Mal didn’t seem to agree. “We might as well travel with a marching band,” he grumbled under his breath.

“What the hell is going on?” Sergei asked as soon as I’d dismissed Vladim. “One minute I’m in the infirmary with Maxim, the next I’m in a cell.” He paced back and forth. There was a clammy sheen to his skin, and he had dark circles beneath his eyes.

“Calm down,” said Tamar. “You’re not behind bars now.”

“I might as well be. We’re all trapped down here. And that bastard is just looking for a chance to get rid of us.”

“If you want out of the caves, then this is your opportunity,” I said. “We’re leaving. Tonight.”

“How?” Stigg asked.

By way of answer, I let sunlight flare for a brief, brilliant moment in my palm—proof that my power had ignited in me once more, even if that small gesture took more effort than it should.

The room erupted into whistles and cheers.

“Yes, yes,” said Zoya. “The Sun Summoner can summon. And all it took was a few deaths and a minor explosion.”

“You blew something up?” said Harshaw plaintively. “Without me?”

He was wedged up against the wall next to Stigg. Our two Inferni couldn’t have looked more different. Stigg was short and stocky with nearly white blond hair. He had the solid, stubby appearance of a prayer candle. Harshaw was tall and rangy, his hair redder than Genya’s, nearly the color of blood. A scrawny orange tabby had somehow made her way down to the bowels of the White Cathedral and taken a liking to him. She followed him everywhere, slinking between his legs or clinging to his shoulder.

“Where did those blasting powders come from?” I asked, perching next to Nadia and her brother on the edge of my bed.

“I made them when I was supposed to be making salve,” said David. “Just like the Apparat said.”

“Right under the noses of the Priestguards?”

“It’s not as if they know anything about the Small Science.”

“Well, somebody must. You got caught.”

“Not exactly,” said Mal. He’d stationed himself by the doorway with Tamar, each of them keeping an eye on the passage beyond.

“David knew we were meeting in the Kettle,” said Genya, “and he guessed about the master flue.”

David frowned. “I don’t guess.”

“But there was no way to get the powders out of the archives, not with the guards searching everything.”

Tamar grinned. “So we had the Apparat deliver it.”

I stared at them in disbelief. “You meant to get caught?”

“Turns out the easiest way to schedule a meeting is to get arrested,” said Zoya.

“Do you know how risky that was?”

“Blame Oretsev,” Zoya replied with a sniff. “It was his idea of a brilliant plan.”

“It did work,” Genya observed.

Mal lifted a shoulder. “Like Sergei said, the Apparat was waiting for an opportunity to take us out of action. I figured we’d give him one.”

“We were just never sure when you’d be in the Kettle,” Nadia said. “When you left the archives today, David claimed he’d forgotten something in his quarters and came by the training rooms to give us the signal. We knew the Apparat would be more likely to trust Tolya and Tamar, so they roughed us up a little—”