فصل 10

Chapter 10

IT DIDN’T TAKE them long to reach the corridors where the Masters lived. It wasn’t a part of the Magisterium that Call had ever been to before. Though it wasn’t forbidden, the only students who generally braved the area were assistants like Alex running errands or students carrying messages for Masters. Going there otherwise was too much of an invitation to get in trouble.

Call, in fact, was having a hard time looking confident and walking as he normally did, which had been Tamara’s advice. He kept wanting to slink along the walls, out of sight, though very few other students passed them. No Masters did. They were all still holed up in their meeting, trying to figure out what had gone wrong, which was good news for Call’s plan. It did make things a little spooky as they turned onto the set of corridors where the Masters’ sleeping quarters were, though.

They had some fun guessing whose door was whose. Master Rockmaple must be the massive door studded with brass, Master North must be the plain metal door, Master Rufus the door of brushed silver. The door with a picture of a kitten dangling from a wire that had the message HANG IN THERE underneath obviously belonged to Master Milagros.

Anastasia’s was just as easy to spot. A thick white mat had been placed in front of it, and the door itself was made of pale marble veined with black that looked like smoke. Call remembered her having all her expensive, pale white furniture carried inside on the first day of school.

“This is her,” Call said, pointing. “It has to be.”

“Agreed.” Aaron drew close, tapped his fingers against the marble. He examined the seams of the door, but like all doors in the Magisterium, it didn’t have hinges, just the flat pad where you were supposed to wave your bracelet to get in. Eventually Aaron stepped back, raising his hand. Call felt a familiar pull underneath his rib cage.

Aaron was about to use chaos magic.

“Wait,” Call said. “Don’t — not unless we absolutely have to.”

The pulling feeling went away, but Aaron gave him a look that was almost hurt. “What have you got against chaos magic all of a sudden?” Call tried to form his jumbled thoughts into words. “I think it brings the Masters running,” he said. “I think they have some way of sensing it, at least when it’s used in the Magisterium.” “I figured it was the racket that Skelmis made in our room that got them there so fast,” said Tamara thoughtfully. “But they did race over pretty quickly for just some noise. Call could be right.” “Okay, then,” said Aaron. “What do you suggest?”

For the next ten minutes they went at the door with everything they could think of. Tamara cast a fire spell, but the door was impervious. It didn’t react to freezing, either, or to “Open sesame,” or to the unlocking spell Tamara had used on the cages in the village of the Order of Disorder. It just sat there, looking at them, being a door.

It didn’t react to being kicked, either, Call discovered.

“Seriously?” Aaron said, after they’d exhausted their ideas and were leaning sweatily against the opposite wall. He glared at Master Milagros’s kitten poster. “All this worrying about the safe and we can’t even get past the door.” “Somebody got past our door,” Tamara pointed out.

“So it’s possible,” said Call. “Or at least it should be. I mean, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. These doors are the Magisterium’s security. We shouldn’t be able to wave just any wristband at one of them and have the door open.” He waved his arm at the door for emphasis.

There was a click.

Tamara stood up straight. “Did that just —”

Aaron took two strides across the hallway and pushed. The door slid open smoothly. It was unlocked.

“That’s not right.” Tamara didn’t sound pleased; she sounded upset. “What was that? What happened?” She whirled on Call. “Are you just wearing your regular band?” “Yeah, of course, I’m —” Call pushed up the sleeve of his thermal shirt. And stared. His wristband was on his wrist; that was true. But he’d forgotten the wristband he’d shoved up above his elbow.

The wristband of the Enemy of Death.

Tamara sucked in a breath. “That doesn’t make sense, either.”

“We’re going to have to figure it out later,” said Aaron from the doorway. “We don’t know how much time we have in her room.” He looked agitated but also a lot happier than he’d been a moment before.

Call and Tamara followed him in, though Tamara’s expression was still worried. Call felt as if the Enemy’s wristband was burning on his arm. Why hadn’t he left it back home, with Alastair? Why had he wanted to wear it to school? He hated the Enemy of Death. Even if they were in some way the same person, he hated everything Constantine Madden stood for and everything he had become.

“Wow,” Tamara said, shutting the door behind them. “Check out this room.” Anastasia’s room was stunning. The walls were glittering, veined with quartz. A thick white pile rug covered the floor. Her sofa was white velvet, her table and chairs were white. Even the paintings on the wall were done in shades of white and cream and silver.

