A half hour ago, I was in the clutches of a heavy sleep and beautiful dream: Luka and I were together in a small flat and it was morning. He was sipping coffee and I was drinking tea, each of us on a laptop. That’s it. A stunningly mundane morning with no threat of death, without looking over our shoulders. We were online, checking news and e-mail, maybe a blog. Something I can’t fathom today, where the burner phone in my pocket becomes a ticking time bomb with each successive use.

I glance toward the rumpled bed, where he held me through the night, curled beneath the covers. The sight of it makes the dream fade more quickly with each passing moment. Especially in this subterranean room; the flat in my dreams was filled with windows.

*  *  *

By the time we leave, my heart is trilling against my rib cage like a hummingbird’s. I adjust my mask, brush back the chains of a gold hairpiece protruding from my ornate blue wig like chopsticks stuck in a bowl of chop suey.

My kimono offers little defense against the first chill of fall, and I imagine I have difficulty breathing in the wide obi lashed around my middle. Luka takes me by the elbow to keep me from stumbling on the cobbles. He’s dressed all in black, as he has been every night, a long coat brushing the tops of his boots.

“Remember,” he murmurs. “You’re valuable—very valuable—to them.”

I nod, twine gloved fingers with his.

Claudia, ahead of me in an elaborate peacock mask, has been silent all evening. The bustle of her short skirt rides her rump like a beehive before cascading to the ground behind her. In fact, the whisper of her hems behind her clicking heels is all I’ve heard from her since leaving the flat.

She’s said Tibor has been known to send people away. Has she already written me off for a second time? I don’t miss that she’s clinging to Piotrek’s arm as though an invisible hand might snatch him from her side at any moment.

We’ve gone to court by a different route each night. But even without the whispered instructions from the Progeny actor—tonight, a medieval priest—I would know the general direction blind. Can already sense those gathered deep in the hillside of Tuskanac forest from here.

I stare, dumbfounded, the moment we enter.

The court has nearly doubled in size.

But there’s something else. The tenor of these caverns has changed. The electric pulse that buoyed me onto shoulders just last night has coalesced into one heaving drone. The frozen expressions of the masks seem macabre and menacing, the eyes behind them fixed in a single direction: mine.

My first thought is that I should never have brought Luka with me—that I need to get him out.

My second is that it’s too late.