The Paper Magician

CHAPTER 11



EVEN IN THE DARKNESS she could see the anger blazing in those eyes, feel them pierce her like two jagged shards of glass. Emery’s forearm pressed even harder into her collar with an almost painful strength. Black hair like shadows drooped over his forehead. The shield chain must not have recognized the pressure, for it did nothing to help her.

And suddenly Ceony stood on the other side of the office, Emery’s arm gone from her chest. She gripped the side of a long desk for support. She had moved, but Emery remained where he had been, only instead of Ceony pinned against the wall, it was Lira—a younger Lira, her dark hair in loose ringlets over her shoulders, but her face still held a touch of familiar hardness.

“How dare you!” Emery seethed, almost shouting. The venom in his words hit Ceony’s ears like hammers and shook her bones. It jarred her to hear such harshness from the paper magician’s lips. “Do you even understand what all this means?”

“Get off of me!” Lira shouted back.

Emery conceded only a few inches of space. Still clutching the folded Fennel in her hands, Ceony edged toward them.

“Three days with no word. No word!” Emery hissed, his hands flying through the air like striking cobras. His shoulders tensed and made his neck look shorter. “And now you’re a suspect in the Fr?ulein’s disappearance!”

Lira’s eyes widened.

Emery grabbed fistfuls of his hair and looked away for a moment—those boiling eyes passed over Ceony, but didn’t see her. Unlike the Emery Thane in the Anglican church, this one was fully incorporated into the vision, unaware of Ceony’s presence. Spinning back on Lira, Emery said, “And you don’t even know. How have you not heard, Lira? Where have you been?”

“Does it matter?” she asked, her voice just as sharp as his, but her words touched the air with frost, not fire. “I’m not your dog, Emery!”

“Do you think it’s not my business when my wife vanishes without a trace?” Emery asked, flabbergasted. A loud crash made Ceony jump, and it wasn’t until she squinted that she saw Emery’s fist against the wall, the paint cracked around his knuckles.

“Emery,” Ceony whispered.

He pulled his hand back, wincing, and turned to Lira. “It’s Grath Cobalt, isn’t it?” he asked, half angry and half hurt. The emotions rolled over him like thunder, the lightning flashing behind those fierce eyes. He rubbed his sore knuckles like they were his own heart.

“Leave him out of it,” Lira snapped.

Emery grabbed Lira’s shoulders and shook her. “This is Excision you’re dabbling in, Lira! Damn it, it’s Excision! What excuses could you possibly assign it? Have you turned your back on everything good and right in the world already?”
     



The room heaved as Lira’s hand sailed across Emery’s face. Ceony’s shoulder hit the office door—she had retreated from them and had run out of space, gaping as silvery light from the office’s one window highlighted their persons. This wasn’t the Emery Thane Ceony knew—his motions so sharp, his voice so commanding and hard. It scared her.

She fumbled for the doorknob behind her with a clammy hand, turned it, and fell onto her back.

She landed on cool, wet grass, a murky, overcast sky spread in even swathes above her. Soft half droplets of rain pelted her face and she quickly rolled over, protecting Fennel from the moisture. Cold air made her skin prickle and sent chills through her upper arms. Tucking Fennel beneath her shirt, Ceony pushed herself onto her knees, swiped a mess of rain- and sweat-dampened hair from her forehead, and took in her surroundings.

A flat lawn with no trees or gardens greeted her. A redbrick building that almost looked like a schoolhouse without a bell loomed far in the distance. No path led to it, but Ceony spied a cobbled road winding through the landscape far to her right. To her left stood several gray slate buildings with gabled roofs and no windows or chimneys. Too small to be homes. They looked like sepulchers, the homes of the dead.

Ceony found her legs and stood, her bag tugging at her shoulder. She switched it to the other side.

Standing gave her enough height for her eyes to find rows of neatly spaced indentations in the ground, each with its own cement plaque engraved with names and dates. Some had soggy or dead bouquets of flowers resting upon them. One had a small stuffed lamb, no larger than Ceony’s hand, soaked through with rain.

