A scar behind her ear.

It isn’t a big scar. I’ve certainly never noticed it before. Just a line of silver skin running behind her earlobe, fading into invisibility wherever shadows hit it. But it’s unmistakable.

The Chief Architect is still talking, rapidly now, as she gestures at one glass chamber holding a Ghost that looks like it might be dying. “We are going to put this one down,” she says as the creature shakes its broken jaw. “Its bones aren’t setting right, for some reason, and it doesn’t seem capable of keeping up with the others.”

But her words sound muffled and distant in my ears. I listen numbly, my breath frozen in my chest.

How can the Chief Architect be the one behind a rebellion? She had personally overseen the mutilation of Red into a Skyhunter, then mine. She has torn thousands of families apart in her creation of her monstrosities, has been instrumental in the Federation’s conquering of so many nations. She spends her days walking anxiously around her lab, always doing the Premier’s bidding, always bowing to the horrors she inflicts.

She finishes talking now and turns to look at me. Something in my eyes must catch her attention—because for an instant, she hesitates, and some emotion flashes by on her face.

Then the Chief Architect nods at the young translator. “That will be all,” she says. “I have a few checks I need to do with our Skyhunter.”

The girl glances quickly at the woman’s face, as if checking to make sure she is being given a proper dismissal. But the Chief Architect just nods again at her. “Go on.”

We watch the girl leave. For a moment, we are alone here in the corner of the institute.

The Chief Architect turns away. “Follow me,” she calls over her shoulder, glancing back briefly at me.

“Architect—” I start to sign at her, but she glimpses my movement and interrupts me.

“My name is Raina de Balman,” she replies.

We move like a pair of shadows, with nothing but the sound of our boots echoing along the corridor. Finally, she leads me into one of the private rooms. In the weak light filtering in from outside, I see a sparsely furnished space, equipped only with a bed and dresser.

I tense immediately. I used to be sent into chambers like this one to recover from each round of experimentation during my Skyhunter transformation. They’d put me in a bed, and I’d lie still for an entire week at a time, waiting for the wounds in my back to slowly heal around my new wings or my skin to graft back together. An involuntary shudder courses through me at returning to this space, and I wonder what new experiment she’d brought me here for.

But she doesn’t turn on any of the lights. Instead, she walks over to the side of the bed and presses her hand against a section of the wall there.

A slight groove in the wall materializes, then indents, as if a section of the wall has pushed inward. She waits without a word as the wall slides open by a couple of feet, then glances at me and nods for me to walk through the narrow darkness.