Everyone in the world had a dreamscape, the beautiful mirage inside their mind. In dreams, even amaurotics saw their sunlit zone—just not very clearly. Voyants could see into their own minds, live in there until they starved to death. My sunlit zone was a field of red flowers, a field that rippled and changed depending on my mood. I saw flashes of the world outside my body, felt the roll in the earth as I emptied my stomach of my tiny meal. But in my mind I was calm, watching as flux wreaked havoc around me. I lay down in the flowers and waited for the end.

I was back in the room at Magdalen. The gramophone was warbling nearby. Another of Jaxon’s blacklisted favorites, “Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?” I was lying on my stomach on the daybed, naked from the waist up. My hair had been twisted into a knot.

My hand went to my face. Skin. Cold, clammy skin. I was alive. In pain, yes—but alive. They hadn’t killed me.

I was too sore to lie still. I tried to sit up, but the weight of my head kept me from rising more than a few inches. The back of my right shoulder burned with a ferocious heat. A dull throb in my groin told me where I’d been injected—but this time the damage was deeper.

Flux was one of the only drugs that worked better in an artery than it did in veins. My thigh was hot and swollen. My chest heaved. I was burning up. Whichever Reph had done this had not only been very clumsy, but very cruel. I had a vague memory of Suhail leering at me before the lights went out.

Maybe they had tried to kill me. Maybe I was dying.

I turned my head to the side. A fire had been lit in the hearth. And someone was in the room: my keeper.

He was sitting in his chair, staring at the flames. I gazed across the room, hating him. I could still feel his hands on me, holding me back, stopping me from saving Seb. Did he harbor any guilt for that pointless killing? Did he care about the helpless slaves at Amaurotic House? I wondered if he cared about anything at all. Even his interactions with Nashira seemed mechanical. Did anything make this creature tick?

He must have sensed my gaze, because he stood. I held still, scared to move. Too many parts of me hurt. Warden knelt beside the daybed. When he raised his hand, I flinched. He laid the backs of his fingers against my scorching cheek. His eyes had returned to neutral apple gold.

My throat was sore, full of fever. “His spirit,” I forced out. It was agony to speak. “Did it leave?”

“No.”