Ceony did not frequent cemeteries. They were such sad places. Even the heavens thought so, for they wept steadily above her.

Nearly five years had passed since Ceony last trod among graves.

Ceony reached back for the office door, despite knowing it wouldn’t be there. A chill in her arms drilled into her breast and stomach. “Not here,” she whispered, shivering. She hugged herself. “I don’t want to know what’s here, Emery. Please.”

But the scene didn’t warp or shift. The cemetery awaited her, quiet as snowfall, the accompanying drizzle soaking through her blouse.

Chewing on her bottom lip, Ceony trekked to the cobbled road and followed it up a shallow hill. Fatigue finally dragged at her legs. What time was it? How long had she been inside Emery’s heart? How long did she have left? She had no pocket watch, nothing to answer her questions. She imagined, by her weariness, that it had grown late . . . though her run-in with Lira and her scramble between chambers would be enough to tire anyone.

She pulled some cheese from her bag and ate it slowly, her stomach too tight for anything more. In the back of her mind she heard Emery’s voice looping like a disc stuck in a phonograph, betrayal and anger lacing his words. If this chamber turned out to be what she thought it was, Ceony wanted to leave as soon as possible.

The cobbled road stretched up and over a small hill, and off to its left side Ceony spied a small gathering of people dressed all in black—two men in black suits, a preacher with a white-and-black collar, and four women in long black dresses, three of whom wore broad hats and netted veils over their faces. She approached them slowly, sore legs trudging up the wet slope. One of the men turned to a woman and whispered something in her ear. Ceony knew the man—the beekeeper—though he looked different. Perhaps it was merely the sorrow lining his features that changed him, but he looked drawn. Tired. The beekeeper. Emery’s father. A jolt of panic shot through Ceony’s torso.

Finding a new store of energy, Ceony jogged the rest of the way to the gravesite. Surely this wasn’t Emery’s grave! No person’s heart could know the future, could it?

She froze mid-stride, only a few paces from the gravesite. Unless this isn’t the future, she thought. What if she was too late? What if Emery had already . . .

Biting her lower lip, Ceony phased through the women, none of them sensing her presence, and faced two clean graves above two fresh mounds of dirt.

Between them stood a little boy no older than three holding a tiny bowler hat to his stomach. Rain weighed on his loose black curls and plastered the strands to his forehead, temples, and ears. He stared forward with little thought or expression, save for the pucker of his tiny mouth.

Ceony knelt beside him and tried to brush wet hair from his eyes, but of course her hand passed through him. Then she read the tombstones: “HENRY THANE, 1839–1874” and “MELODY VLADARA THANE, 1841–1874.” Both had doves in mid-flight carved beneath the names, along with the image of two overlapping wedding rings.

Ceony pressed both hands to her chest.

“These are your parents,” she whispered, glancing to the little boy, then to the beekeeper behind her. He had to be an uncle, judging by the family resemblance, slight as it was.

Anger. Infidelity. Death. Dark times—that’s what these memories were. Ceony had passed through Emery’s goodness and his hopes; it made sense to see his darkness, too. To see his hurts and his vices. To see the shadows cast behind those bright eyes.

The rain in the grass seeped into her skirt where her knees pressed the fabric to the ground. The little boy looked through her to an unmarked spot between the tombstones, the lids over his large eyes drooping. Raindrops clung to his dark eyelashes and pattered against his round cheeks.

“Please let me,” Ceony whispered. “I know you’re somewhere in here, Emery. Let me help him.”

Ceony tried to push soggy hair back from the boy’s face once more, and this time her fingers felt a glassy solid. Not skin and hair, but at least she could touch him.

She wrapped her arms around the little boy’s shoulders and hugged him to her. “It will be okay, I promise,” she murmured. “I’ve seen your future, and you accomplish a lot. Your parents would have been proud. It will get better. You’ll be happy again.” I’ll make sure of it.