“It’s like being inside a pearl,” said Tamara, turning in a circle.

“I was thinking it was like being inside a giant bar of soap,” said Call.

Tamara gave him a withering look. Aaron was stalking around the room, looking behind the china cabinet (white, with white dishes) and behind a bookshelf (white, lined with books wrapped in white paper) and under a (white) trunk on the floor. Finally, he approached a long tapestry hanging on one wall. It had been woven in threads of cream and ivory and black, and it depicted a white mountain of snow.

La Rinconada? Call wondered. The Cold Massacre?

But he couldn’t be sure.

Aaron twitched the tapestry aside. “Got it,” he said, lifting the tapestry up and away. Behind it was a massive safe, made of enameled steel. Even it was white.

“Maybe her password is some variation on the word white?” Aaron suggested, looking around. “That’s definitely her thing.” Tamara shook her head. “In this room, that would be too easy for someone to say by accident.” Aaron frowned. “Then maybe the opposite. Jet? Onyx? Or a really bright color. Neon pink!” Nothing happened.

“What do we know about her?” Call asked. “She’s on the Assembly, right? And she’s married to Alex’s dad, whose last name is Strike, so obviously she didn’t take his name.” “Augustus Strike,” Tamara said. “He died a few years back. He was pretty old, though. She’d been filling in for him a lot by then, my parents said.” “And she said something about a husband before that — and having kids,” Call said. “Maybe they got a divorce, but if not, that’s two people who married her and died. Maybe she’s one of those ladies who kills her husbands for their money.” “A black widow?” Tamara snorted. “If she killed Augustus Strike, people would know about it. He used to be a very important mage. She has her seat on the Assembly because of him — before her marriage she was just some no-name mage from Europe.” “She could just be unlucky,” Call said. He hadn’t realized Alex’s dad was dead. He wondered if Tamara’s parents had dissuaded Kimiya from seriously dating him because of his lack of connections. This year, Alex and Kimiya seemed to be close again, but Call wasn’t sure what that meant.

“Alexander,” he said aloud. “Alexander Strike.”

That wasn’t the password, either.

“Do we know where they were from?” Aaron asked. “Europe is a pretty big place.” “France!” Call yelled. Nothing happened.

“Don’t just yell France!” Tamara scolded him. “There are a lot of other countries.” “Let’s look around and see what we find,” Call said, throwing up his hands. “What do people use as their passwords? Their birthdays? The birthdays of their pets?” Tamara found a notebook, bound in a light gray leather, under a stack of books. It held notes on the comings and goings of guards, names of elementals, and a half-composed note to the Assembly explaining how security measures at the Magisterium and Collegium could be tightened while the two Makaris were still apprentices.

Tamara dutifully read out anything that seemed like it could be a password, but the safe didn’t change.

Aaron discovered a small stack of photos with several grim-faced people, two small babies and a very young woman with dark hair standing off to one side in a baggy dress. The photos were grainy and nothing in them was familiar. The landscape was rural, with fields of flowers behind them. Was one of the children Alex? Call couldn’t tell. Babies all looked pretty much the same to him.

There was nothing written on the backs of the photographs. Nothing that could possibly help them discover a password.

Finally, Call looked under her bed. At this point, he was starting to feel a little desperate. They were so close to getting the key and being able to talk with the elementals, but increasingly he was feeling as though figuring out the password of someone they barely knew was impossible.

There were a few white shoes with low heels and a single cream-colored slipper. Behind them was a wooden box. It might have been the only thing in the whole room that wasn’t some variation on the color white. As Call scooted closer to it, he wondered if the box was hers at all. Maybe it was a leftover of the last person who’d used the room.

He pushed it out the other side and went around the bed to inspect it. Worn wood and rusty hinges — not at all her style.

“What did you find?” Aaron asked, coming over to Call. Tamara sat down next to them.

Call lifted the lid …

… and the face of Constantine Madden stared back at him.

Call felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach.

It was Constantine in the photograph, no doubt about it. He knew Constantine’s face as well as he knew his own, for all sorts of reasons.

Not all of him was visible. Half his face was young and still handsome. The other half was covered by a silver mask. It wasn’t the same mask that Master Joseph had once worn, to fool everyone into believing he was the Enemy. This one was smaller — it concealed the terrible burns Constantine had gotten escaping the Magisterium, but that was all.

