Seventy-Two, I gather, can only be Lonan—he was the last of us to enter the lodge, and Dad called me number Seventy-Three. And that would make Seventy-One . . . Phoenix?
There is a long, drawn-out silence. “Well,” Dad finally says, “what do you suggest we do? Zhornov wants Seventy-Two and his crew out on the yacht ASAP.” A yacht? Dad mentioned earlier how he’d risked contact with Zhornov—and how eager the kingpins were to meet Lonan—but I never explicitly put the two together. What has he planned, if it isn’t exactly what they expect? “You’re the one who put the Wolf in holding with Cassowary, Ava. You’ve been monitoring her for as long as I have—she’s not going to let us take him without a fight. Or any of the others, for that matter.”
Ava clears her throat. “My shift here starts in two minutes,” she says. “You and Pell can flip for who gets to kill the defective Wolf. Procedure, and all that.”
There is the clinking of change, the slide of silver on silver, the slap of palm on palm.
“I call tails,” Pellegrin says.
A second passes. “Tails it is,” Dad says. “And, Pell—take Seventy-Three with you.”
SEVENTY-THREE
WHEN MY FATHER said earlier that Pellegrin had taken the zip here, I imagined him driving a zippy sort of golf cart, or one of those rolling podiums tourists always used on city tours.
I did not expect the endless concrete hallway outside the Aries office to be equipped with a removable panel in its roof, or a steel ladder that plunges down like a death threat. We climb and climb—we were deeper underground than I realized.
When we come up for air, there are more things I did not expect.
Like, for example, that we are not in the lodge anymore.
And not only are we not in the lodge, we aren’t outside, either. It’s dark, so dark I can only see what’s visible in the leftover light from the hallway far below. The smell is familiar, stale and dank. I look up: a dome of carved-stone windows lets starlight and moonbeams in whenever the leaves shift in the breeze.
We are in the temple. In the temple rotunda, to be exact, where Hope first noticed all the beetles. No wonder it is so heavily secured, with the Aries station directly below it.
“This way,” Pellegrin says.
I follow him blindly, first because it is dark, but also because I trust him just enough. I want to ask, You aren’t really planning to kill Alexa, are you? and Are Lonan and the others really going to board the yacht Zhornov wants them on? and Are Finnley and Hope going to be okay? But I think better of it when I remember Ava is on security duty now. Who knows what she can see or hear. Even if I’m not officially activated and under the Wolves’ control, I should act like I am—there are probably cameras all over the place. Pellegrin might even be monitored somehow, so it’s unlikely he could give me a straight answer if he wanted to.
We wind through the temple—not through the narrow, serpentine hallway I took with the girls, but in the opposite direction. My eyes adjust to the darkness as we walk.
I do not hear a single scuttle of beetle feet.
Pellegrin pauses to press a button on the wall. A complicated web of blue lasers flickers in the darkness before blinking out of existence. The lasers remind me, again, of Hope: assuming she and Finnley were compromised at the same time, Hope would have been under the Wolves’ control the day we found this place. How much of what happened was actually manipulated by Dad or Ava? Hope’s accident with the lasers drew blood, the blood drew out the beetles, the beetles drove us away.
Perhaps it wasn’t an accident at all.
She is also the only one of us who refused to sit on the poisonous moss.
She is the only one of us who didn’t get assaulted by tentacle plants.
A deep and lingering chill spreads out from my spine and into the rest of me. I wasn’t even the one compromised—but I was the one who ended up suffering for it. The pain of the moss, the Birch hallucinations.
I can’t start believing I’m safe just because Dad refused to complete their horrific procedure. Complacency is my enemy.
We dead-end at the base of a thick tree. Either the passageway was designed that way, or the tree grew up later and blocked the path. At any rate, the Wolves have found a way to use it to their advantage.
“Careful on this ladder,” Pellegrin says. “Some of the footholds are narrower than others.”
The rungs are carved directly into the tree, like the ones at the net where Finnley fell. Merely thinking of having to cross the cocoon-bridge maze again is exhausting—I don’t have it in me right now. To my relief, when we get to the wooden platform, there are no bridges; instead, we will use a zip-line system, the sort that is functional in both directions.
“The harness is more solid than it looks,” Pellegrin says.
If this is an attempt to reassure me, it isn’t working—I can’t clearly see the harness, thanks to the darkness. It doesn’t feel frayed or like it’s falling apart, but it is insubstantial, flimsy as the Spanx my mother used to wear under her party dresses. Pellegrin offers his harness for me to feel, too, and it is exactly like mine. If he trusts these, uses them every day, surely they will hold up.
He helps me slip inside, hooks the harness to the carabiners and the wire, and gives me a brief rundown of how to stop when we get to the end of the line. He goes first so he can be there to help me, just in case.
I take one last glance at the temple, all of which is below me at this point. A temple hidden in ferns, just like my father wrote in his field guide. I had such high hopes for it, such different expectations, the day we first found it—and found it abandoned.
Except it isn’t really abandoned at all, now that I think about it. Temples hiding among ferns, structures formed of stones and secrets. Monks who grant refugees immunity from both sides of the war by inducting them into their monastery. Hologram tattoos given to all who approach peacefully, without any hint of hostility.
It is a good thing the ink on that page of my father’s book became blurred beyond legibility.
Of all the times I’ve read that passage, I’ve read it only in the context of finding freedom—and I’ve only taken it at face value, not as a coded clue.
Hologram tattoos. Approach peacefully.
It was a warning meant to protect, should anyone ever find their way to his lab. It was a warning about the things he would have to do, the things it’d be best to go along with. His notes weren’t a map to Sanctuary so much as they were a map to him, the monk inside it. It isn’t the freedom I expected, but perhaps it is the freedom I need.
My father is alive. My father is alive.
I am alive.