She kissed Emery on his forehead and pulled his hat from his fingers so she could set it on his head. The storm had already drenched him, but at least the hat would keep the water from his eyes. Standing, she searched for something dry to wipe her face with, but she had few options. She needed to get away from the rain—if she soaked through, so would Fennel, and she didn’t think she’d make it much farther without him. Not in this dark place.

Reverently stepping over the graves, Ceony slid between the beekeeper and the priest and moved away from the funeral service and the path altogether, rubbing chills from her shoulders and neck. The cemetery seemed to stretch on forever, past all horizons, until the very sky seemed filled with graves.
     



Onward she trudged.

She reached a stone wall only as high as her knees and stepped over a portion that had weathered and crumbled. The grass grew shorter and harder beneath her feet until her shoes clacked on wide black and white tiles. An arching ceiling nearly three stories above her head replaced the clouds and rain. Ceony’s hair and clothes instantly dried, and the air warmed to room temperature.

She took several seconds to absorb the massive atrium—no, a hallway—into her brain. Copper-colored columns lined the walls to her left and right, and between them pear-shaped alcoves showcased different treasures: painted vases, old and yellowed documents framed in thick glass, portraits of the queen or busts of queens past. One bust, oddly enough, looked especially worn on the nose.

Long rows of square windows let in sunlight through the ceiling itself. Something about the place seemed familiar to Ceony, but she couldn’t pinpoint what. She had never been in this particular spot before. Or, perhaps, just not seen it from this angle.

She retrieved Fennel from the confines of her blouse. If the rain from the cemetery had gotten to him, then the change of scenery had dried that as well.

She unfolded the dog, who immediately popped to life and began scratching behind his paper ears with his back leg. Ceony laughed and rubbed his chin. “Stay close, boy.”

She began walking, her footsteps sounding particularly loud, Fennel’s especially quiet. The dog trotted off to a fern against one of the columns, sniffing the edge of its ceramic pot.

Faint whispers brushed Ceony’s ears. She paused, listening. They came from ahead and around the corner. Given her recent interaction with the characters of Emery’s heart, she approached the whispers with caution.

She recognized both voices—the first was Emery’s. The second, which she strained to hear, belonged to Mg. Hughes.

She spied around the corner to see them both leaning against a wall outside a room with double doors. Those doors jogged Ceony’s memory; this was Parliament. She had toured it once many years ago, back when her father still worked as a chauffeur.

“. . . don’t think it will work out,” Emery whispered. He stood with his hands clasped over his elbows and his eyes cast to the opposite wall. He wore a sage-green coat similar to his indigo one, but with more buttons. “I’ve neglected him. He’s only brought it up once, but at this point I’m delaying his certification. Edward is a bright young man. He deserves better, and I’ll hardly make him defer.”

“No, not defer,” Mg. Hughes agreed, rubbing his short white beard with his index finger and thumb. “But they’ll avoid transferring. It hurts the method of the thing, takes time to switch over lesson plans and readjust. You both would need to make a good case.”

“My marriage is falling apart, Alfred,” Emery said. He let out a long breath and slid his hands into his pockets. His voice carried such weight that Ceony withered against the wall.

Mg. Hughes rested a hand on Emery’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. On my third, myself. It’s a hard thing, but surely given a bit of time—”

“I think she’s an Excisioner,” Emery interjected.

The words were barely audible, but they rang like cymbals in the empty corridor.

Mg. Hughes mumbled something on a dry tongue before sputtering, “You . . . you can’t be serious.”

“I prefer not to be, in most cases,” he replied, “but I’ve seen the signs.” He hesitated. “Then again, I haven’t even seen her in four months.”

The two men quieted for a long minute. As Ceony turned to leave, Mg. Hughes said, “What you do know, Emery, could be of use. I know some people—not the police, per se—who work tirelessly to extinguish the dark magics from her ladyship’s domain. If you’re willing, I could introduce you . . .”

Mg. Hughes’s lips continued to move, but no voice filled the words, leaving him little more than a mime. Ceony’s eyes darted between him and Thane, waiting for more information to pass between them . . . but they had become two marionettes, and Ceony was a poor lip-reader. Groaning, she resisted the urge to stamp her foot.

