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He frowned, heading for the ridge.

“Stop him!” Zeinab ordered in an urgent rasp, her gag pulled down once more. “Now!”

Ellie’s throat went dry with an instinctive panic. Her mind whirled for a solution that wouldn’t get them all killed. “How?”

“You could pretend to faint,” Constance offered helpfully.

“Or throw a rock at his testicles,” Jemmahor countered darkly.

Everyone stared at the apprentice midwife in surprise.

“What?” she shot back unapologetically. “You do not think that he deserves it?”

Ellie considered the options—with a pang of yearning over the lack of any potentially incendiary materials on hand.

Her train of thought was rudely interrupted by the bruised, dashing American beside her as he shouted across the night at the top of his substantial lungs.

“Hey, you cold-blooded bastard! How about you and I have a word?”

Everyone froze, from the crewmen carrying buckets of red sludge to the Al-Saboors with their rifles.

Jacobs stopped at the base of the cliff he was about to climb—and slowly turned back.

“Are you mad?” Ellie hissed to Adam. “Or have you forgotten that your hands are bound and you have no machete!”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Adam replied.

Ellie wasn’t so sure. Jacobs had hesitated, but he was still at the base of the ridge. He narrowed his eyes as though considering Adam’s request.

He turned away and began to climb.

“Not even about what you saw in that damned mirror?” Adam called after him boldly.

Jacobs went very, very still.

A chill crept over Ellie’s skin.

What you saw in that mirror…

There was only one mirror that mattered—the one that had lurked in the darkness beneath Tulan. A mirror that did not show reflections. A mirror that Ellie had destroyed.

Her own dark memories of that obsidian eye swirled up from the place where she had tried to bury them.

The soft plink of water in a pristine washroom. A gold-eyed woman with a scar on her cheek.

The history of an empire spilling into her brain like a rain of fire.

Tell me what you want.

“But Jacobs never used the mirror,” Ellie pressed unsteadily.

Adam replied without looking at her. His eyes were locked on Jacobs, who stared at him with dangerous focus from across the ledge. “I made him bleed. It’s how I knew where to find my knife—but Jacobs got a face full of that smoke as well.”

Blood. Mirror. Smoke. Ellie knew what that trinity had meant inside the hollow space beneath the city of the gods.

“But what would he have seen?” Ellie gasped, reeling.

Even as she asked the question, the answer echoed in her ears, murmuring in the voice of a mischievous old priest.