“I don’t,” Zezili said, and she found the conviction in her own voice very comforting. “Ask about your Seeker Sanctuary. Ask where your friends are now.”

Zezili went to bed. She lay awake for hours, staring at the spiders crawling across the ceiling, each as big as her palm. She should have known Isoail would have a living double on the other side. If she couldn’t destroy the mirror, perhaps she could still help Zezili find Anavha. They could open a door here, and Zezili could spend… how long? How long would she look for him, before her Empress gave her up for dead or had her friends over there murder her for treason?

No. If the Empress destroyed her, she wanted to take something with her.

When she finally slept, Zezili dreamed Anavha was scratching on the door, his head covered in a hood of fine spiders’ silk. When she woke, a hooded form stood over her. Fear seized her. She grabbed the sword next to her bed.

Isoail threw back the hood of her coat. She looked pale and distraught in the early morning light.

“They came for the girl,” she said, “and brought me a message by sparrow, from the Sanctuary. It had died on the way. A tirajista with the enforcers kept it in tissue paper.”

“And?”

“I want to know what the Empress really has planned for us.”

“I thought you might,” Zezili said. “But if we’re going to destroy the new world they’re building, we need to figure out how to get there.”

“How would I know where this mirror is?”

“You don’t have to know. I know where it is.”

“Do you?”

“Right here,” Zezili said. “You said you always open a door to the same place? You say the easiest place to come through is here? Maybe the easiest place for you to build a gate to over there is the best place for them to put a mirror, too.”

“That is a great leap in logic.”

“I’m full of leaping today. But the bigger question is how we get you over there when your other self is still alive.”

“We don’t have to get me over,” Isoail said.

“Why not?”

“The girl,” Isoail said.

“What, from last night? What about her?”

“The girl could break the mirror if she knew the pattern.”

“Why?”

“She may not be my daughter here, but there… well. I went over our conversation many times last night. You believe I was the one who made this mirror, this great gate, over there. If that’s so, I can untangle it. And so can a very close blood relation, if they are gifted and know the pattern I used to create it. Sometimes they are able to see the pattern and unravel–”

Zezili threw off her blankets. The room was cold. “Let’s get her, then.”

“We can’t,” Isoail said.