“You told me to come,” I say to Ivan, steadfastly ignoring her. “That I would be safe here. Well, here I am. Now what?”

“Yes,” Claudia says succinctly. “Safe. At great cost to ourselves! By now the Scions know you were desperate to keep something from them by any means, which makes them want it even more. Make no mistake: The killings will accelerate, if only because they know you are alive. Your return is more of a danger to us than if you had truly died!”

I actually blink at the blunt force of her words.

“You have forgotten who you are,” Ivan says gently. “But I have not. I told you to return for your sake, but for ours as well. Your ‘resurrection’ will send a surge through the underground court. It will give them hope. Some who left will return. In that way, Claudia is right. You cannot come back after disappearing if you are unwilling to give them that. Better that you never returned at all.”

“What are you saying?” All this time I had pictured spending my foreseeable future in some underground safe house. Not posing as the Progeny poster child! What can I possibly offer them? Hope? Resurgence? I can’t even summon those things in myself.

“I am saying you are the daughter of Amerie Szabo. By virtue of that fact alone, anything you knew was of interest to the Historian. But this thing that was so great a liability that you had it removed from your memory, it is of interest to us as well.”

“So let me get this straight. I faked my death and erased my memory to keep something from falling into the Historian’s hands. Now that he knows what I did, he’ll let me live long enough to rediscover it—before killing me and harvesting my memory to get it.”

“Or perhaps not even that long, depending on what they think it is,” Piotrek says.

“Noted. Meanwhile, you want it, because if the Historian wants it that badly, it might be useful to you.”

“To us,” Ivan says quietly. “You . . . are one of us.”

“But every minute I’m with you puts you in danger. Which is why you won’t help me unless I’m willing to undo everything I did. Why? Because you don’t trust my reasons?”

“No,” Ivan says. “Because the stakes are far higher. Had you stayed dead, we would have mourned you, and you would have achieved your goal. But now, as Utod and Scion alike learn you are alive, everything has changed. The Historian will not rest until he discovers what you were so intent on keeping from him. Which is why we must find it first.”