Constantine was standing among a group of other mages, all wearing the same dull green uniforms. Call recognized only one of them: Master Joseph. Master Joseph was younger in the photo, too, his hair brown instead of gray.

Constantine’s clear gray eyes stared right at Call. It was as if he were smiling at him, down the years. Smiling at himself.

“That’s the Enemy of Death,” said Aaron in a hushed voice, leaning over Call’s shoulder.

“And Master Joseph, and a bunch of Constantine’s other followers,” said Tamara, her voice tight. “I recognize some of them. I’m starting to think …” “That Anastasia Tarquin was one of them?” said Call. “There’s definitely something weird going on. The Enemy’s wristband opened her door, she has pictures of him …” “She might not be keeping it because it’s him in the photo,” said Tamara. “It could be because of any of the other people.” Call stood up on legs that felt wobbly. He faced the safe, his hands in fists at his sides.

“Constantine,” he said.

Nothing happened. Tamara and Aaron stayed where they were, half crouching over Anastasia’s opened box, looking up at him. They both had matching expressions on their faces — the expression Call thought of as their Dealing with the Fact That Call Is Evil expression. Most of the time they could ignore or forget that Call’s soul was Constantine Madden’s.

But not always.

Call thought of the followers of the Enemy of Death. What had drawn them to Constantine? The promise of eternal life, of a world with no death. The promise that loss would be reversed and grief erased. A promise that the Enemy had made to himself when his brother died, then extended to his followers. Call had never experienced real loss, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like — he didn’t even remember his mother — but he could imagine the kind of followers that Constantine had undoubtedly attracted. People who were grieving, or frightened of death. People to whom Constantine’s determination to get his brother back would have been a symbol.

Anastasia had lost several husbands, after all. Maybe she wanted one of them back.

Call raised his hand, looked at the Enemy’s wristband, and then, again, at the safe.

“Jericho,” he said.

There was a click, and the safe opened.

Call, Tamara, and Aaron went still at the sound. The safe was unlocked. They were going to be able to sneak down to see the elementals. The plan had worked. But Call was still nervous enough to make his hands shake.

Anastasia had seemed like a nice, non-murderous person, but despite that, it seemed that she was either trying to kill him or she was on his side for terrible reasons. He didn’t like either option.

“So … you better cast fire into the lock,” Tamara said. “Before that poisonous snake elemental crawls out.” “Oh, yeah.” Call fumbled to get his thoughts straight. Snapping his fingers, he kindled a small flame between them. Then, approaching the opening, he let it grow into a long, thin bar of flame — like an arrow without a quiver or bow. He tossed it through the open hole of the safe. It whuffed, briefly seeming to grow and burst in the enclosed space. Call couldn’t tell if there was an elemental in there, coiling around. Had he sent enough fire to destroy it? Did it disperse or just slither into some corner?

Call reached out his arm toward the hole in the safe.

Don’t flinch, he told himself. Don’t move fast. If you see a snake, it’s an illusion.

His fingers edged forward as he heard an intake of breath behind him.

“Call,” Aaron warned, “don’t go too fast.”

The snake’s head slithered out of the hole just as Call’s hand skimmed the edge. It was the bright green of poison, with black eyes like two droplets of spilled ink. A tiny orange tongue flicked out, testing the air.

The hair on his arms rose. His skin crawled at the feeling of a snake sliding over him, cool and dry. Was that an illusion? It didn’t feel like an illusion. Every muscle in his body clenched as, against all his instincts, he reached deeper into the safe. He felt around for a moment, encountering more coils of something that felt like smooth rope.

He shuddered involuntarily. Outside the safe, the snake began to wind its way up his arm.

“Anastasia wouldn’t have lied to the Masters, would she?” Call asked in a voice that quavered only a little. “This is an illusion, right?” “Even if it isn’t, I don’t think you should startle it,” Tamara said, her voice sharp and nervous.

“Tamara!” Aaron scolded. “Call, we’re sure. It’s an illusion. Just keep going. You’re almost there.” Aaron should probably have been the one to do this, Call thought. Aaron definitely wouldn’t have been seriously considering giving a high-pitched scream and bolting out of the room, not even worrying about the alarm.

But along with that thought came a tiny thread of doubt. If Aaron did want him dead, what better way than to tell Call to do something stupid. What better way than to encourage him to be brave and dumb.

No, Call told himself, Aaron isn’t like that. Aaron’s my friend.

