Felix blinked, plastic lids capping his glass eyes. The left one stuck for just a second.

“But I have something here that belongs to your friend. She left it behind last time.”

“What is it?”

“Your partner, she lost it in the Looking Glass. Came right off her neck when you shoved her across the room.”

I looked at him.

“You can’t seriously think we don’t have cameras,” he said, his eyes rolling from the ceiling to the walls to the cannons protruding from his hairy little shoulders. He had a point.

Then his eyes rolled back again, and there was a commotion from his middle, a whirring and grinding of gears. Finally, a small drawer popped out from where his belly button might’ve been.

“Go on,” he said, with what I thought was a hint of either irritation or flirtation. “Take it.”

I had to crouch down to reach the drawer, and my fingers grazed the coarse hair of the hide stitched up his middle. It looked like cow. Maybe dalmatian.

“Has she been missing it?”

I opened my fist and shook out a silver ball chain, slick to the touch and cool from its time inside Felix after so many years against a human heart.

In the middle hung a cluster of soda tabs.

I was right.

Jason and the rest of them were not resentful ex-footballers; they were soldiers. The General’s soldiers. And not only did they think they needed his key—his mark—so that they could go to Heaven, not only did they still believe him, trust him, even after the raid at the barracks, even after some were returned, thin and thirsty, to their red-eyed parents . . . But if this knockoff dog tag, this heartbreaking relic of imagination and violence, was truly Cal’s, then it, combined with her willingness to cut me out of the deal in favor of Trey, pointed to one answer.

She still believed him too.

I could tell from her file how she felt about that key. The key that he took from the group home when he was a child. The key that was just as much of a lie as everything he had ever done or said. Why didn’t he just stick with this “Holy Father’s” story the whole way through, and brand the boys alive? I wondered as I gripped the chain. But as soon as I thought about it, I knew the answer.

He thought Father Michael, with his underground fighting ring for profit at Saint Anthony’s, and the Farm’s Holy Father, with his hand to Elsie’s battered cheek, were cruel.

He believed himself to be better.

This was a common opinion among those who found themselves here.

I tucked the necklace in my pocket and patted it flat. It would come in handy at some point; it had to. But right now, there were only two things I knew for certain.