I thought of Julian in his dark cellar and thought of Liss, shivering in her shack. She didn’t have a bed. She didn’t have anything. It wasn’t nice in here, but it was far warmer and cleaner than the Rookery. And safer. I had stone walls to protect me from the Emim. All she had were tattered curtains.

As I hadn’t been given nightclothes, I stripped to my underwear. There was no mirror, but I could see I was losing weight. Stress, flux poisoning, and a lack of nutritious food were already taking their toll. I dimmed the lamp and slid between the sheets.

I hadn’t felt tired before, but I found myself dozing. And thinking. Thinking of the past, of the strange days that had led me to this place. I thought back to the very first time I met Nick. It was Nick who put Jaxon and me in contact. Nick, the man who saved my life.

When I was nine, shortly after I came to England, my father and I left London and went south for what he called a “business trip.” He had to put our names on a waiting list in order for us to leave the citadel. After months of waiting, we were finally allowed to visit my father’s old friend Giselle. She lived on a slanted, cobbled hill, in a sugar-pink house with a roof that hung over the windows. The surrounding land reminded me of Ireland: open, sumptuous beauty, wild and untamed nature, everything that Scion had destroyed. At sunset, when my father wasn’t looking, I would climb up to the roof and tuck myself against the tall brick chimney. I would stare out at the hills, at the reams of trees under the sky, and I would remember my cousin Finn and the other ghosts of Ireland, and I would miss my grandparents so terribly it hurt. I had never understood why they didn’t come with us.

But what I wanted was open water. The sea, the wondrous sea, the glittering road that stretched to the free lands. It was over the sea that Ireland waited to bring me home—back to the ashen meadow, to the cloven tree of the rebels’ song. My father promised we would see it, but he was too busy with Giselle. They always talked deep into the night.