“Will Constantine think you did it?” I whisper.

She shakes her head. Let me deal with him, she answers. He doesn’t know you’re in the city. I have my alibi, watching him in the room beside his chambers.

For a second, her shoulders loosen slightly, as if casting off a weight. There’s such deep sadness in her that all I want to do is leave with her—take off into the sky together, this world be damned.

The other voice begins to sound skeptical in my head.

She isn’t telling you everything. She’s afraid to betray you again.

We should be afraid too. And a part of me still is. Everything in me yearns to tell her about our plans, but all I can think about is the moment in the train yard outside Newage when we realized we were stepping into a trap. All I can see is the memory of Talin’s regret in her eyes, and the way she had been forced to give us away.

No. Too risky.

Talin looks down and produces something else from her pocket. “I have something else for you both,” she signs, repeating the same through our link. “I know you’ve been searching for answers on the artifacts.”

She unrolls a slip of paper covered in sketches and scribbled notes.

I recognize Constantine’s hand immediately; it’s the same curving script I’ve seen sign declarations hung around the city. Jeran leans over as we unfurl the page and study it. Then I utter a soft gasp.

This looks like one page of many, a partial blueprint of a cylindrical object that looks like the Early Ones’ artifact.

That is the artifact.

It’s a schematic drawn of the interior of the cylinder, with the same inner ring of smaller metal rods and a hollow center. But in this drawing, there is something inside the hollow center.

A drawing of a human.

It’s a person lying within the cylinder, hands folded across the chest.

I can’t read the Karenese, Talin says as we read. What does it say?

I look up at her. “Where did you get this?” I whisper.

She shakes her head. “Constantine has hidden himself away in a private chamber,” she signs. “A room filled with these kinds of schematics. He’s in bad shape.”

Jeran points to a block of text scribbled along the side of the cylinder. “This is a translation of some text from the Early Ones,” he murmurs. “An experimental machine of theirs.”

I scan the entire paper before my gaze hitches on the bottom of the paper.

“‘In this mechanism,’” I read slowly, “‘we find probable cause to believe that a human subjected properly to this energy may find aging slowed. Evidence toward this theory. Evidence contrary.’” The text cuts off abruptly at the bottom of the page, pencil drawings of arrows sliding off the page and presumably onto another sheet.

“Aging slowed,” Jeran whispers.

And then I understand, at last, the true source of Constantine’s obsession with these artifacts.