The snake had reached Call’s neck. It started to twine, making itself into a snaky necklace … or a noose.

At that moment, Call’s finger touched what felt like a key. The jagged metal bit was cool against his skin. He closed his palm over it.

“I have it. I think,” he said, starting to withdraw his hand.

“Go slow!” Aaron commanded, almost making him jump.

He glared in Aaron’s direction. “I am!”

“We’re almost there,” Tamara said.

Call’s arm emerged, then his hand, with the key in it. As soon as he was free, the snake disappeared in a puff of foul-smelling smoke, and the safe resealed itself.

They’d done it. They had the bronze key.

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They closed up Anastasia’s room as fast as they could and hurried toward the deep passage of the Magisterium where the elementals were kept. Call kept glancing nervously back over his shoulder as he went, half expecting Rufus or one of the other Masters to have discovered what they were doing and come after them.

No one was there, though. The corridors were quiet, and then even quieter as the stone around them smoothed out, the walls and floor turning into marble that was so polished it was slippery. Doors carved with alchemical symbols flashed by, but this time Call didn’t pause to look at them. He was sunk into thoughts of Anastasia Tarquin, of the photo in her room. Of Master Joseph. Was Anastasia Tarquin one of his servants? Was she the spy in the Magisterium, looking out for Call because he was — despite everything that had happened — still Master Joseph’s Chosen One, the soul of the Enemy of Death?

Tamara came to a stop in front of the massive door made from the five metals of the Magisterium — iron, copper, bronze, silver, and gold. It shone softly in the ambient light of the corridor. She turned to look at Call and Aaron, a determined expression on her face. “Let me handle this,” she said, and knocked once, sharply, on the door.

After a long pause it swung open. One of the young guards Call remembered from the last time they’d been there squinted out at Tamara suspiciously.

“What’s going on?” he asked. He looked like he was about nineteen, with shaggy black hair. The uniforms of the Collegium were a deep navy, with stripes of different colors down the sleeves. Call suspected the colors meant something — everything in the mage world did. “What’s up, kid?” Tamara restrained her annoyance at being called “kid” admirably.

“The Masters want to see you,” she said. “They said it’s important.”

The boy swung the door wider. Behind him, Call could see the antechamber, with its sofa and dark red walls. The tunnel leading away into the distance. His heart pounded. It was all so close.

“And I’m supposed to believe that?” the boy said. “Why would the Masters want me to leave my post? And why would they send a runt like you to get me?” Aaron exchanged a look with Call. If the Collegium guy didn’t cool it, Call thought, he’d end up on the floor with Tamara’s boot on his neck.

“I’m Master North’s assistant,” Tamara said. “He wanted me to give you this.” She held out the guide-stone. The boy’s eyes widened. “It’ll take you to where the meeting is — you need to give evidence about the protections here. Otherwise you could be in trouble, or your boss could be.” The boy took the guide-stone. “It wasn’t her fault,” he said, sounding resentful. “Or any of the guards’. That elemental came from somewhere else.” “So go tell them that,” said Tamara.

Clutching the guide-stone, the boy stepped out into the corridor. He slammed the door behind him, and Call heard the tumblers of a dozen locks as they slid into place.

“Better scram,” the boy said, glancing briefly over the three of them, and then headed off down the hall.

When the guard was out of sight, Call fumbled the key out of his pocket.

There was a spot in the huge door into which it fit neatly, and when it was placed there, an entire tracery of symbols began to glow all over the door. Words Call had not seen before revealed themselves: Neither flesh nor blood, but spirit. As Call was puzzling over that, the door opened, swinging inward.

They headed inside, passing quickly through the antechamber and into the dark red corridor. It was short, leading to a second, massive set of doors that went up and up, reaching over Call’s head, the size of the doors of an enormous cathedral.

But there was a spot in them, too, a tiny hole, almost too small to notice. Call swallowed and fit the bronze key into the spot. The second set of doors opened with a groan.

They stepped through.

Call didn’t know what to expect, but the sudden heat of the room beyond surprised him. The air was heavy and smelled sour and metallic. It felt like a place where a huge fire was blazing, but no fire was visible. He could hear the rush of water in the distance and the roar of flames, much closer. Arched doorways in the stone led in five different directions. Chiseled in the rock were familiar words: Fire wants to burn, water wants to flow, air wants to rise, earth wants to bind, chaos wants to devour.

“Which way?” Call asked.

