“Nashira wanted you alive,” Warden said. “The NVD makes clumsy, violent arrests, as do many of our red-jackets. Around half of those arrests end in death. That could not happen with you. You had to be unspoiled. That was why Nashira sent the Overseer, her specialist procurer of clairvoyants.”

“Why?”

“Because she wants to learn your secret.”

“There is no secret. It’s what I am.”

“It is also what Nashira wants to be. She longs for rare gifts, including yours.”

“Why doesn’t she take it, then? She could have killed me when she murdered Seb. Why the wait?”

“Because she wants to understand the full extent of your abilities. But she will not wait forever.”

“I won’t perform for you,” I said. “I’m not a harlie yet.”

“I did not ask you to perform for me. Where is the need? I saw your ability in the chapel. You forced your spirit into Aludra’s mind. I saw it on the meadow, when you broke into mine. But tell me”—he leaned toward me, his red eyes hot in the dark—“could you have possessed either of us?”

There was a tense silence, broken only by the reedy screech of an owl. The sound made me look up. I looked at the moon, cradled in a smoking cup of cloud. For a brief moment, I was taken back to Jax’s office, the first time we’d broached the subject of possession.

“My dear girl,” he’d said, “you’ve been a star. Nay, a luminary. You are absolutely and indubitably a keeper, a Seal fit to burst—but now I would like to give you a new task. A task that will test you, but also fulfill you.” He’d asked me to force my mind into his, to see if I could take control of his body. The idea had shaken me. I’d given it a halfhearted try, but the complexity of his mind had been too much to fathom. “Ah well,” he’d said, with a puff of his cigar. “It was worth a try, O my lovely. Away with you, now. There are broads to spread, and games to play.”

Maybe I could have done it. Maybe if I’d really wanted to, I could have seized Jax’s body and stubbed out that bloody cigar, but it was that very ability that frightened me. To control someone was a serious responsibility, too serious for me. Even with the promise of a pay raise. I would wander through the mind of London, but I would never seize control of it. Not for all the money in the world.

“Paige?”

I surfaced from my memories. “No,” I said. “I couldn’t have possessed Aludra. Or you.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t possess people. And I definitely can’t possess Rephs.”

“Would you like to?”

“No. You can’t make me do it.”