It opens abruptly into an illuminated space.

I find myself standing in a large chamber filled with what appears to be the same equipment used during my Skyhunter transformation.

We aren’t alone in here. At the other end of the windowless space, seated calmly at a low table sprawled with what look like blueprints, is Mayor Elland.

She leans back in her seat and regards me with her penetrating look. “Ah,” she says. “You all took your time out there.”

My mother’s quiet message to me at the mayor’s estate. Her hint to me. Suddenly the words of the prisoner from Carreal return to me again.

I am not the rebel leader you think you have. I am just one of many.

The mayor had used my mother to communicate with me, had wanted me in on whatever this meeting is. I stare at her, unsure how to react or what to expect.

When I hesitate longer, the woman rolls her eyes and gestures to the seats beside her. “You don’t have all day here,” she says. “Constantine will expect you back eventually, so let’s talk.”

I feel uneasy as I settle into a seat across from the mayor and the Chief Architect shuffles to sit beside me.

The Chief Architect glances sidelong at me. “Panic room,” she explains, gesturing around us at the enclosed space. “The lab complex is equipped with a small number of these. In the event that something goes wrong with one of our experiments, our scientists can escape to relative safety for a moment while sending out a distress signal to have guards sent in.” She nods at me, her own tense nature in contrast to her words. “No one can hear us in here.”

Mayor Elland folds her arms against the table. Unlike Raina, she looks as regal and self-assured as she did at her estate. “A good place for you to flee if Constantine ever discovers the real reason why he’s ill all the time,” she quips.

At that, my eyes dart from the mayor to the Chief Architect. Constantine’s failing health. The fog in his mind. Then I think of the medicinal soup that Constantine drinks, that it was formulated by the Chief Architect to help him think. “Constantine’s treatments,” I sign to her, my hands faltering for a moment. “His illness. You—”

She greets my realization with a blink. “It’s just an illness, Skyhunter,” she says pointedly. “Or is it?”

An illness. Or a poisoned body, slowly dying.

“The tonic I gave you on the wall,” she continues, pushing up her glasses in a nervous gesture, “was one I sometimes used on Red when we were still figuring out his limits. He was the first person I ever attempted a link upon. This tonic weakens the effects of your mind link so that the effects reduce to a trickle. It should prevent you from sharing with the Premier most visions of where you currently are. It is a suppression of one of the many threads that make up your bond with Constantine.”