I glance at her. “And you know why I stopped.” Why we all stopped, I want to add, but I also don’t want to be that much of a jerk. Truth is, Natalie is judgy and way too beholden to the Order. It’s why she didn’t know about Lily’s boyfriend. It’s why we all worry she’ll run and tell Elite Cain when we aren’t following rules. Her determination to become a commander overrides her wish to have friends.

“I said I was sorry,” she mutters.

“Doesn’t work if you don’t mean it.”

Her frustration is palpable, twisting in the air toward me like a darkling.

“Blake forgave me,” she says through her teeth.

“Because she was about to be sent into exile.”

“Because she knew I didn’t want to turn her in,” Natalie argues. “She was involved with the occult, Shy!”

It was a scandal when it was discovered. Blake was a year older than us and had just entered college when she got tangled up with death-speakers who joined the occult, which is the kind of stuff that happens in New York, not in our close-knit town. She started practicing—small stuff at first, but it quickly got out of control. One night, she came knocking on my door, one of her death-speaker friends dying in her arms. Some spell gone wrong. She asked Mom to help him, and she saved the kid’s life, but she was still suspended because “Valryn are not permitted to administer medical attention to humans.” The only reason Mom wasn’t exiled is because she was technically doing half her job—saving a human soul.

Mom doesn’t blame Natalie for what happened. She says the Order would have found out anyway, and she’s probably right. And maybe I’m not as mad at Natalie as I am at the Order for turning their back on Blake—someone who needed family and friendship more than the cold shoulder.

“I guess I just never thought Blake was capable of deceit,” Natalie says.

Her attitude sets me off.

“There. Right there.” My voice stings the air between us. “That’s where you’re wrong. It’s not that she was capable of deceit. She was helping a friend.”

“The Order doesn’t see it that way, Shy, and whether you like it or not, we’re sworn to uphold their laws. Blake knew that.”

“You keep telling yourself that.”

I turn down a makeshift dirt road and park in a clearing—my usual spot. Natalie and I shift and fly to the Compound. We make our way down white marble halls veined with black toward Elite Cain’s office, our feet thudding against the cold stone like a drumbeat ticking off the minutes until our deaths.