She got to her feet, swaying a little. Everything was a little blurry in the aftermath of panic; she felt as unsteady as a boat adrift. But she checked her siphon where it clasped her wrist and looked for a clear path to the exit.
Mox’s hands closed around her arms. He spoke right above her ear. “When a maniac all but summons you to him,” Mox said, “you don’t just obey.”
“My friends,” Sloane said. “My—”
“I know.” Mox sounded almost terse. He squeezed her arms, hard, one hand cold with the metal that encased it, the other warm and callused. “We’ll go. But we won’t go without a plan.”
Ziva stomped over to them both and planted herself in front of Sloane so she couldn’t have walked out of the safe house if she had wanted to. Ziva folded her arms over her chest and Sloane realized there was a plate of armor screwed right into her forearm, a gauntlet anchored to bone.
“I’m not allowing either of you to march like fools toward a man who, apparently, both of you have failed to kill on more than one occasion,” Ziva said. “So get a firmer grip on yourself, Chosen One.”
“Ziva,” Mox said, chastising.
But Sloane only nodded. There was something bracing about Ziva’s manner, like a slap to the face that brought her back to herself. She ran her hands through her hair and nodded again.
“Okay,” she said, tugging herself free of Mox’s grip. “Let’s make a plan, then.”
38
SLOANE HAD NEVER had to plan an operation like this without her friends before. Her mind was a maze of city streets and entry and exit points. Her talent was in observation, not in strategy. Not like Matt, who had an instinct for people and exactly how they could be pressed, or like Esther, who could think five moves ahead of her opponents, whoever they were. All together, they had not been great wielders of magic, but they had been like the fingers of a hand moving to make a fist.
And now she was just a single finger. The middle one, probably, Sloane thought with a kind of faint hysteria.
Mox and Sloane sat on the table in the safe house’s ballroom that Ziva had been using to stitch up the soldier when they returned. Mox had finished the job himself, sewing deftly, like he was darning a sock. He asked the soldier about his luck with dice, a game he apparently played with the others in his platoon and often lost. They bet scraps, the soldier explained to Sloane when he saw her looking confused. Pretty bits of glass, old bottle caps, nuts and bolts they had found in the gutters. He gave her a piece of rounded blue glass that he had sanded into an oval.
“Can you sew?” Mox asked her, and Sloane looked out at the room of groaning, shuffling bodies and sighed.
“Yes,” she said, and that was how she ended up with a sewing needle in hand, swallowing hard to keep herself from vomiting as she pinched a woman’s dead skin together just above the elbow to sew a cut closed. Mox had gotten her a pair of gloves so she could keep her hands clean, but the dark fluid that seemed to serve as blood for the undead army got all over her gloved fingers and ran down the back of her hand. It stank like mold and mildew.
She tried not to think of the last needle she had held, the one she had used to blow a hole the size of a house into the Dome.
At least stitching up zombie soldiers was distracting. Her thoughts kept drifting back to the boots. Flakes of dried Earth mud falling onto a Genetrix floor. Nero wanted her to know what he was. Did that mean he was going to keep her friends alive until she got there, or did it mean he had already killed them? Some of the gray ooze splattered on her cheek after an enthusiastic stitch, and she wiped it off with the back of her wrist, trying not to grimace. The Dark One she knew wasn’t erratic; whatever he had done, he had always thought it through.
Ziva and Mox spoke freely in front of the soldiers, with Mox explaining to Ziva Sloane’s revelation about reversing the effects of the siphon fortis in the Hall of Summons. He didn’t act as if the soldiers weren’t there—every so often one of them weighed