“Close your eyes,” she commanded tersely, so I did, and thunder rumbled loud enough to shake the room. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

“I was in Isarna–”

“You don’t need to say it,” she said, cutting me off. “Just hold it in your mind.”

Riding in the carriage, pulled by Tralla horses on the island of Isarna, the museum in Öhaus with the bedazzled fox skull, kissing Pan in my hotel room, the lined face of Indu as he told me that he was my father—

—and then it was pain cracking through my skull, and I cried out. I flinched, unable to stop myself, and the pain subsided.

“I told you to lie still,” Sunniva said flatly.

Tove scoffed. “Sunniva, she’s in pain.”

“The process can hurt,” she said, sounding only slightly sympathetic. “But it’s the only way I know how to do this.”

I opened my eyes, only for a moment, and Sunniva’s dark brown eyes were glowing silver as she scowled down at me.

“I need you to go back to the memory, the one you were on when it started to hurt,” she commanded.

I took a fortifying breath and pushed through the fog of my mind. Indu’s face smirking at me shifted to a young woman with his blue eyes under thick eyebrows. My sister Noomi.

The pain flared again, a crackling expanding inside my skull, but I gritted my teeth and focused on Noomi. She was glaring at me through the iron bars, and her mouth was moving, but the words came out slightly delayed, sounding far away and warbled.

“Why do you hate me so much?” I asked her emptily.

“I hate you because you exist,” she said coldly.

My head felt like it was going to explode, and I groaned in pain.

“Stay with it,” Sunniva said firmly. “I know it hurts, but I need you to stay in it.”

Noomi’s face appeared before me again, but it was different, from another day. Bold stripes of cobalt blue across her eyes and bloodred on her narrow lips. Her hair was plaited tight to her scalp, woven with strips of leather.

“Is it time to go?” I asked.

“There’s been a change of plans,” she said with a wicked smile.

“You can’t just take her!” Dagny said, and despite her conviction, her words were soft and far away, like they were being carried on the wind.

But then cuffs were on my wrists, made of a strange oxidized metal that left it more jade than copper. They were heavy, far heavier than they’d looked in Noomi’s hands, and the metal burned my skin.

“Where are you taking her?” That was Pan in the prison cell across from mine, his face pressed against the bars, an arm outstretched through the narrow gap between them.