more even and strong than I ever would have anticipated.

“What are you talking about?” Zoya’s fists were clenched, and there were hectic spots of color on her cheeks.

“We should find cover,” said Tolya.

We limped across the plateau and followed the others a short distance up the next hill to the camp they’d made near a tall poplar.

Mal dropped his rifle and unslung his bow. “I’m going to go catch dinner,” he said, and melted into the woods before I could think to form a protest.

I slumped down on the ground. Harshaw started the fire, and I sat before it, staring at the flames, barely feeling their warmth. Tolya handed me a flask, then dropped into a crouch, and after waiting for a nod from me, slammed my shoulder back into its socket. The pain wasn’t enough to stop the images pouring through my head, the connections my mind wouldn’t stop making.

A girl in a field, standing over her slain sister, the black wisps of the Cut rising from her body, a father kneeling beside her.

He was a great Healer. Baghra had gotten it wrong. It had taken more than the Small Science to save Morozova’s other daughter. It had taken merzost, resurrection. I’d been wrong too. Baghra’s sister hadn’t been Grisha. She’d been otkazat’sya after all.

“You must have known,” said Zoya, sitting down on the other side of the fire. Her gaze was accusatory.

Had I? The jolt that night by the banya, I’d assumed it was something in me.

And yet, when I looked back, the pattern seemed clear. The first time I’d used my power had been when Mal lay dying in my arms. We’d searched for the stag for weeks, but we’d found it after our first kiss. When the sea whip had revealed itself, I’d been standing in the circle of his arms, close to him for the first time since we’d been forced aboard the Darkling’s ship. The amplifiers wanted to be brought together.

And hadn’t our lives been bound from the first? By war. By abandonment. Maybe by something more. It couldn’t be chance that we’d been born into neighboring villages, that we’d survived the war that had taken both of our families, that we’d both ended up at Keramzin.

Was this the truth behind Mal’s gift for tracking, that he was somehow tied to everything, to the making at the heart of the world? Not a Grisha, and no ordinary amplifier, but something else entirely?

I am become a blade. A weapon to be used. How right he’d been.

I covered my face with my hands. I wanted to blot out this knowledge, carve it from my skull. Because I hungered for the power that lay beyond that golden door, desired it with a kind of pure and aching fever that made me want to tear at my skin. The price for that power would be Mal’s life.