Aaron shrugged, then spun around with one arm out, letting himself point randomly, like a weather vane. “There,” he said when he’d stopped. The arch he was pointing toward seemed to be much the same as the others.

“Warren?” Call called under his breath. It seemed like a long shot that the little lizard would hear them down there, but Warren had shown up in strange places and at odd times before. “Warren, we could really use your help.” “I don’t know about that,” Tamara said, heading in the direction Aaron had picked. “I don’t trust him.” “He’s not so bad,” Call said, but he couldn’t help thinking of how Warren had led them to Marcus, Master Rufus’s former Master, now one of the Devoured, drawn into the element of fire by using its power too much. Still, Marcus hadn’t hurt them. He’d just been scary.

It was dim beyond the archway, less a corridor than an empty space of tumbled stone with a path cutting through it, leading into further darkness. A torch was embedded in one wall, burning greenly; Aaron took it down and led the way, Call and Tamara just behind him.

The path sloped downward, becoming a ledge over a deep pit. Call’s heart started to thud. He knew that large elementals were imprisoned here, knew that theoretically mages were able to approach them without getting eaten — that was the whole point of the imprisonment. But by the dim light of Aaron’s torch, Call couldn’t help feeling a little bit like they were approaching a dragon’s den instead of a holding cell.

A little farther and an alcove dipped into the wall. When they passed it, they saw a winged serpent hovering inside. It was covered in feathers of orange and scarlet and blue, vivid even in the gloom.

“What’s that?” Call asked Tamara.

She shook her head. “I’ve never seen one before. Looks like an air elemental.” “Should we wake it up?” Aaron whispered.

There must be restraints, Call reasoned, but he didn’t see any. No prison bars, no anything. Just them and a deadly elemental, a few feet away.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. He racked his brain, thinking over monsters in books he’d read, but he couldn’t think of what this was called.

One of its eyes opened, its pupil large and black, the iris around it a bright purple and star-shaped.

“Children,” it whispered. “I like children.”

The “for breakfast” went unsaid, but seemed clear to Call.

“I am called Chalcon. Have you come to command me?” The eagerness with which it asked the question made Call very nervous. He wanted to command it. He wanted to force it to tell him everything it knew — or, even better, find and devour the spy. But he wasn’t sure what the price might be. If he’d learned one thing during his time in the Magisterium, it was that magical creatures were even less trustworthy than mages.

“I’m Aaron,” Aaron said. Trust Aaron to introduce himself politely to a floating serpent. “This is Tamara and Call.” “Aaron,” Tamara said, between her teeth.

“We’re here to question you,” Aaron went on.

“Question Chalcon?” the serpent echoed. Call wondered if it was very bright. It was definitely big. In fact, he had a feeling it was bigger than it had been a few seconds ago.

“Someone broke in here a little while ago and freed one of you,” said Aaron. “Do you have any idea who it was?” “Freed,” Chalcon echoed wistfully. “It would be nice to be freed.” He swelled a bit more. Call exchanged an anxious glance with Tamara. Chalcon was definitely getting bigger. Aaron, standing in front of it with his torch raised, seemed very small. “If you free Chalcon, he will tell you everything he knows.” Aaron raised an eyebrow. Tamara shook her head. “No way,” she said.

There was a loud thump. Chalcon had flown at them suddenly, his star-shaped eyes burning red with anger. Aaron jumped back, but the serpent was thrashing against an invisible barrier, as if a sheet of glass separated them.

“This guy’s not going to tell us anything,” Call said, edging sideways. “Let’s try to find a different elemental. Someone more cooperative.” Chalcon growled as they moved away from his cell — it was a cell, wasn’t it, Call thought, even if it didn’t have a door or bars? He kind of felt bad for the winged creature, meant to fly but stuck down here instead.

Of course if Chalcon actually flew around, he would probably pick Call off and snack on him like a hawk nabbing a tasty field mouse.

They moved downward and into a bigger space — a massive hall lined with alcoves, each imprisoning a different elemental. Creatures squeaked and flapped. “Air elementals,” said Tamara. “They’re all air elementals — the other four archways must have led to the other elements.” “Over here,” Aaron said, pointing at an empty cell. “This is where Skelmis was — its name is engraved in the plate. So the elementals in this room had to have seen something.” Call walked up to one of the cells, and a creature with three big brown eyes on long eyestalks and a body that seemed more miasma than solid looked back at him. He wasn’t even sure it had a mouth. It didn’t look like it had a mouth.

