“He’s a coward. He won’t look that far.” Lyon’s hands had been shaking when he covered the eye. That last glance inside it cost him something. Whatever he saw in that vision threw him off his game, as if the future unnerved him. Maybe even terrified him. And I have to believe the person he saw wrecking his future was me.

Kai looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. “There will be at least four Guards in that room. Maybe more. Not to mention Gaia!” She whispers Gaia’s name with an almost fearful reverence. “Even if you could get close enough to take the staff, you’d never make it out of that room alive.”

“So I’ll break into his office and steal it before then. No one says we have to wait for the Dismantling.”

She stops moving to gape at me. “Stolen magic is cursed magic.”

“Who fed you that line of crap?”

“A librarian in the Hall of Records. She said stolen magic comes with a price. And if you take someone’s magic without their permission, you inherit their weaknesses and faults.”

“Bullshit. There’s no such thing as curses.”

Her laugh is dark. “Bet you didn’t think there was any such thing as magic once, either.”

“Whatever,” I mutter, splashing her and making her duck low in the water. “I’ve been here a long time, and I’ve never heard anything like that.”

“Even if you could steal the staff, you’d have to find a way out of our cell first.”

I gesture loosely at the pool around us. “And?”

With a roll of her eyes, she asks, “What about the Guards?”

I pull her toward me, close enough to whisper, “All we need is a little distraction.”

She looks up at me through thick, wet lashes, and I catch a glimmer of hope under them. “Even if you could manage to break into his office,” she says quietly, “Gaia has a pet inside. A snake. You won’t make it two steps out that door before Gaia finds out and the Guards are all over you.”

The snake. I hadn’t thought about it until now. I draw back from Kai, scraping trails of warm water from my face. Getting into Lyon’s office wouldn’t be impossible. Overtake the duty guard when he comes to our cell, steal his key card, take the staff . . . One stroke of the scythe—that’s all it would take to bring an end to Daniel Lyon.

But Kai’s right . . . the snake poses an obstacle. If it is one of Gaia’s pets, then it could also be one of her spies. She’d sense everything that snake sees, and she would know what I’m up to the moment I breach Lyon’s office.