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Why?

you lied to me.

About?

you know exactly what. I won’t.

Then I’ll just have to find someone else.

you can’t! you’ll hurt someone.

And if you don’t do this, then I’ll make sure you take the blame. Do you think you’re my only insider?

you can’t. I didn’t. I won’t.

So you keep saying.

if you do this, i’ll tell them the truth.

Will you?

[picture message attached]

you’re a monster.

No, I’m simply following the rules. What will it be, love? It’s entirely your decision.

find someone else. it won’t be me.

Very well, then. It’s your funeral.

—Text message exchange between two prepaid mobiles, 17 January 2024

MY MOTHER DOESN’T LEAVE MY side all evening as I sob miserably into my pillow.

I don’t tell her why I’m crying—I can’t find the words, and even if I tried, I’d have to tell her about Aoife and the ABR, and I already feel like I’m at my breaking point. But once she realizes I don’t want to talk about it, my mom doesn’t push, and instead we curl up together underneath my blanket, and she tells me stories.

Most of them are fictional and only meant to distract me—the plots of books she’s read, movies she half remembers, myths she’s always liked—but inevitably they remind her of something that’s happened in her life, and she veers into the truth. Stories about her childhood that I’ve never heard. About her friends growing up, and how they used to make jewelry to sell at craft fairs and how she designed the covers of all her high school yearbooks. She tells me about her time at Oxford, about the classes she took and the traditions I have to look forward to next year, and Alexander slides in and out of her anecdotes like his presence is as natural as breathing.

I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must at some point, because I start to dream of her life like I’m her. Like my childhood was normal, or as normal as it could be when her own father died when she was three, and like the only thing eighteen-year-old me has to worry about is making it to my next class on time. But in the middle of this montage of memories that aren’t mine, a shrill sound pierces the lecture hall I’m sitting in, spun entirely out of her words and my imagination, and my eyes fly open as my mom and I sit up in the darkness together.

“What is that?” she says, her voice low and sleepy, and I’m relieved she can hear it, too.

“I don’t know,” I say, already wriggling toward the edge of the bed. My limbs are heavy, and my head feels like it’s full of sand, but the screech penetrates my brain like an ice pick. “It almost sounds like a—”

“Miss Bright!”

My bedroom door bursts open, and a protection officer holding a flashlight rushes inside, stopping only a few feet from the bed as he shines the light in our eyes. “Miss Bright—Ms. Bright—we need to go. Now.”

I shrink back, but his free hand is already reaching for my elbow, and he seizes it with the kind of force that makes it clear he’ll drag me if he has to.

“What’s going on?” says my mom, already on her feet.

“There’s a fire in the private apartments,” he says, pulling me upright. “The castle’s being evacuated.”

I stumble across the carpet, my mind fuzzy. My rooms are technically in the visitors’ apartments, but the private ones—

“Maisie,” I gasp, her name caught in my throat, and suddenly everything she said to me flies out of my mind like it was never there at all. “Is she—”