“This afternoon. Gather whatever you need.” He made a dismissive motion with one hand. “I will call you when the time comes.”

“What I don’t understand,” Alice said to Ashes as they climbed the stairs toward her room, “is why he doesn’t go himself.”

“The same reason he hardly ever leaves the house. He’s afraid of the other Readers. None of them trust the others farther than they can spit. Getting two of them in one place is the next best thing to starting a fight already. If you tried to gather five or six, there’d be nothing left but a smoking crater. That’s why they have apprentices.”

Ashes rubbed his head against her ankle as she stopped in front of her door. “Look, no offense, but you’re pretty young as apprentices go. You’ve got a lot of talent, but there’ll be stronger kids than you in the group. You just need to go along for the ride.”

Alice paused, with her hand on the latch. “Then why’s he sending me at all?”

“To keep an eye on the others, of course.” Ashes sniffed. “And maybe to make sure you’re properly scared, in case you ever get ideas about trying what Jacob did. But it’s not justice that they’re mostly concerned with, it’s division of the loot. All you apprentices are mostly there to watch one another and make sure nobody tries to sneak anything out.”

It took a moment for Alice to process this. Her head was still spinning, and she shook it to try and clear some of the cobwebs.

“Wait here. I’ve got to change.”

Ashes, obedient for once, curled up against the opposite wall. Alice shut the door behind her and leaned against it, trying to make sense of things.

Her little room hadn’t changed much since she’d first arrived. The two stuffed rabbits, all she had left of the old house where she’d live with her father, still kept their silent vigil on the windowsill. She went over and pulled one of them into her lap.

She could refuse to go, she supposed, but Geryon would punish her—she wasn’t quite sure how; she’d never truly made him angry, but her imagination could supply particulars all too readily—and the wayward apprentice, Jacob, would be hunted down anyway.

And, though it made her uncomfortable to be part of a . . . a posse, like in some cinema Western, she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t want to go. There may be something in Esau’s fortress that can tell me the truth about my father. Some record, or one of his creatures. This could be my only chance.

Once the Readers had divvied up his treasures, like the creditors who’d swooped in on her father’s house after his ship went down, she’d never be able to find what she was looking for.