“Did you see who freed Skelmis?” Call asked it.

The creature just stared back at him, floating gently in its prison. Call sighed.

Tamara went up to a cell that opened into an enormous space where three eel-like elementals swam through the air. They were the same elementals that had carried Call, Tamara, Aaron, and Jasper back from the Enemy of Death’s tomb in their bellies, only much smaller now. Maybe all elementals could change their size like Chalcon could.

Remembering flying inside the elementals also made Call remember where Jasper was now. On a date. With Celia. Who was almost definitely not trying to kill Call, but who might not be his friend anymore, either.

“Are air elementals all pretty dumb?” Call asked, annoyance at Jasper bleeding into his voice. They had only a short amount of time before the Masters figured out who’d sent the guard and came down here, ending the whole operation. If they didn’t have anything by the time the Masters arrived, the trouble they were going to be in would be for nothing.

“Harsh,” Aaron said.

“Harsh, but fair.” Tamara was watching the placid movements of the eel-like creatures. “Let’s try the earth elementals. They’re friendlier.” They backtracked up the path, past Chalcon, who stared hungrily at them, trilling in a super-eerie way. Call’s leg felt as if it were full of jabbing knives. They’d done a lot of walking, but taking the steep slope up made his muscles burn. By the time they were back in the main corridor, despite this being his plan, he kind of wanted to give up. Tamara was studying the stone, trying to figure out if there were markings so they could tell which archway led to the earth elementals. Aaron was frowning, like he was trying to puzzle this whole thing through.

“I hear you there, apprentices,” someone said from the farthest archway, a voice that seemed ominously familiar. “Come and find me.” Call froze. Was it the spy? Had they stumbled on the person who wanted him dead?

Aaron whirled with the torch. The archway was empty, the space beyond it glowing a deep red-black, like old blood. The corridor seemed full of ominous shadows.

“I know that voice,” Tamara whispered. Her eyes were wide, her pupils enormous in the darkness.

“Come and find me, Rufus’s children,” the voice said again. “And I will tell you a secret.” Aaron raised his torch over his head, the fire spitting and crackling. In the greenish glow his expression was determined.

“This way,” he said, and took off, running toward the sound, Tamara right behind him.

That’s what heroes did, Call guessed. They ran straight toward danger and didn’t ever give up. Call wanted desperately to go in the other direction, or just lie down and cradle his leg until it hurt less, but he wasn’t about to let Aaron have to fight without his counterweight.

Aaron wasn’t his enemy.

With a gasp, trying to ignore the pain, he followed them.

It was immediately evident what element they’d fled toward. Oppressive heat blasted from the archway and the corridor beyond. The walls were made of hardened volcanic rock, black and full of ragged holes. The roar of fire was all around them, like the blast and crash of a waterfall.

Aaron was standing partway down the hall, Tamara beside him. He had lowered the hand that was holding the torch, though it was still shedding a weird greenish light over them. “Call,” he called, and there was a strange note in his voice. “Call, come here.” Call limped down the hall, passing different cells in which fire elementals were imprisoned. Their cages weren’t closed off by clear walls but by gold-colored bars sunk deep into the earth. Behind the bars, he could see creatures made out of what looked like black shadow with burning eyes. One was a circle of flaming hands. Another was a cluster of fiery hoops linked together, drifting and pulsing in the air.

The heat was so oppressive that by the time Call reached Aaron and Tamara, his shirt was soaked in sweat and he was close to passing out. He could see immediately, though, why Aaron and Tamara were so still. They were staring through the bars of a cage at a sea of flames, and in the center of that sea of flames, a girl was floating.

“Ravan?” Tamara said in a cracking voice that Call had never heard before. “H-how are you here?” Ravan. Call felt a shock of horror go through him. Ravan was Tamara’s sister. He knew she’d been swallowed up by the elements, becoming one of the Devoured, but it had never occurred to him that she would be down here.

