He had me in a bind. He was right: I couldn’t lose my leg. I needed to run. This time, when he took the back of my head in his hand, I opened my mouth and drank from the goblet. It tasted rank, like earth and metal. Warden nodded. “Good.”

I mustered a look of loathing, but the effect was dampened by relief as my leg tingled. I drank the foul liquid to the dregs, and wiped my lips with a steady hand.

Warden lifted the sheets again. My thigh was already returning to its normal dimensions.

“We’re even now,” I whispered. My throat scorched. “No more. I healed you, you healed me.”

“You have never healed me.”

I faltered. “What?”

“I have never been injured.”

“You don’t remember?”

“It never happened.”

I didn’t believe for a moment that I’d imagined the whole encounter. He was still wearing sleeves, so I could hardly point it out to him, but it had happened. His denial wouldn’t make a shade of difference.

“Then I must have made a mistake,” I said.

Warden never took his eyes off me. He was looking at me with interest. A cold, dispassionate interest.

“Yes,” he said. “You did make a mistake.”

And that was my warning.

The bell chimed in the tower. Warden glanced out of the window.

“You may go. You are in no fit state to begin training tonight, but you should find something to eat.” He indicated the urn on the mantelpiece. “There are more numa in there. Take as many as you need.”

“I don’t have any clothes.”

“That is because you were due a new uniform.” He held up a pink tunic. “Congratulations, Paige. You have been promoted.”

That was the first time he used my name.

9 Variety

9

Variety

I had to get out of this place. That was my first thought when I stepped into the bitter cold. Sheol I looked just the same as it did before, just as if Seb had never walked its streets—but I looked different. Instead of white, I wore a pale pink tunic. On my new gilet, the anchor was the same sickly pink. I was stained.

I couldn’t take another test. I couldn’t. If they’d killed a child in the first, what would they do to me in the second? How much blood would be spilled before I was a red-jacket? I had to leave. There had to be some way out, even if I had to dance around land mines. Anything was better than this nightmare.

As I found a path through the Rookery, my right leg weak and heavy, an unfamiliar cold spread through my gut. Each time a performer looked at me, their expression changed. Their features went blank. Their heads went down. My tunic was a warning: turncoat, traitor. Stay away. I am a killer.