He studied the marshal’s glassy, unresponsive expression and then leaned in and heaved the marshal onto his shoulder. With a sudden flood of magic, illusion wrapped around them both and they were gone.
I turned on the spot and, checking I was alone, lowered the blade. A sob broke free, but the others I swallowed down, adding them to the pit of rage simmering inside. I’d won that battle and Kellee would live. Eledan wouldn’t risk losing me. Not until he had the metal heart out of his chest.
Striding to Eledan’s desk, I stabbed the blade into the desktop. It pierced the glass. Cracks scattered across its perfect surface. When I had Eledan under my knife, I’d be sure to carve out his heart. And his soul.
I eyed the office door, realizing Eledan had left me unsupervised and unchained. I was free to roam Arcon.
“Hey, Sindy.”
“Oh!” The woman I’d met at the anniversary party peered through her translucent screen and blinked. Large hoop earrings framed her smiling face. “You have er…” She waggled her finger near her neck. “A little sauce or something there.”
It was blood, but I didn’t have time to argue semantics. Eledan might be back at any moment. I scooted around her desk and tapped a few keys, bringing up a 3D image of Arcon’s layout. “There.” I pointed at the sealed-off lower sections. “How do I get down there?” Eledan had avoided those levels during our numerous tours. That had to be where he was hiding his source of magic.
“Storage?” She frowned. “There’s nothing down there.”
“Uh-huh.” That’s what Eledan wanted them to believe. “So how do I get there? None of these corridors or elevators go down that far.”
“What?” She laughed dismissively. “Of course they do.” She pressed a few more keys that zoomed in on our view of the map. “Right there. See. That stairwell will take you right to it.” She pointed out a section of corridor that ended without any way to descend farther below Arcon.
Illusion.
“Your perfume is nice. What brand is it?” she asked.
Eau de Eledan’s magic. I smiled at the woman’s innocent question and the dreamy look on her face.
Around us, the entire floor of administration staff chatted into their ear mics while eagerly tapping away, doing Arcon’s bidding. I hadn’t paid them much attention before, but now that I didn’t have Eledan beside me, I saw them for exactly what they were. This department didn’t actually do anything. They all played the part, but the actions were automatic. They all had Sindy’s glassy look. Worker drones. Human, but utterly clueless.
Eledan had them all under his spell. Arcon wasn’t just a business that created and maintained defense and surveillance. It was a machine and the human staff was another mask. He probably only needed a handful of people to run Arcon, but he had to keep up appearances, keep up the illusion.
“Are you okay?” Sindy asked.
She had no idea her working life was a lie. Did she go home at night feeling refreshed, as though she had accomplished something important during her days at Arcon, when really, all she did was follow a script Eledan had put inside her head? “Do you like working here?” I asked her, ignoring the rush of goosebumps scattering across my skin.
“Oh, I love it. Istvan is a fabulous boss.” She laughed self-consciously. “You already know that. How’s the training going?”
“Fine. Everything is just fine.” I placed my hand over hers and held her still. Her silly smile fractured. “You should quit. I don’t know what this place is, but it’s not what you think.”
She yanked her hand back. “I think you should go now.”
She wouldn’t or couldn’t see the truth. “Sure.”
I drifted down the corridors. There had to be almost a thousand employees working at Arcon, not counting the satellite offices. And Eledan had the entire staff under his spell. How far did his reach go?
I touched the iron collar under my coat collar and swallowed, feeling it bob.
I activated my comms and whispered, “Kellee…?”
The marshal didn’t reply.
It had only been a few hours since Eledan had taken him. Now, I wandered Arcon’s maze of corridors and offices, searching for a way down. The magic was down there. Kellee probably was too.
What Eledan was doing, casting an illusion over an entire workforce, should have been impossible. For any other fae, it would have been. But he was Mab’s son. A prince. He had access to the kind of power I had only dreamed of. His power was royal and ancient, the same as his mother’s. But Mab hadn’t sent me here like he thought. Her only order had been to kill her. But there had been other orders, things I had deliberately forgotten, choices that had been made for me.
I’d brought me here to Calicto, nobody else. Mab hadn’t possessed the means to control that.
I massaged my temple. Yes, those memories were real. Eledan couldn’t change my past. He couldn’t get inside my head and mess with my mind.
My pace quickened. I wasn’t like these doe-eyed people.
“Kellee… please answer me.”
I stopped and found myself outside Sota’s clear-walled room. Pressing my hands to the glass, I willed Sota to fix his lens on me, but the drone didn’t move. Sota could cut through illusion. He wasn’t susceptible like humans were. He would have told me what was real. I missed him.
All I had to do was kill Eledan. The people working at Arcon would be free. Sota would be free. The company would collapse, freeing its hold on the Halow system. But what about the defense net? Without Arcon behind it, would it open? There had to be fail-safes in place. The human governments would have insisted. There had to be more stopping the fae than just me.
Pressure pushed against my skin, rippling my coat with unseen movement.
I turned my head.
Eledan’s magic pushed down, rippling the space he carved through. The walls he passed bowed slightly, reality distorting around him. He wore soft gray leather pants and a partially armored gray jacket, unbuckled to reveal a loose white shirt. I blinked. He was blatantly fae, but nobody looked up, nobody cared. He wasn’t pretending for me anymore.
“You’ve been busy.” He opened the door to Sota’s room and gestured for me to enter.
What was happening here? All around, through the glass walls, people went about their business. There had to be a hundred witnesses, and yet not a single soul looked up. In fact, they seemed to be going out of their way to avoid looking. Some switched their paths mid-stride, veering away. Others turned their chairs away.
“That’s what happens when you leave your prisoner alone,” I mumbled, his power crackling across my skin.
“Knife.” He held out his hand.
Damn, I’d hoped he had forgotten that. I hesitated, but he had Kellee, and withholding the knife wouldn’t achieve anything. I handed the knife over.
He slipped it into a leather sheath and hooked it to his belt. “You are beginning to understand the weight of the decision on your shoulders.”
I was beginning to understand that nothing was as it seemed. I had assumed he was weak. I had been wrong. I had assumed much of Arcon was real, but I had been wrong about that too. The people were his puppets. Was I? “I want to know one thing.”
He nodded, his gaze sweeping over me, seeing too much.
“Are you saving this system or condemning it?”
He lifted his chin.
“You’ve had your hands on the defense net for years. Why haven’t you let them in?”
He sat on the edge of the steel table next to Sota. “You believe I care what happens to the people here?”
“I think, over the years, you’ve learned to care. You didn’t have much choice.” Saying it out loud brought home exactly how insane it sounded. The fae didn’t care for humans. And a prince? He cared less than most.
He laughed. The smooth, luscious sound tried to influence my mind and body. I swallowed, holding myself under control, feeling a terrible sense of foreboding pressing in.
“Your human naivety is adorable. I thought they bred those ridiculous notions out of saru.”
I clenched my hands. Something was wrong. The air was too tight, the magic too sweet. “You can’t breed out compassion.”