Fennel huffed behind her, and Ceony blinked, eyes burning from staring. As she moved away from Thane and Hughes and under a granite archway, however, she found not Parliament, but crowded hallways and stairs beneath a pebbled ceiling. A shrill bell rang over her head.

She stood at the end of the main hallway of Granger Academy, her secondary school.

The hallways were filled with young people chatting, walking, and eating lunch. One particularly frisky couple kissed by the tennis trophy case—which had far fewer trophies than Ceony recalled it holding—until a man in a sweater vest smacked a ruler along the boy’s backside and told the couple to get moving. Behind her a trio of girls with high hairstyles and brightly painted lips whispered to each other with hands shielding their mouths. The shortest of the group laughed so hard she snorted, which caused her companions to snicker in turn. The trio shifted as a narrow-bodied woman holding a clipboard walked down the staircase behind them, a pair of spectacles balanced on the edge of her nose. The woman didn’t look up at anyone as she passed by, including Ceony.

Ceony pulled her eyes from the people and refocused her attention on the building itself. She recognized Granger Academy, though the school looked a little different than she remembered it—some sort of linoleum tiles comprised the floor instead of the stiff maroon carpet she had tramped between classes for four years. The stair railings were pine with faded stain instead of oak. Other than that, the building looked the same. Granger Academy had been Emery’s secondary school as well—perhaps this was what it looked like when he attended.

Thoughts of Anise Hatter surfaced in her mind. She pushed them away. Today she walked Emery’s heart, not her own.

A flicker of black hair made Ceony jump, but it was only another girl not much younger than herself, a young woman who looked similar to Lira but with a broader face and stronger nose. Still, Ceony grit her teeth and said, “Who knows what we’ll encounter here, Fennel.”

She had to admit that the casual nostalgia of the school didn’t quite match the mood the previous visions of the chamber had born. Still, she would stay on alert, and hopefully Fennel would catch anything unusual that she missed.

Ceony touched the shield chain around her chest. If the water and blood had damaged it, the shift to Parliament, and now the school, had restored it. Good. She thought to take the time to Fold more birds against the hard school floor, but decided against it. The feeble paper heart she’d given Thane only allocated her so much time. She would have to trust her shielding spell and the fan to protect her.
     



She picked her way through the hallway lined with coat hooks and cubbies stuffed with books, crumpled homework, and lunch boxes. Class—or perhaps lunch—must have recently ended, for the hall filled with bodies. Ceony tried to evade them at first, but there were too many. They simply phased through her when she held her ground, reminding Ceony once more that she was the anomaly in this place. She and Fennel both.

The bulk of the students passed, followed by Mrs. Goodweather, Ceony’s algebra teacher, looking plumper and a bit younger than Ceony’s memory of her. Mrs. Goodweather swished by quickly in her tight purple skirt, and in her wake Ceony spied a group of boys, three standing and one on the floor with a book in his lap. He held a folded paper in his hands. The sight of his black hair made Ceony run to him.

“Em—” she began, but the chap on the floor was not Emery Thane in the slightest. He had shaggy black hair, yes, but his acne-pocked skin was too pale, his nose too pointed, and he wore a pair of finely wired glasses. Freckles like Ceony’s own speckled his hands, and his eyes were a light brown, not green.

Still, she recognized the half-folded item in his hands—a fortuity box. Or the beginning of one.

“Guess paper’s the only thing that’ll let you put your hands on it, eh?” asked one of the standing boys, and his companions sniggered. “Don’t you have anything better to do than take up space, Prit?”

Ceony rounded on the boys—she couldn’t stand bullies—ready to give them a piece of her mind in hopes that the vision would allow her to interact with them. As she opened her mouth for a retort, however, her words caught somewhere between palate and tongue and dribbled over her lips incoherently.

The boy doing the jibing had short ebony hair and bright green eyes.

Emery.

