Of all the heretical, insane things I could have suspected of Rhyanon, this possibility had never occurred to me.

“Not exactly,” I said faintly.

She smiled, amused.

“I thought as much,” she said. “I’ll warn Commander Asan, and we’ll take further precautions to protect her mother.”

“This is—what are we doing? Who else is involved?” My head was still spinning. “What—”

“You are safer not knowing,” she interrupted.

“That’s not—”

“If anything happens to me, trust Enforcement. That’s all the information you need.”

No, you are safer if I don’t know enough to sell you out. But I bit my tongue. Rhyanon seemed unperturbed by my scowl.

“Do you have anything else?” she asked.

Oh, nothing on the scale of destroying the Order, no.

I shook myself. “Possibly. I looked into Verje’s renovations.”

“And?”

“She’s dug a pit inside her barn, and has sent away all her estate’s regular staff. The farm was badly neglected.”

Rhyanon looked mystified. “A pit inside her barn?”

“Yeah. And there was a lot of metal sheeting stacked outside. Whatever she’s doing, it seems unfinished.”

She chewed on her lip. “How odd.”

“That was my reaction.” I stood up and straightened my robes. “Anyway, that’s all I had to tell you. But one more thing, before I go.”

“Yes?”

“Call off Osan.”

Rhyanon gave a little shake of her head. “And there I thought he would be subtle. I’ll talk to him. And good work, Elfreda. This was valuable.”

Jaylen watched me through a gap in the curtains as I left the house. When I waved, she vanished. I shoved my hands into my pockets. Children were not my forte. I walked out into the warm evening, mosquitoes droning in the heavy air.

Destroying the Sisterhood?

If they had really sent my mother to the Martyrium before her time, maybe that wasn’t the worst idea.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

The air inside the hothouse was humid. I sank my gloved hands into the tray of dark, loose compost and delved around until I found a grub. The fat white creature squirmed in the sunlight filtering through the glass windows overhead.

Probably ripe enough. I tossed it into the box for processing.

Aside from the earthworms which the Sisterhood distributed to farmers throughout Aytrium, the Vilitir Wormery was also home to sixteen other species of insect. Easy to breed, easy to feed was our project’s unofficial slogan; the bugs weren’t fussy, and we put the city’s refuse to good use. In the last six months, the Department of Food Management had expanded operations threefold in anticipation of food shortages, and I had learned a lot about the versatility of insect ingredients. For example, the tiris beetle—the object of my present search—could be ground up in the larval stages to form a sweetish grey paste. We salted the pulp and stored it in glass jars, as a kind of meat spread. Well, bug spread. It didn’t taste that bad on bread.