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Before he could turn the handle, she changed her mind and grabbed his arm.

“Hey. Did anyone tell her? About being on the List?”

Vikram frowned, then shook his head. “No, cousin. I have not told any of the others yet. I thought it better to wait… until your mother is perhaps more acclimated.”

Dante nodded.

Reluctantly, she released his arm, realizing at least part of her asking had been a stall tactic. But Vikram was already opening the door.

Turning the handle, he swung it wide, exposing the inside of a very plain-looking cabin.

It looked identical to how Dante’s cabin looked when she first came on board, but Dante personalized hers a lot in the time since. Like right now, her cabin walls were covered in printouts from the Lists, generally the portions she was working on that day.

She’d mark out the ones they found, using a color code she worked out with Vik and Jaden. “Red for dead,” Jaden joked when they sat down with the markers over lunch that day. Green for alive and on the ship. Blue for alive and not on the ship.

Black for alive and unreachable because they were in a Shadow city.

Purple for unknown.

Something about having that physical version mapped out on her wall reassured her. It also made the people behind those Lists seem more real, especially after she tracked them down and could tape pictures next to the names.

Vik had the Lists on his walls, too.

She didn’t know about Jaden, since she’d never been to his room.

A lot of the seers had that sword and sun symbol on their wall, or pictures of other seer deities. Vikram had Hindu images by his bed, and on his dresser. He seemed particularly fond of the dancing god with the elephant head.

So yeah––it had been a while since she’d seen one of these cabins stripped down to its bare-bones basics.

Metal table, pretty much blank of anything. A mirrored panel that had been programmed into the wall. A gray blanket on the room’s couch. A bolted down gunmetal-gray chair in front of the desk. The door to the head. A monitor over the single bed––

Doing a double take, Dante stared at the bed.

Two people were on it.

Not one, two.

And Dante recognized both of them.

“What in the name ofshit-bleed storms of the godsis this?” she shouted.

She didn’t really notice she’d done the swearing part in Prexci.

When she yelled it, though, her mom started violently, her cheeks blooming bright red even as her eyes widened comically in her face. Well, itmighthave been comical, if it hadn’t been for the rest of it, including Vikram’s shocked face as he stared at Dante.

“Cousin!” he murmured incredulously. “Language… please.”

Dante barely heard him.

Instead, she stared at her mom, fuming.

Her mother looked back at her, still surprised, but her dark eyes held additional things now: annoyance, a barely suppressed joy at seeing her, what might have been guilt.

Loki, the guy her mom had been tongue-macking with––likefive secondsearlier––looked one hundred percent mortified, even as he hastily acquiesced to Dante’s mother’s attempts to extricate her body from his. Given that he’d been lying on her, half-wrapped around her with various limbs and other parts of their two bodies, the process took a few seconds.

Somehow, it was him, Loki, who got the brunt of Dante’s wrath.

“You goddamnediceblood!”she exploded in English.