He looked different—much younger, and lankier as well. He must have come into his height at an early age, for he stood half a head taller than his comrades and could not have been a day older than seventeen. His face looked thinner, his jaw slacker, and Ceony spotted a distinct lack of maturity around his eyes. Eyes that held no sympathy. Eyes just “having fun,” as adolescent boys were bound to do.

“You deaf?” one of Emery’s friends asked, the one on the left with a square face and broad build. He nudged Prit with his foot. “Don’t you have anything better to do? We need this space for walking.”

Prit frowned, his eyes downcast. He tried to smooth the fortuity box against his book—an astronomy textbook—to make the next fold, but Emery wedged his toe between Prit’s legs and the book’s cover, then flipped the book over. It tumbled off Prit’s knee and onto the floor, closing on top of the fortuity box, ruining it. Not that it would have worked without the bonding, but still.

Emery and his companions laughed as Prit quietly gathered his book and stood. He turned his back on Emery just as the bullied had always been taught to do. Just ignore them, Ceony’s mother had always advised, but Ceony knew from experience that ignoring didn’t make pigs go away. The image of Mickel Philsdon surfaced in her mind, a broad-shouldered and stout boy who had called Ceony a walrus in the seventh grade, before Ceony had grown into her teeth. She had ignored him for two years, but the relentless torture had only gotten worse. It wasn’t until the first day of secondary school when Ceony rounded on Mickel and cut him a steaming piece of her mind that he stopped his torment. As far as Ceony was concerned, the only thing bullies understood was bullying, plain and simple. Mickel had avoided her after that.

“Stick up for yourself,” she found herself saying to Prit, who didn’t respond.

Emery shoved Prit in the shoulder, making the boy stumble. “A little faster, paper boy?”

Prit picked up his pace and disappeared into the crowded hallway.

Frowning, Ceony turned to Emery and said, “You used to be a real jerk, you know that?”

Emery reached down to where Prit had been sitting and snatched up a paper sack—Prit had left his lunch behind. He rifled through it, the friend on his right trying to peer around his arm to see what was inside.

“Dibs on the cookie,” Emery’s flunky said.

Emery grabbed a red apple and tossed the bag to his companion, then slid down to the floor, stretching his skinny legs in front of him. Rubbing the apple on his sleeve, Emery took a bite.

Leaning to one side, Emery reached beneath him and pulled a folded frog out from under his backside—more of Prit’s handiwork. He chuckled around a mouthful of apple and crumpled the frog in his hand. “What a barmpot,” he said, throwing the paper wad at a dark-skinned girl passing by. The girl gave him a sour look, but continued on her way without retaliation.

“Come on, Fennel,” Ceony commanded. As she lost sight of the paper magician, she took a deep breath. This was the past, after all. No use getting upset over it. “Still,” she said aloud, “I’ll have to ask you what changed your mind about Folding. And I hope you apologized to him.”

Students filtered from the halls into their respective classrooms, thinning out the population enough for Ceony to find a set of double doors that appeared to lead outside. She assumed those doors would either reveal to her another shade of Emery Thane’s heart, or warp her back to the third chamber itself, which she had yet to physically see. She hoped for the latter—she needed to escape Lira’s trap quickly, and the only plausible way out seemed to be at the heart’s end—she had to reach it, just as she had to play out each of these stories, one by one, to get there.

She opened the door and found herself in a familiar office—the first she had entered in this chamber, albeit lit with dim evening sunlight filtering through that square window and candles set on the desk and surrounding shelves. Ceony hesitated at the doorway to the office, the too-recent memory of it raking her brain with needles.

Emery sat at his desk, poring over a thin stack of papers, though not the Folding kind. He held a pen in one hand and tangled the other in his hair, worn shorter than in present day.

Fennel sniffed around the mauve rug strewn over floorboards stained with age. Ceony let the door shut behind her.

