I believe her, and yet my first instinct is to guard information carefully—pull it close to my chest and curl my entire body around it. But I fight the urge and answer her question. “I’ll leave early enough that no one will be awake yet. Other than that, I’m not sure there’s a plan to be made. All I have to go on is the address of a shop in the city. If I don’t find anything there, it’s a dead end.”

“But what if you do find something?” she asks. “After seeing that vision of Latham in the Fortress …” She shivers. “Saskia, you can’t go alone.”

Bram tenses beside me. “I’ll go with you.”

“Yes,” Tessa agrees. “Me too.”

“Count me in,” Niklas says.

My chest feels tight. “No, you guys, I can’t put you all in danger.”

“I don’t mind a little danger,” Talon says. “It makes me feel tougher than I am.”

Jacey stabs a piece of roast beef with her fork. “It won’t work. They lock the doors at night.”

“How do you know?” Talon asks.

“My brother almost got expelled for trying to sneak out when he was here a few years ago. The doors were locked, and when he tried to leave, it set off some kind of silent alarm system.”

My heart sinks. “Oh. Well, I guess I do need a plan then.”

“They don’t lock the upper-floor windows,” Jacey says. She pops the meat into her mouth and chews slowly.

Bram shoots her an exasperated look. “Yes, because no one would be stupid enough to try to climb out a window that far from the ground.”

Jacey swallows her food and grins at him. “If they had the right tools, they might be exactly that stupid.” She uses her fork to point at Niklas. “Tell them what you’ve been working on.”

Niklas pushes his hair out of his face. “Bone-carved climbing equipment. For hikers.”

“Or for scaling walls,” Jacey says, her expression triumphant.

Talon blanches, which makes his freckles stand out in even sharper relief against his pale skin. “When I said I didn’t mind a little danger, I meant a very little. Doors are more my style than heights.”

I ignore Talon and lean across the table toward Niklas. “Is that possible? Could you get the tools for us?”

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know, Saskia. It would require sneaking into one of the training rooms and stealing them. I could get in a lot of trouble.”

His uneasy expression should be all the answer I need—Niklas isn’t one to say no without a reason. But I need to find information—some clue about where Latham could have hidden my mother’s bones. And then I need to make him suffer for what he’s done.

“We’ll put the tools back before anyone knows they’re missing,” I say.