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I’D NEVER CONSIDERED that the loss of someone else’s mother would be so connected to losing my own. Or that that loss would go hand in hand with death, destruction, and a horrifying fate. Nick’s mother, Sel’s, mine. How many mothers has the Order taken?

I want to say something, offer something to Sel, but the tension in his body and the thunder building in his unseeing gaze are all screaming at me to run. Run away before the bomb goes off, before the building explodes.

Suddenly, Sel is on his feet. He paces to the end of the room, the back of his hand pressed hard against his mouth like he doesn’t trust what could come out of himself. It takes everything in me to stay seated when he kicks his closet door and the wood splinters into a boot-shaped hole.

I realize then that I’m watching grief like mine come crashing down on Sel, all at once. The sudden, sharp, all-consuming pain of loss is tearing into him right in front of me. I remember how that felt. I remember how much it hurts. The pages fall from my hand.

I don’t remember standing up. I don’t remember walking to him. I just know that my arm is around his middle. His entire body turns to stone as soon as I touch him, and his smoke-and-whiskey scent swirls around us, heavy and burning, but I don’t let go. “I’m sorry,” I whisper into his spine. He doesn’t answer, but his muscles release the tiniest fraction. I wonder how long it’s been since someone touched him. We stay like that until his breathing slows.

When he finally speaks, his voice is pitched low. “You called me a monster once.”

My arm drops and I pull away, my voice colored with despair. “I was angry. I—I didn’t mean that.”

He turns, and his red-rimmed eyes sweep across my features. After a moment, a shadow crosses his face, and his mouth folds into a small, rueful smile, like he wants to admonish me and call me a liar. I look for tears, but he hasn’t shed them. His eyes take on a faraway, haunted expression. “Maybe you were right. It looks like I came from one.”

I’ve never heard Sel speak this way. So dazed, like he’s not really here in the room with me at all. I want to comfort him, but it feels like it’s not my place to offer comfort in the face of his family history. And yet I’m the reason he knows that history in the first place. I’m the reason he’s standing there, hollow and fractured.

The guilt is enough to choke me.

“?‘So that she may bear an heir…,’?” he whispers, his eyes turned inward. I flinch at the cold language. The hope and expectation that his mother would produce a child—a weapon—for the Order fills me with nauseous horror.

He shudders, and his eyelashes flutter, as if he’s just remembered that I’m standing in front of him. He inhales deeply through his nose and looks over my shoulder at the pile of paperwork behind me. When he exhales, the cold, calculating, distant Sel is back, his analysis curt. “It appears I was lied to, likely for my protection. Which means there was no uchel, no mission. They released her for a time and took her away when she relapsed. I suppose I was too young to see that she was losing herself, or too admiring of her abilities…”

Watching him Holmes his way through his own devastation is almost more than I can take. I open my mouth, but he cuts me off.

“At any rate, she’s alive.” His voice breaks on the revelation. Then he sucks in another breath. “But locked away, has been for years, so she’s not our culprit. And, it seems, I inherited her penchant for paranoia, so perhaps there is no mole at all and never was. As for your quest, your mother may be one of the witnesses.”

I’d already thought of that, of course, but… “Sel—”

He brushes past me. “We should find out what happened to your mother,” he says flatly. He crouches down and pushes the affidavit aside, flipping through the file’s other papers.

I kneel beside him and place a hand on his forearm, ignoring the small sizzle between our skin. He freezes without looking at me, muscles hard beneath my fingers. “Sel.”

His voice drops into a register meant to scare and intimidate. “Don’t.” But I hear the restrained desperation in his voice. A pause. Then, quietly: “Please.”

I recognize that sound. It’s the sound of holding on to a cliff by the edge of your nails. The sound of barely containing a pain so immense that to look at it, to raise your own flesh and examine what’s beneath, is to risk falling into a darkness you know you’ll never escape.

It hits me then, that I’d come all this way for my mother and for the truth, but the pain of existing without her, the deep searing wound in my own chest, hasn’t gotten any better. It has only changed shape.

Wordlessly, I slip my hand from his arm. His shoulders sag, as if he’s just released a heavy weight, and he reaches for the papers again.

“Here.” He taps a stack of papers clipped together. “These are the witnesses who were mesmered. All students. Looks like alphabetical order.”

The first few witnesses in my pile are all white. Psychology student. Football player. Theater kid. Then I flip the page and everything stops when I see her face.

