“Rhona,” Caledonia answered immediately, feeling herself respond to the aggression in the woman’s tone with some of her own. It wasn’t a good thing. She needed to keep her head.

“What are you doing in my sector, Rhona? And with one of my Hollows?” The question was laced with more threats than Caledonia knew how to unravel. What did it mean for a Bullet to be found outside their sector? What might bring a Bullet into a sector they weren’t assigned to? She didn’t know. She only barely knew what a Hollow was.

“She got lost,” Nettle supplied. “Their clip only arrived yesterday.”

“Lost.” The woman repeated, considering.

It was an excuse of incompetence. Caledonia suspected that never landed well among Bullets, but if Nettle thought it was her best option, she wasn’t going to argue. The girl was damned resourceful.

“Lanning!” The woman’s call dislodged one of the young Hollows behind her. Bringing them to her shoulder in three quick steps. “Get the Hollows inside and to work. You, Rhona, will have to come with me.”

Caledonia hesitated, loath to find herself under this woman’s charge.

“Bullet Rhona!”

The shout was like a clap of thunder, sharp, familiar, and unwelcome. Gloriana marched toward them, chewing up the distance with long, quick strides.

Nettle’s eyes widened at the sight, and sweat pricked between Caledonia’s shoulder blades.

“One of yours, Bullet Gloriana?” the woman asked.

“Hardly. She was spotted outside her sector. I came to intercept.” She locked her eyes on Caledonia in a way that suggested she knew more than she was saying. “I’ll take her from here.”

“Take care you keep to your sector in the future,” the woman said, turning to usher Nettle toward the greenhouse. “No one gets lost in Slipmark.”

“No Bullet,” Gloriana added quietly.

Caledonia’s stomach pitched.

Nettle dared one last glace over her shoulder as the woman drove her forward. Caledonia gave her an encouraging smile, a promise that they would see each other again. With Nettle on the ground, she didn’t doubt it. But with Gloriana at her side, she feared it would be through the bars of a prison cell.

“After you,” Gloriana said, and with her next word she cinched Caledonia’s fears. “Caledonia.”

Chapter Twenty-two

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Slipmark was alive now, and it was full of clamor and the rhythmic thumping of feet on pavement as Bullets jogged up or down the main street in perfect formation. They chanted to keep the pace, and each time they passed another troop doing the same they roared in unison.

Caledonia watched it all with a distant kind of horror, while a single word stretched across her mind like a cloud covering the sun: caught.

“Where are you taking me?” she asked, craning to peer over her shoulder.

Bullet Gloriana didn’t answer. She walked with her eyes straight ahead almost as if she’d forgotten Caledonia was there.