Everything in the office—smaller than the study at the yellow-brick house on the outskirts of London—spoke of Emery. Shelves, trunks, and furniture pressed against all four walls of the room, each set in an almost symmetrical order without allowing the tiniest bit of space to go unused. A fine-looking shelf of cherrywood held stacks upon stacks of paper in eggshell, chartreuse, and rose, all cut into different-sized rectangles and squares. Another shelf held together with metal clamps bore endless volumes of very old books, some of which Ceony recognized from a different shelf in Emery’s present bedroom. Atop that shelf rested an assortment of glass bottles filled with bright colors of sand layered on top of each other, and beside those, an empty picture frame. Ceony wondered if it had ever held a photo. She didn’t recognize it from the yellow-brick house.
     



A glass half-filled with some sort of tea sat at the end of Emery’s desk. Ceony touched it—cold. A sniff caught a hint of peppermint. Now that she thought of it, she hadn’t seen any coffee in Emery’s kitchen—perhaps he didn’t like the flavor. Or perhaps it made him jittery, and Ceony imagined “jittery” would not complement the list of Emery’s personality traits.

Carefully placed clutter littered the desk everywhere except a perfect rectangle where Emery read those papers—a jar filled with writing utensils and a compass, a short calendar depicting a different species of tree for each day of the year, a bottle of blotting sand. More papers, folders, and small racks holding more papers and folders. Her inspection hesitated on a model of the Surrey Theatre entirely crafted from paper, from the columns standing guard at the front entrance to the English flag that flew from the spire protruding from the top of the theatre’s dome. Ceony marveled at it for a few long seconds, wondering how much time and precision must have gone into such a detailed piece. Phasing or no, she dared not touch it, though the front doors did look like they were meant to open via the mouselike hinges that held them to the building’s foremost wall.

She glanced to Emery. He created such beautiful things.

Emery flipped one of his pages over and began to write along the bottom of the next. Ceony finally settled her attention on the documents—thick legal jargon in small print crammed between one-inch margins on all sides. Each paragraph had its own number, and some sentences had been typed in all caps and separated with bold lines. Across the bottom Emery scrawled his signature—he had stunning handwriting, his lowercase letters all the same width and the capital E and T of his name drawn with minimal flourish. Part of Ceony wanted to trace those letters just so she could learn to scrawl half as well.

He turned that page and began to scour the next, his lips in a frown, his eyes set in concentration and wrinkled at the outside corners. Ceony read the header at the top of the page: “BERKSHIRE COUNTY CLERK | DECLARATION OF DIVORCE.”

The light in the office dimmed as the sun finally dropped behind the world. Ceony spied the date he penned alongside his second signature. Exactly two years and five months had passed since this memory. Had he been living alone all this time?

Something clacked elsewhere in the house. Ceony stiffened and reached into her bag for her fan. But Emery had stiffened as well. He had heard it, too, which meant it couldn’t be Lira. The images of Emery’s heart reacted to Lira’s presence just as they reacted to Ceony’s—not at all. Whatever had made the noise had a place in this vision, though a prickling sensation still churned beneath Ceony’s skin.

Emery stood from his chair, its legs scraping against the old wooden floorboards as it slid away from the desk. His jaw set above the high collar of his shirt. Stepping around the desk, he phased through Ceony as he approached the door.

A moment passed before he folded his arms and said, “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Silence answered him.

A long sigh passed over Emery’s lips. Ceony reached for his hand, but stopped herself. He said, “I have wards set up.”

Another moment passed before the door opened past its crack. Ceony squeezed her fan as Lira appeared, to remind herself this wasn’t the real Lira, the present Lira. Her hair was too short, and the malice in her face was less . . . prominent. In fact, she looked at Emery with the eyes of a lost hound dog and chewed on her lip like a scolded child. She wore a slim dress with a slimmer belt accenting her waist. The dress’s collar had been unlaced halfway down, revealing the soft curves of her breasts.

Fennel barked and Ceony seethed inside, despite knowing all that she did. She forced her grip around the fan to relax, lest she wrinkle it and destroy its enchantment. Lira’s tormented disposition was an act—that much was plain. Ceony didn’t buy it for a second.

And neither did Emery. His expression remained perfectly schooled, like that of a frustrated parent.

“I need help,” Lira whispered.