Sel notices my shaking hands. “Did you find her?”

The words don’t come because there are no words.

Her student picture must have been taken when she’d just arrived to campus as an undergraduate, because her features are relaxed and bright with the promise of adventure. The creases at her cheeks and the edges of her eyes, the ones from laughter and time, have yet to form. Her sharp brown eyes stare at the camera as if challenging it in a contest she knew she’d win. Hair permed straight and curled at the ends. Nothing like the short, cropped coils she’d adopted when I was ten.

“I’d almost forgotten what she looked like,” I whisper.

Sel’s voice is gentle. “What does the file say?”

I release a wavering breath and flip to the one-page summary. “?‘Witness Eleven. Faye Ayeola Carter, age nineteen. Sophomore. Biology major, chemistry minor.’?”

Sel lets out a low whistle. “Bio major, chem minor? That sounds painful.”

I hear the quiet pride in my own voice. “That’s a scientist.”

“What else does it say?”

I keep reading. “?‘The Scion of Owain and Squire Harris found Ms. Carter and two other Onceborns (see file names Mitchell and Howard) near the ogof y… ddraig’? What is that?”

“ Ogov uh thrah-eeg ,” he corrects my pronunciation. “The Welsh ‘dd’ is the soft ‘th’ in ‘leather.’ It means ‘cave of the dragon.’ The cave is at the center of the tunnel network. Keep reading.”

“?‘… near the ogof y ddraig, cornered by a hound. Once the creature was killed, the three Onceborns were taken into custody—’?”

Sel sighs in frustration. “I’m sure they came willingly, too, after the shock of seeing a full-corp hellhound. Probably had to knock them out first.” I glare at him, and he shrugs. “It’s protocol.”

I release a steadying breath. “?‘… taken into custody and brought back to the Lodge. Once their memories were altered, Ms. Carter and the others were monitored in chapter custody for one day to assure the mesmer had taken, and released. As with the other witnesses, Ms. Carter will be monitored during her time on campus by Order members and assigned a field Merlin when she graduates.’?”

“What’s the rest?” Sel points to a table under the written summary.

I realize what the table is almost immediately. “Check-ins. They’re all dated like a log, with columns for date, time, location, and a short section for notes.” I point to one of the early rows. “?‘May 1, 1995. 10:31 a.m. Undergraduate library, UNC-CH. Working with Ms. Carter on a group project final for our LING 207 class. Have spent several hours with her this week. Even with some gentle probing about campus events, she does not mention or recall last month’s attack.’?”

Sel hums. “They didn’t just watch her, they tested her. How many entries are there?”

I flip the page. And flip again. And flip again. “There must be dozens of pages here. At least one entry every week for the first year, then once a month after graduation… They kept tabs on her for years .”

“Witness protection,” he murmurs. “Sort of.” He clears his throat and takes the stack from me, thumbing to the very back. “Let’s see what the last entry says.”

I swallow around the lump in my throat. “Okay.”

Sel pauses, his finger resting on the final slip of paper in the back, and dips his head to catch my eye. “This is the last page,” he says, but I hear the meaning behind the words. I know what he’s really asking me: Are you ready?

My heart pounds in my chest, and blood rushes in my ears like an ocean. Am I ready? I’d started this whole mission worried about finding the truth and convinced that nothing could be worse than not knowing. But now?

Sel’s eyes are patient but wary, and no wonder; he’d just learned his own horrible truth.

“Read it.”

“?‘May 13, 2020. 9:18 a.m. Bentonville County Hospital, Bentonville, North Carolina. Ms. Carter was killed in a hit-and-run near her home at 8:47 p.m. last night, May twelfth. I was alerted to her death by a Vassal working in the local police department. In order to confirm Ms. Carter’s death, I assumed the identity of an officer. She leaves behind a husband, Edwin Matthews, and a teenage daughter. As recorded in the enclosed logs, Ms. Carter has never shown any evidence of her memory returning or knowledge of the incidents. As such, she has not, in the past or currently, given cause to pursue containment steps. This is the final entry in Witness Eleven’s file.’?”

Sel passes me the paper, but I wave it away. I can’t touch it.

I can’t breathe.

“Is this the Merlin you saw?”

