Six years ago a dirty, bedraggled, starvation-thin young man had walked out of the desert, and it had been no accident. He had not stumbled upon our homestead because it was the only source of warmth and light for miles. He had not scuffed his bare feet on the rocks behind me because I was the least threatening guard; he had been looking for me all along. I had brought him to meet Adam and my family. We had listened, rapt, to his stories of hardship and humiliation at the hands of the Councils. My mother had given him a mug of hot tea and smiled when he thanked her. She always tried to bring comfort to those who needed it.

“How long have you worked for them?” I asked.

“Nine years.”

Something inside me crumpled, the last ashy log of a fire falling to dust. He was older than he looked. They would have chosen him because he was so nonthreatening, with his brown eyes and curly hair, his kind smile.

My vision blurred with tears. “Why didn’t you stop us? Why did you let us come here, if you knew what it was like?”

“Zahra,” Malachi said. He moved his hand, as though to reach for mine, but did not. “I didn’t know it was like this. I swear to you, we didn’t know. I had no idea there were secrets SPEC was keeping even from its own people.”

“Somebody must have known. The people you work for? None of them knew?”

“The mission was to observe and report,” Malachi said. “And retrieve data.”

“Retrieve—you mean from the ship. Have you been doing that?”

For the briefest second, Malachi’s lips twitched with a wry smile. “I was until Panya took my skeleton key.”

If what Malachi was saying was true, we had been nothing more than a means by which SPEC Intelligence could sneak an agent aboard—a mission the Councils had been refusing to authorize for ten years.

“You’re not even supposed to be here,” I said. “Officially. Are you?”

Malachi’s smile was gone. “You know what? I have no fucking idea. I know what my handler thinks I should know. And until we got to this place, I thought that he’d told me everything. But now . . .” He exhaled sharply, his breath a thin white cloud. “There are people in SPEC who have wanted to come back to House of Wisdom for years. I guess somebody got tired of waiting.”

The worst of it, I thought, was that I had once believed I could tell when he was lying. But he had been lying to me for six years—and to people far more suspicious than me. He had convinced Boudicca, who had been a SPEC pilot herself. He had convinced Adam, who saw spies and traitors in every shadow. He had convinced all of us.