Next was the crux of the play. The séance. Red lanterns were brought onto the set. When I looked back at the stage, I had to stifle a laugh. The Overseer was really getting into his role. “Earthly power is not enough,” he said, almost panting with the sheer evil of his character. The séance table was out, and he was waving his arms in circles above it. “The Victorian era, they say? But what will Edward’s era be? What king can truly rise, encumbered by the shackles of mortality?” He leaned over the table, rocking it with his hands. “Yes, rise. Rise from the shadows. Rise through the gateway, spirits of the dead. Come into me, and into my followers! Breed in the very blood of England!”

As he spoke, the red lanterns moved from the stage, carried by actors dressed in black. They represented the unnatural spirits. They scattered across the room, grabbing at people, making them shriek. They were the plague of unnaturalness.

The music and the laughter of the actors was too loud. My head was spinning. The Overseer roared his incantations. In the darkness and confusion, Warden took my arm. “Quickly.” His voice was a thrum against my ear. “Come with me.”

He led me to the trap room: the small, dark space below the stage, piled high with storage crates. The only light was what filtered through the boards. Red, like the lanterns. Dense velvet drapes hung down the length of one side of the room, hiding us from the hall above. It wasn’t easy, in this darkened space, to think of what I might soon face upstairs.

It was quieter here. The actors danced above us, but the sound was muffled by the boards. Warden turned to face me.

“You will be the play’s last scene. The final act.” His eyes were hot. “I heard her with Gomeisa.”

My skin prickled. “We knew it was coming.”

“Yes.”

I’d known from the beginning that Nashira was going to kill me, but hearing it from him made it all the more real. A part of me had hoped she might wait—wait a few days, giving me a chance to get away with the others on the train—but Nashira was cruel. Of course she wanted to do it in public, before Scion. She wouldn’t risk keeping me alive.

The light from his eyes made the shadows deeper. There was something different about them: something raw, something volatile.

Cold tremors seized my legs and abdomen. I sank onto a crate. “I can’t fight her,” I said, “her angels—”