“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t march to the telegraph right now and report you,” he said, his voice stony. Ceony made a guess that Lira had been in more than one skirmish with the law since the last vision in this office. Ceony wondered if she’d bonded flesh yet, then cringed as the thought of how crossed her mind. She had no idea how one became an Excisioner, and she didn’t want anyone to enlighten her.

Tears—real tears—brimmed on Lira’s dark eyelashes. The woman had some talent. “Just one night, please, Emery,” she pleaded. “I’ll be gone in the morning. I just need someplace to stay.”

“I know a few good prison cells that might do the trick.”

“I’m innocent!” she said, and Emery only responded with an incredulous raising of one eyebrow. Lira’s cheeks flushed and hard lines ridged her forehead. “Think of all I’ve given you, Emery! Don’t you know what they’ll do to me? I’m innocent!”

Emery scoffed and threw his hands out to his sides. Ceony winced at how the gesture exposed his heart. She pushed down the vivid memories of Lira’s sharp fingernails digging into his chest as he hung against the dining room wall, Ceony helpless to stop it.

“I know what you are, Lira!” he exclaimed. “Everyone does! You think you can play on your innocence now?”

“You weren’t there,” she cried. Ceony stepped closer to her, studying her face, trying to find her secrets. Ceony wanted to push Lira away from Emery, but her hand passed through the woman’s torso as if she were an illusion read from a storybook. No, Ceony wouldn’t be allowed to interrupt this memory.

“You don’t understand.” Lira wept.

“I’ve tried to,” Emery countered, sitting against the edge of his desk and grabbing it with stiff fingers. “Heaven knows I’ve tried to, Lira. Just . . . just go.”

“I can’t,” she whispered. “They’ve tracked me here.”

“And the others?” Emery asked. “Grath? Menion? Saraj?”

Lira shook her head, looking desperate. “I came alone. I want to get away from it all, Emery, you have to believe me! But how can I clear my name when Grath and his gofers have slandered it so? How can I start a new life when every cop in a blue hat is trying to fit a noose around my neck?”

Emery shook his head and rubbed his temples. “Criminals have gotten worse for less, Lira. Or have you forgotten—”
     



“I’m innocent!” she cried, stepping forward and grabbing Emery’s sleeve. “I’ve been nothing but a mascot for them, a scapegoat! I know I’m a fool, but everyone deserves a chance to recover from their mistakes! And oh . . . my mistakes . . .”

Ceony frowned. “She’s toying with you,” she said. “Look at her eyes—it’s an act. I took theatre in secondary—I know.”

But this was the past; Ceony couldn’t change it. Couldn’t prevent the heartache this woman piled on top of Emery. Couldn’t stop her from ripping his heart out.

But she wanted to.

She looked at Emery, whose eyes had begun to soften.

“Don’t believe her!” Ceony shouted, and Fennel barked his agreement from behind her. A paper dog had more sense than this man! “You know what kind of person she is! What kind of person she’ll become!”

“The worst of it is you,” Lira whispered, batting those thick eyelashes. She sunk against Emery like a half-filled sandbag. “You are my everything, Emery, and I’ve ruined all of it. I let them get into my head . . . I thought you . . .”

She paused dramatically, pulled away from him. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. You don’t believe me.”

“Lira—”

“Can’t we go back to how it was?” she asked, eyes wide and wet. “Can’t we just run away and shed all of this skin?”

A bad metaphor. Emery began to harden again.

“You know I’m one of them,” he said. “I’ve helped them track you before.”

“I know,” she said. Ceony stared hard at her face, but this time she couldn’t read Lira at all. Curse the woman and her perfect porcelain features. “I know, and I deserve your scorn. I know I’ve lost you . . .” Lira looked deep into Emery’s eyes, and Ceony could see that they had indeed softened, and she began to doubt her own assessment of the Excisioner. “Or have I?”

