clothes damp from the Flickering soldiers’ attempt to drown him.
“We have food and water stowed elsewhere,” he said.
Sloane followed him out of the room. She knew she should be afraid to be alone with him—to be here at all. But it was too late to go back now. She had betrayed her friends. Edda had seen her with the Resurrectionist.
They went into a smaller room not far from the others, still in a state of disrepair—a crumbling half-wall separated it from a bathroom, and there were cobwebs in the exposed rafters of the ceiling—but swept clean and stocked neatly with cans of food and jugs of water. There was a pile of blankets in the corner, too, and a small table with two rickety chairs set up around it.
Mox stood before the table and started removing his siphons. The wrists came first, then mouth, eyes, and ear. Beneath them, his skin was sweat-slicked and pale.
“I’m not your nurse,” Sloane said.
“Didn’t ask you to be,” Mox replied.
But she still picked up one of the water jugs and set it on the table in front of him, then searched the row of supplies for a first-aid kit.
When she found one, she dropped it next to the water jug, which she opened and gulped from greedily. Mox sat down in one of the chairs, heavily enough to make it creak, and reached for the little box with trembling fingers.
“Is that metal serrated?” she said, nodding to the fragment just above his hip.
“No, edge looks straight.”
“Did it hit bone?”
Mox plucked a pair of scissors from the kit and cut from the hem of his shirt to the shard, then pulled the fabric away from the wound. It looked nasty, blood streaking his pale skin beneath the puncture, the tip of the blade—or whatever it was—sticking out behind him. But he had been lucky; it seemed to have gone through the meat of his hip, missing bone and organs both.
“Looks like you might be able to just pull it out,” Sloane said.
Mox grunted in reply.
“I guess I could help,” she said. “In exchange for some answers.”
“Not sure where to begin,” he said.
“How about you start with why you stalked me to the cultural center,” she said. She was hesitant about stepping closer, but she forced herself to do it, then searched through the first-aid kit for antiseptic. She would have to sterilize the wound as best she could with the metal still in it, then pull it out and apply pressure to stanch the bleeding. She had done it before—Ines had gotten pierced with debris during a Drain once—but it felt different this time, in the quiet, with no battle raging around her.
“Ziva noticed something going on at the Camel. All the scurrying around. So I knew they had summoned another one. There’s a . . . burst of energy when they do it.” His face twitched a little. “If you’re paying attention, you can feel it for miles in every direction. Like a . . . bubble of magic, popping. And I’d been waiting for it.”
“You said that you ‘knew they had summoned another one,’ ” she said. “Another what, exactly?” She poured water from the jug over the wound to clean off some of the blood, then doused the entry point and exit point of the wound in antiseptic. That would have to do.
Mox was unwrapping a square of gauze. “They bring warriors here from other places to fight me. You—your friends—are the fourth.”
He offered her the gauze, and she took it and clamped it around the metal so she could get a firm—and clean—grip on it.
“Fourth,” she said. “Nero said we were the fifth Chosen Ones they’d brought here.”
“Chosen Ones?” Mox’s brow furrowed.
“I’m going to pull now,” she said. “Unless you’d like to do it magically?”
He snorted. “I would probably cut myself in half if I tried.”
“Fair enough. Brace yourself.”
Mox grabbed the edge of the table, and Sloane pinched the flat of the shard between thumb and forefinger on both hands. She took a deep breath and pulled as hard as she could. Mox screamed, stuffing his fist into his mouth to muffle the sound. The fragment moved, but only a little. Without delaying, she pulled again, and this time, the metal pulled free. She set it aside. Mox was trembling but trying to open another packet of gauze. She smacked his hands away and did it herself, then used the gauze to apply pressure to both sides of the wound.