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“I don’t want tea! I need to see her,” the red-head yells, thrashing her naked hips up and down.

Milo shoves in next to me, sharing the view through the grate, our shoulders smashed together. He tips his head against mine, his fair hair brushing my forehead.

A scrawny man in a gray jumpsuit makes his way out one door and across the atrium, pushing a wooden cart stocked with tea cups and a teapot, clattering and clunking over the uneven stones. A gray drape hangs from the edges of the cart down to the wheels below. The man moves slowly, following the unnecessary stone path despite the urgency in Ash’s call, licking his lips every other step. He parks the cart, squats and pulls open the drape, revealing a row of sacks on the lower level of the cart.

“Malachite!” Milo inhales sharply. “That’s the new elixir. I recognize the sacks. I packed them myself.”

With heaping spoonfuls of yellow powder, the worker distributes the contents of the sack among the teacups, following with steaming water and the swirl of a metal stirring rod that mixes the falling rain in too.

Ash takes a teacup off the cart, grabs the woman’s chin and forces open her screaming mouth, pouring the tea down herthroat while she fights against the chains. In under a minute, the woman’s crying stops. Her body droops. Her thighs fall to the side, mouth hanging open.

“Why would they give the elixir to her? I thought it didn’t work on Vaile,” I ask.

“It’s supposed to be used for medical emergencies, not to shut up women who want to hold their newborns. They gave her enough to put five hundred Hollows into a stupor.”

We watch as every woman is forced to drink the tea, becoming limp and lifeless, drugged into submission. The picture is clear—following every ear-splitting birth, the babies are severed from their mother’s arms before the silence-inducing elixir tea is given.

This isn’t right. Even if the babies are dying, the mothers aren’t given a chance to say goodbye, to feel, no matter how painful.

“We have to stop this.” Bands of injustice tighten around me.

“Ever…” Milo nudges my shoulder with his. “We can’t do anything right now. We’re locked up and wanted dead.”

Like Kelt. My top priority. I bury my head in my arms.

A late-hour lull settles around us. The women are quiet, pacified despite their empty arms. The double doors open, and the Centress sweeps straight across the atrium with a handful of guards in black jumpsuits behind her. She ignores the stone pathways, leaving a trail of mangled red flowers and trampled moss in her wake. Her hair follows her in black waves down the back of her forest-green dress. It sticks to her trim middle andwide hips, flaring out from her thighs down. The rain rolls right off it.

“She came.” I shut my eyes, trying to get the memories and pain of that day at the temporary school out of my head.

Milo taps his fingers in the rainwater now overflowing from the gap under the door and into the room where we lie belly-down on the floor, watching through the grate again. She’ll probably kill him for helping Eli hide me.

The Centress scans the atrium. “Where did you put them?”

“They’re locked in a birthing room,” a guard says.

“Take me to them.”

I reach for Milo’s hand and squeeze it.

“Centress Oreyla—” Ash, in the blood-splattered gray jumpsuit, steps forward and dips her head. “The carriage will be leaving soon. We need you to choose the babies first so there’s time to load them up. And one more is coming.”

The Centress stops, reluctant fists at her sides. “Right. Remove the blankets. Let’s get on with it.”

Ash enters a room behind her. Each baby taken from its mother is in a nest of blankets inside a basket and lined up in a row on the floor.

“Only four will be returned as surviving babies tonight. Take the rest of them to the carriage and inform each mother their baby didn’t make it,” the Centress says.

Ash nods and leans over the first baby, blocking our view. When she pulls back, the swaddle is loose, exposing its tiny chest. The Centress reaches up to the collar of her dress, tucks her hand inside and produces a necklace. She squats in front of the first basket, dress puddling around her, and stays there, her back to us while the baby wails.

Then all the babies cry.

Minutes pass, and the Centress rises, necklace still clutched in her hand. We can’t hear anything except each other over theceaseless cries of all the babies at once. We can only watch as she moves on to the next one with her necklace, emotionless. Ash whisks the first basket away, a loaded syringe in hand.

“What is she doing with her necklace…and why a syringe?” I ask, wrapping a hand around my own necklace, the other still holding tight to Milo.

“I don’t know. The carriages go to the falls and dump the elixir into the water supply. Why would she put babies in them?”

“I’m not the one to ask, Milo. But they’re lying to the mothers about their babies dying.”