I should leave. I have to leave, Ceony thought, the sourness still churning. She had a feeling she didn’t want to see where this vision led. She reached for the door behind Lira, but when it opened, she saw only the hallway outside, the hallway and the rest of the house. No new images, no fleshy chamber walls. The distant PUM-Pom-poom still echoed somewhere beyond her reach. She hoped its faintness was only a side effect of her being caught in a memory.

She turned back to Lira and Emery. Something else clacked in the house. Moments later a solid knock came at a door—two slow beats, two quick. The furrow in Emery’s brow told Ceony he recognized the knocker.

Emery’s lips pressed into a thin line. Lira clung to his shirt.

“Please,” she whispered. “Please believe me. You know me better than anyone, Emery. You must listen to me.”

Emery hesitated for a moment before grasping Lira’s wrists and pulling her fingers from his clothes. He moved into the hallway—passing through Ceony—toward the front door. The house silently built itself around Emery as he walked, as though his presence allowed Ceony to see what lay in the dark beyond the vision.

She followed him down the hallway. Though the front door had a narrow glass window in it, it was too dark to see anything but yellow light beyond it.

Emery opened the door to two policemen, each holding a lantern.

“What’s wrong?” Emery asked.

“Sorry to bother you so late, Master Thane,” the taller policeman said, “but we believe Lira Hoppson to be in the city.”

“Lira?”

“No,” Ceony murmured behind him. “No, Emery, don’t lie to them. Don’t protect her.”

The policeman nodded. “We thought she might try to contact you, or her mother. Have you . . . ?”

Several stiff seconds passed. Ceony held her breath.

“I’m sorry,” Emery said. “But thank you for the warning. I’ll ward the house.”

“Perhaps you should stay elsewhere until we’ve tracked her,” the second policeman said. “If you hear anything . . .”

“I’ll tell you,” Emery said with a nod. “Of course. Thank you.”

The policemen bowed their heads and stepped off the porch. Ceony felt her own heart drip cold drops into her stomach, making her nauseated.

She leaned against a wall for support, only to hear the creaking of hinges near her ear. The dark colors of the house swam around her, but she didn’t shift to another vision. Instead she appeared back in the office with Fennel and Lira as Emery closed the door behind him.

“Thank you,” Lira whispered.

“It is more than you deserve,” Emery replied, eyes cast to the floor.

Lira stepped up to him, hesitant, and wrapped her arms around his waist. She buried her face into his collar and repeated, “Thank you.”

Ceony bit her lips until she tasted blood. She felt immobile. How would the future be different had Mg. Thane turned Lira over when he had the chance? Ceony was trapped inside his heart trying to save his life, all because he couldn’t deny this horrible woman a prison cell!

Her face grew hot and she felt tears sting the back of her eyes. She stepped toward the far wall. Let me go, she pleaded. Let me go somewhere else. Anywhere else.

Emery said something quietly—Ceony didn’t catch it.

Lira pressed herself against him in such a way Ceony flushed all the hotter. Lira murmured, “I love you, Emery. You know I love you. Surely you know.”

“Lira . . .”

“You wouldn’t have sent them away if you didn’t know it,” she whispered. “If you didn’t still love me.”

Her long fingers crept behind his neck like spider legs, each step sticking him with venom. Lira pulled his mouth to hers. He resisted at first, but like a bitten insect he stopped fighting and let Lira pull him into her web.

A tear escaped Ceony’s eye. She had to get out, but they blocked the door—they—

She backed into the wall and pounded the side of her fist on it. Nothing changed. Before a second tear could fall, she scooped Fennel off the floor and screamed “Let me out!” so loudly that her own eardrums rattled. “Emery Thane, let me go!”

The office faded into shadow, then into nothingness. The sleepy thrum of PUM-Pom-poom beat against her at all sides, a pale imitation of her own heart’s frantic rhythm. One more chamber, she thought, grasping onto the shreds of calm that came with the words. One more chamber left.

But the darkness of the third chamber hadn’t finished with Ceony yet. Instead of the red walls, the river of blood, and the tight valve that would take her to the fourth chamber, Ceony found herself in an unfamiliar city, the twilight sky overcast, and shrill police whistles sounding all around her.