He slams a hand against the wall. “This is what the Protectorate did. It was their job to keep it all together. To know where the safe zones were—to figure out how to survive. We have their books and their notes. We have their maps and letters. We know everything they knew about trying to make this world work so we could live in it.”

I back away from him slowly, putting the heft of a table between us. “Maybe there’s some place out there that’s not on the map.” I scramble for some ledge of hope to hold on to—some proof that we’re not all slowly disappearing. “Maybe there’s still somewhere safe the Protectorate kept secret. They had to go somewhere after the Rebellion.”

I sweep my arm around the room at desks covered in paper. “Maybe they got information about somewhere that beat back the Unconsecrated—we just need to figure out what it is. Maybe it’s still in here.” Ox simply shakes his head as I start tearing through the desks looking for something, anything.

Finally, he puts a hand on my arm as I’m sifting through pages, tossing them onto the floor—some of them so old they crumble in my fingers. “It’s impossible in this world.” He says it gently, but there’s an undercurrent of anger, frustration and despair.

“We’re surviving,” I protest, not wanting to believe what he’s saying. Wanting him to be wrong.

He looks at me, so sad. “That’s what I brought you here to see,” he says. He walks over to the map where our island is clearly visible, a green pin stuck firmly in the lower end of it for the Dark City and another pin to the north for the Neverlands. A thick line bisects the two where the Palisade wall was built between them long ago.

He sorts through the pins scattered on the desk until he finds two black ones and sticks them both in the island. One for the Dark City and the other for the Neverlands. It’s such a final gesture that I can barely breathe. In a second he’s wiped out almost everything I’ve ever known.

He then collects a handful of silver-topped pins. “There’s one more color,” he says, pushing pin after pin into the map, all through the Neverlands and the river and across onto the mainland.

I don’t even have to ask. I know what he’s doing. “Silver means horde,” I say evenly. “It represents the horde.”