He released her legs, and she crashed to the floor, her body battered by the tiles. She was in a long hall flanked by wide pillars and tiled with white marble. Geometric fixtures of blue glass hung in a line down the center of the hall. The tall windows on one side of the room were boarded up with plywood except for the top row of glass. Across from them, on the other wall, a line of morning sunlight glinted on tiny golden tiles.
Her elbows ached from hitting the ground so hard. She rolled over so she was on hands and knees and breathed through her nose as the pain subsided. She had been right about the Resurrectionist’s army surrounding her. They were in every direction, standing in clusters or sitting with their backs against the wall, talking. They were dressed in uniforms, rich navy slacks and shirts with high collars, capes pinned at the shoulder by gilded buttons. If not for the unnatural greenish tint of their skin and the patches of rot on their faces and hands and throats, she might have thought they were just soldiers.
Sloane stood. The man—if he could be called that—who had been carrying her was tall and broad with milky blue eyes and only one ear. The woman with the bone-bare jaw who had knocked her unconscious was standing behind him, her dark, fraying hair worn in a braid over one shoulder. Sloane tasted bile.
“Move,” the man said.
She wanted to do as she was told. She really did. But her legs were shaking, so she just stood there staring at them both.
The woman rolled her eyes, grabbed Sloane’s elbow, and dragged her forward. Sloane’s shoes squeaked as she walked down a hallway of broken tiles and peeling paint and up a metal staircase. The higher and deeper she went into the building, the less likely it was that she could escape. She tried to make a map in her mind—West, you’re walking west—but it was all she could do to focus on her boots.
Boots meant now. Bare feet meant the past.
The woman stopped in front of a door and unlocked it with a key from the ring on her belt. Inside was a disintegrating laboratory. All the walls were painted azure, as was the front of each drawer and cabinet door, all of them dangling precariously from the lab table in the center of the room. The floor—wood under linoleum—was buckling in places and covered with bits of plaster and flakes of blue paint.
It wasn’t a cell, not really. That was good. That meant it wasn’t supposed to keep her in. That meant there was a way out.
The woman shoved her into the laboratory and shut the door behind her. Sloane listened as she turned the lock, then walked the perimeter of the room, getting a sense of its size. It was empty except for the lab table in the middle and a faucet on the back wall. She went to it. There was a pipe beneath it that must have gone to some kind of sink drain, but the sink was gone.
She turned on the water. It hissed for a moment before spraying a few orange drops in every direction, then spewing yellowish water that likely wasn’t safe to drink. But she was covered in dirt and dust from the Drain and desperate to smell less like death. She stripped off her coat and turned it inside out so she could tear off one of the pockets with her teeth. It would make a good washcloth.
She scrubbed at the backs of her hands with the balled-up cloth until they were almost the right color, then rinsed out the pocket and used it on her face. She scrubbed until her cheeks tingled, then moved on to her throat and neck. Last was her hair, which made the water run black.
She turned off the faucet and wrung out her hair, then tied it in a knot at the back of her head so it wouldn’t get in her way. She wrapped herself in the coat, rubbing her arms to generate some warmth. The water had chilled her, or maybe she was just afraid.
She crouched with her back against the lab table, facing the door, and took the deepest breaths she could manage.
It had gone this way before. Waking in a strange place and having to wait there until her captor, the Dark One, decided to do something. Falling asleep out of sheer