Page 153 of Silvercloak

“I want to trust you,” he said. “It’s just … Alucia …”

Saffron’s heart split open like a log beneath a woodaxe. “I know. Thank you for not letting your father kill me.”

He tilted her chin upward with his golden hand, and touched his lips to hers so tenderly it almost broke her. He pulled back a hair’s breadth, as though about to say something, then decided against it.

“Let’s go,” he muttered, rearranging his cloak in a way Saffron now recognized as a nervous tic.

She followed him down the tunnel. The passageways were dug out like the spokes of a wheel, meeting in the center before spanning back out to each individual shack. Saffron wondered why they didn’t connect each shack in a wider circle, but since every part of this settlement was built with defense in mind, she assumed there was a grander reason.

A pattern emerged in which they’d go down each spoke to the center, then back up the next one until they reached the trapdoor at the end. They’d hover silently beneath each trapdoor for a few moments and then repeat the process.

“What are you looking for?” Saffron asked, after the fourth trapdoor remained sealed shut.

Levan rubbed at his temple. “Miret taught me about the energy fields created while casting spells. How tofeelthem and follow them like a kind of sixth sense. It’s taken practice, but I can home in on that energy. It’s not a sound or a heat or a smell or a sight, but … I can’t describe it. There are skirmishes going on above us, and it’s all overlapping. But I’m looking for a constant thrum from whoever’s casting the perimeter dome. If we can incapacitate them, we canportariout.”

Up the sixth wheel spoke, Levan found the sensation he sought.

“Here,” he mouthed, pointing upward at the trapdoor.

Dread lurched up Saffron’s gullet.

With little hesitation, Levan climbed up the rope ladder. It was identical to the one beneath his family’s old shack, and Saffron finally realized the purpose of the wheel layout. It was intentionally disorienting, a purposeful scrambling of the internal compass, difficult to know which shack you lurked beneath. If you could simply move around an outer circle, it would be far easier for intruders to track their whereabouts.

Manually lifting the trapdoor only an inch or two, Levan pushed his head up high enough to see through the crack, then positioned his wand in the gap.

“Sen debilitan,” Levan shot out.

There was a muffled grunt, and then the sound of nothing.

Had Saffron been wrong? Was there only one Silvercloak in each shack?

Levan climbed the rest of the way into the room and gestured for Saffron and Rasso to follow.

Stock-still in the center of the room, blocking off the fireplace, was Detective Fevilan, a gas mask fitted around her nose and mouth, sandy hair falling into her pale eyes as she strained against the paralyzing spell Levan had cast upon her. Saffron wondered why he wasn’t casting to kill. To protect her, perhaps, from the hell of seeing her friends slaughtered.

Behind Fevilan, crouching in the hearth of an ashen fireplace, was Detective Tenébo Jebat, also in a gas mask, pointing up through thechimney and trembling with visible effort from holding the perimeter dome. Saffron could almost detect what Levan meant by the energy field. It was somewhere between a hum and a vibration, a pitch and a heat and a magnetic draw.

Levan moved around Fevilan to get a better shot at Jebat, who was trapped in the small space and unable to defend himself while maintaining the effortful dome.

“Sen debilitan.”

It struck true.

Every inch of Jebat trembled against the bounds of the cruel curse, and there was a shudder overhead as the perimeter dome crumbled to nothing.

“Let’s just get out,” Saffron muttered. There was still a chance that the Silvercloaks would round up the Bloodmoons, even without the perimeter dome, and a large, traitorous part of her didn’t want Levan to go down with them. “The two of us. Now.”

Maybe he could escape. She’d help him flee, hide, arrange exile.

But Levan seemed not to have heard her. Instead, he crouched by the fireplace, studying Jebat’s immobilized face. The detective—in his fifties, and nearing retirement—had deep brown Sinyi skin with a craggy, pocked texture. The gas mask was slightly too tight, puckering the flesh around it. Levan ripped it off, revealing Jebat’s gold-and-ruby septum piercing and horror-frozen mouth.

“Who told you about this mission?” Levan pointed his wand at Jebat’s lips. “Ans oriloquan.”

The spell he’d used to loosen Saffron’s tongue after sex.

She didn’t know what she wanted more: for Jebat to betray her, or for him to stay silent. Because Saints knew what Levan did to people who stayed silent.

“I don’t know,” Jebat spat out in an odd, stiff tone. The rest of his body stayed immobilized. “Orders are orders.”