I drag my eyes back to a small photo clipped to the back of the file. In a single rushing moment, I’m back at the hospital with new details filling in the blanks. Thin mouth, bushy brows, blue eyes. His badge flickering in the light.

Everything inside me pinches and recoils, twists and tightens, until it feels like my entire body is a knot made of lead, heavy and poisonous. A low, pained whine escapes me, ending in a choking sob. I can only nod in answer.

Sel reaches for me, but I squeeze my eyes shut. After that, he doesn’t try to touch me again. “I’m sorry, Bree.”

“That’s it,” I say wearily, a strange numbness flooding my body. A humorless laugh leaves me in a low huff, and I open my eyes. “Now I know.”

I thought that once I had the truth, it would get better. That things would feel right. But they don’t. Everything’s just as wrong, all over again.

I stand and start toward the door.

“Bree, wait.” Sel follows me. “You can sense aether, you can see it, feel it, but you also resist illusion. If mesmer doesn’t work on you, maybe it didn’t work on your mother, either.”

“Yeah.” My throat is tight. “Already thought of that.”

“And?”

“And?” I whip around, fighting back tears. “Don’t you get it? She did the smart thing. The thing I should have done in the first place. She hid. She hid every time one of those Scions or Squires pretended to be her friend and ‘tested’ her. She hid what she knew from everyone for twenty-five years, so this medieval boys’ club, this feudalist fever dream, this whole… fucked-up world of yours could never find her!”

Sel looks like he wants to say something but thinks better of it. Good. Nothing he could say could make this moment better.

My chest feels like it’s imploding. “She hid it from me. Or she tried to. But it didn’t work, because I’m a selfish daughter and I had to come here and dig.”

“Bree, you’re not—” Sel starts, but I don’t let him finish.

The words spill out of my mouth in an angry, sobbing rush. “She didn’t want me to find the Order”—I turn, snarling at Sel—“because she didn’t want me to become your target, but I did anyway.” He flinches, but I don’t care. I tug my shirt down to the still-healing purple bruise on my collarbone from tonight’s trial. “Didn’t want me to get hurt, but I did anyway. I had to barge in with the barest shadow of a plan and no clue what I was doing—” My voice breaks off.

I see words of comfort and repair hovering uselessly on his lips. He wants to help me, but he doesn’t know how.

I do.

The idea unfurls in my mind like a matted, frayed rope thrown down a well. I know, logically, that climbing that rope is a mistake, but in this moment, anything is better than staying here. Anything.

The words fall from my mouth in a desperate whisper. “Take her away.”

Sel looks bewildered. “Who?”

I step toward him. “I don’t want this anymore.” I take another. “I don’t want to feel this anymore.”

Understanding floods his features, and after it a pained, sickened expression. “Bree, no.”

I plead with him, “You can do it. Please. I won’t break the mesmer. I’ll—I’ll let it happen.”

When I reach him, his lips curl in something like disgust. “Don’t ask me that.”

“If I can’t have her, I don’t want to remember her.”

“You don’t mean that,” he hisses.

“Yes, I do!” My eyes swim with tears.

He takes a deep breath, holds his ground. “Even if I wanted to—” He shakes his head. “I’m not powerful enough. The older or more traumatic the memory, the stronger the replacement has to be. Like for like. ‘Memories of equal weight.’?”

Memories of equal weight. There are no memories that could equal this weight. And the last hour has just made them heavier.

I break then. Snap. The tears run hot down my cheeks, and my breathing comes in ragged sobs. Sel watches me with a sad, helpless expression. Almost like he’s worried for me, hurting for me… but if that’s true, it’s another truth I can’t handle.

I open the door and run into the hallway, letting the door slam shut behind me.

Sel lets me go at first. I make it all the way to the foyer and front door before he catches up. I can feel his gaze along the back of my neck. “Leave me alone, Sel.”

He grasps my left shoulder. “You aren’t in any shape to walk home alone.”

I jerk back, but we both know the only reason he lets me go is because he chooses to.

He stands there in the grand foyer, a shadow with searching eyes, and suddenly it all becomes so clear. He was born to this world, for better or for worse. And Nick and the Scions and the Squires and the Pages… they grew up living inside the Order’s legends. Suddenly, all I can see is the hundreds of years of history that don’t belong to me. A war that doesn’t belong to me.

“I never should have come here.”

“Bree—” He reaches for me again right as I open the front door—and come face-to-face with Nick.