Most of either wall is smooth. However, beginning perhaps a foot from the floor, sharp, jagged spikes begin protruding from both sides of the corridor. Some are set lower and some higher, but a spike on the opposite wall matches each one, so closely no human body could fit between them. What’s more, the floor between the corridor walls is also covered in spikes, much shorter than the ones above, but so many of them that a person with full use of their legs couldn’t take a step without piercing their foot.

She couldn’t even crawl under the wall spikes.

This seems impossibly cruel. It seems to go against everything she’s heard and experienced in her time with the Planning Cadre. This is the Crache Dyeawan glimpsed so often in the streets, from her many hiding places and while sliding away from Aegins and drunkards and sneak thieves.

It’s a test, she reminds herself. This is the test Edger talked about. This is the test they give planners.

The knowledge, the certainty of it, brings her little comfort. Clever puzzles in the comfort of a soft bed that belongs to her seem like a very distant memory, something that happened in another place, or perhaps another life.

Either you want this or you don’t, another voice that sounds much like Edger’s goads her. You can pound on the door and beg to be let out of this place. They will open it. You know they will. You can go right back to sweeping the floor and delivering parchment scribbles and the inventions of others. You can spend the rest of your life here in comfort, like blind old Makai toiling every day in his kitchen, or the one-armed mute who tends the sconces, never having to face another test again. You can still be Edger’s favorite pet cripple. You don’t have to do this.

She doesn’t have to, but she wants to. For the first time, Dyeawan admits to herself that she wants what Edger has dangled in front of her. In truth, she wants even more than that. She doesn’t just want to be part of the Cadre, and she doesn’t just want to be a planner; Dyeawan wants to be Edger. She wants to be the one who can reach into the gutters of the Capitol and scoop out the unwanted at will. She could do so much more with that power than he has.

Her mind begins to unfurl such pictures, such fantasies of the knowledge she could attain, the wonders she could create, and the souls she could save. Dyeawan forces that mental scroll to wind back up so she can stuff it away in a corner of her head somewhere. Desire is dangerous, especially for someone like her. It can drive you insane, or worse, it can drive you to act foolishly, even lethally against your own survival.