“Where else would I be?” the flame-girl asked. “They lie to us, you know? They tell us that the pitiful magic we learn in the Magisterium is the whole of what we can do, but I am so much more powerful now. I no longer call up fire, Tamara. I am fire.” The iris of her eyes flickered and danced with what Call at first thought was a reflection of the flames — but then he saw there was fire behind her eyes, too. “That’s why they have to lock me up.” “A touching family reunion,” a voice said from the other side of the room. Call whirled. Marcus the Devoured was looking out at them from an almost identical cage, grinning. “Callum Hunt,” he said in his crackling, roaring voice. “Aaron Stewart. Tamara Rajavi. Here you are. It seems not all my prophecies have come to pass yet, have they?” Call remembered Marcus’s words from two years ago, a terrible echo of his own fears: One of you will fail. One of you will die. And one of you is already dead.

They knew, now, which of them was already dead: Call. He had died as Constantine Madden. Already dead. The words hung in the air, a terrible proof that what Marcus had said was the truth.

“Marcus.” Aaron frowned at him. “You said you had a secret for us.”

Tamara couldn’t seem to wrench her gaze away from Ravan. Her fingers reached out for her sister’s burning hand, as though she couldn’t quite accept that her sister wasn’t human anymore.

Marcus laughed and the fire around him leaped and danced, flaring up volcanically. Even Tamara turned at that, jerking her hand back as though just realizing what she’d been about to do.

“You seek the one who freed Automotones and Skelmis, yes?” Marcus asked. “The one who is trying to kill Callum? For they are one and the same.” “We knew that,” Aaron said. “Tell us who it is.”

“An answer you will not like.” Marcus grinned a flaming grin. “It is the greatest Makar of your generation.” Tamara looked even more stricken. “Aaron’s trying to kill Call?”

Call felt the words like all the air went out of the room. Aaron couldn’t be the spy. But hearing Marcus’s words, Call felt stupid. They were fated to be enemies. Aaron was fated to be the hero and Call was fated to be the villain. It was as simple as that. Call had never had friends like Aaron and Tamara before, and sometimes he wondered why they liked him. Maybe the answer was simple. Maybe Aaron wasn’t actually his friend.

“No!” Aaron said, throwing his arms wide in a gesture that nearly put out the flame in his torch. “Obviously I’m not!” “So I’m trying to kill myself?” Call asked Aaron, unable to stop from blurting out what he was thinking. “That makes no sense. Also, there’s no way anyone thinks I’m the greatest Makar of my generation.” “You don’t really think that I want to hurt you, do you?” Aaron demanded. “After everything — everything — I learned about you and had to accept —” “Maybe you didn’t accept it!” Call said.

“That chandelier almost hit me, too!” Aaron yelled.

“Free me,” Ravan said to Tamara, her face pressed against the bars. “Free both of us and we’ll help you. You know me. I might be a different creature now, but I am still your sister. I miss you. Let me show you what I can do.” “You want to help us?” Aaron said. “Get Marcus to tell them I’m not the spy!” “Everyone calm down!” Tamara said, turning her gaze on the Devoured Master and then toward her sister. “We don’t know how much of any of this is true. Maybe Marcus is making this up. Maybe he just wants what every elemental down here wants — a ticket out.” “Is that all you think I want?” Ravan put her hand on her hip. “You think you’re so great, Tamara, but you’re just like Dad. You think that because you break the rules and get away with it, you can sit in judgment of everyone who gets caught.” And with that, she let the flame overtake her, becoming a flaming pillar and falling backward into fire.

“No, wait!” Tamara said, rushing over to her sister’s prison, hands grabbing the hot bars and holding on for a desperate moment, even though when she released them Call could see the pink skin on her palms where she’d burned them. “I didn’t mean it! Come back!” The fire leaped around, but it didn’t coalesce into any human form. If Ravan was still there, they couldn’t pick her out of the rest of the dancing flames.

“I know you won’t release me, little apprentices, not yet — although I could teach you much. I taught Rufus well, didn’t I?” There was something hungry in Marcus’s gaze that made it hard to look directly at his face. “Well and yet not well enough. He doesn’t see what’s right under his nose.” His gaze was fixed on Call. Call flinched. He couldn’t look at Tamara and Aaron. He stared at Marcus. “You’ve been at the Magisterium a long time,” he said.

“Long enough,” said Marcus.

“So did you know Constantine? The Enemy?”

“Whose enemy?” Marcus said with contempt. “Not mine. Yes, I knew Constantine Madden. I warned him, just like I warned you. And he ignored me, just as you have ignored me.” He smirked at Call. “It is unusual to see the same soul twice.” “But he wasn’t like me, was he?” Call said. “I mean, we’re completely different, aren’t we?” Marcus just smiled his hungry smile and sank down into the flames.