without running. She didn’t check to see if the soldier was following.
“Fucking Camel assholes,” Sloane mumbled. “What kind of pervy excuse for staring at a woman’s tits is that working, anyway?”
“Shows you all kinds of things, I’m sure,” Ziva said. “Let’s just hope that fellow thinks I have one hell of a skin condition.”
They were away from the pavilion now and walking down a hallway of gray stone that matched the area surrounding the Hall of Summons, the one that always looked storm-dark, like it was raining outside. Sloane felt something tickling at the back of her neck, like the Needle was scratching her skin from the space between worlds.
She finally dared to look over her shoulder when they made it to the staircase. She didn’t see the soldier behind them, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t noticed Ziva or that he hadn’t gone for reinforcements. They climbed the stairs to the Camel lobby. Sloane turned away from the elevator bank and toward the hallway of stained glass that separated the area surrounding the Hall of Summons from the rest of the Camel. Green light danced over her body as they walked through it, the delicate fans aglow with daylight.
Just past the hallway, Sloane tugged Ziva into an alcove with a small stone bench in it. They were supposed to wait for Mox’s distraction, which he had promised would be loud enough for them to hear even from within the building.
They were quiet as they waited—well, as quiet as they could be with Ziva’s every breath rasping into her lungs and shuddering out of her mouth.
“Do you feel like yourself?” Sloane said.
Ziva narrowed an eye at her. The other eye seemed to be missing its lid entirely. “You’re not thinking of bringing some friends back to life, are you?”
“No,” Sloane said. “Well—it’s sort of hard not to consider the possibility once you know it exists.”
“Having considered it, then, you can now dismiss the idea.”
“So you’re not glad to be back. To be alive again.”
Ziva looked her over. It was remarkable, Sloane thought, that someone so stiff and inhuman could look so wary.
“I have a thirst for justice,” Ziva said, “that being back helps to satisfy. I don’t remember much about—the time in between. But I don’t get the impression that I was—settled. As you might suspect of a . . . murdered spirit.”
“But,” Sloane said.
“But.” Ziva sighed. “But the longer I’m here, the more distinctly I feel that—my time is done, and every moment that I extend it is a violation of . . . something.” She lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Besides—look at me. I’m a horror.” She tapped her jaw where the siphon covered the hole that exposed her to the roots of her teeth. It was the first time Sloane had considered that maybe the same revulsion she had felt when she first looked at Ziva was what the woman herself felt when she looked in the mirror. No one wanted to wake up as a living dead thing.
“Have you ever talked to Mox about this?”
Ziva shook her head. “He needs me. I can’t leave while he still does.”
Sloane nodded, but she couldn’t help but think that people didn’t just spontaneously stop needing their friends.
A loud, deep sound startled Sloane into a yelp. Dust shook loose from the walls and fell all around them like snowflakes. Sloane heard distant shouts and footsteps through the walls.
One of Ziva’s eyes rolled over to focus on Sloane. It was time.
They walked the path Sloane remembered, the one she had memorized as she followed Cyrielle to the Hall of Summons that first time, when she had shattered the skylight with her siphon and then collapsed. She led the way around pillars and beneath arches, through the grayish light of a coming storm. And then they reached the heavy doors of the Hall of Summons with the gold plaque that named the room and the year it was constructed, 1985.
Standing beside the doors was a security guard. Ziva whistled sharply through the siphon and sent him into the wall; his head smacked into the stone and he crumpled. She bent over him, poked her fingers between his lips, and took the whistle off his tooth. “You get the siphon,” she said to Sloane.
Sloane felt dazed. She crouched by the guard—who was alive but obviously stunned—and unclipped the siphon from his wrist, thankful the mechanism was simple. She slid it from his fingers and tossed it into the Hall of Summons,