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As soon as Levan cast a new spell, the protective bubbles around their mouths evaporated, but the purple mist hadn’t infiltrated the shack yet.

They could breathe freely—as could the other Bloodmoons, providing they’d also made it inside a shack, but anyone still in the open air beneath the perimeter dome would be vulnerable.

Saffron hoped a few stragglers might be picked off by the Silvercloaks this way, tipping the odds more squarely into the Order’s favor.

“After you,” Levan muttered, gesturing to the opening.

And what else could she do but obey?

Rasso leapt blithely into the chasm in the floor, unmistakably familiar with this strange locale.

Saffron imagined Levan—and his brother ?

—chasing the beast around the surrounding woods as laughing children, mere miles from where Saffron herself had floated around Lunes on a flying carpet.

With even the smallest detour, their paths could so easily have crossed.

Saff sank to the ground with a click of her knees, swinging her legs over the edge and finding the top rung of the ladder with her left boot. She lowered herself down until her feet found the soft, damp earth at the bottom, then turned to see nothing but blackness stretching out before her.

Levan dropped to the ground behind her, muttering an illumination spell. His wand lit like a candle, flickering white light over his face.

Saints, he was beautiful. Even now, his eyes shadowed and weary, his skin rough with stubble, the scar bisecting his lip somehow starker than ever.

Now they were alone, he took a step toward her, cupping her jaw with his palm. Urgency played out in his eyes, an undeniable plea, a question loaded with dread.

“Was it you, Silver?” he murmured, voice coarse and hollow.

“No,” she whispered, stomach flipping over, but she knew he’d see right through it—if he wanted to.

“You’re the only one who knew the plan in advance.”

She swallowed, forcing herself to keep meeting his blazing stare. “They must’ve been watching the portari gates.”

“And that would’ve given them enough time to pull together a squad of at least eleven?”

“They were likely waiting to move on your father the second he left the wards. They’ll have an arrest warrant now, thanks to the killings on the docks. The twelve—because they move in sixes—would have been on standby.”

Deep down, Saffron suspected there were twenty-four. Four whole tac teams. There’s no way they’d split up one-by-one and go into each shack alone.

The Bloodmoons were vastly outnumbered.

Hope smoldered in Saffron’s chest—surely, surely this time the Bloodmoons would not weasel free—and yet it was tempered with something sad, something bitter, something that only intensified when Levan rested his forehead against hers.

“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 to feel them 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 can portari out. ”

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 the chimney 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.”

Levan’s jaw clenched. “Who. Told. You?”

“Orders. Are. Orders.”

With an impatient sigh, Levan pulled up Jebat’s silver sleeve and pressed his wand tip to the veined stretch of wrist. “You’ll lose a hand.”

Jebat’s eyes blazed. “I don’t know. ”

Levan’s grip on Jebat’s forearm tightened, and he dug the wand tip even more harshly into the wrist, but the cruel words Saffron was waiting for—the cruel words she uttered herself two days ago—never came.

Instead, Levan looked down at his own golden hand, as though remembering the sheer agony of it, and his eyes pressed closed. His chest rose and fell, steeling himself, and Jebat watched with unbridled terror and hatred in his stare. Waiting for the pain.

But then Levan opened his eyes, and that dead expression was back behind them.

There was a wordless exchange between them, coiled with some unnamed force.

Then Jebat said, calmly, willingly, as though he had never resisted at all:

“Aspar has an undercover Silvercloak in the Bloodmoons. I don’t know who, but they’re close to you.”

What—?

No.

The thing that sucked all the air from the room was not that Jebat had all but confirmed Levan’s suspicion of her. It was not that he had essentially signed her death warrant.

It was that he had suddenly dropped all resistance entirely.

The world rearranged itself around a singular shattering realization.

Levan was a Compeller.