her own shock and wonder the first time she’d been in here. At night, the music room was eerily beautiful. Moonlight fell over the instruments, and something about the elegant lines of the harp, the piano, the violins, made them look less like things and more like people: like marble statues in a garden, pale and frozen but full of expression.
Ayla shook herself.
Thoughts like that were poison tonight.
She faced Benjy and the others, trying not to think of anything at all. “You remember the way to Kinok’s study?”
A housemaid with a shaved head nodded sharply. “Been there every damn day for a year. Fetched him a sea’s worth of ink and heartstone. I could walk these halls blindfolded.”
“Right.” Ayla swallowed hard. “Remember—out the window at midnight. No matter what.”
The housemaid nodded. After a moment, Benjy nodded too.
“Go, then,” said Ayla. “And good luck.”
They headed for the door, but Benjy lingered behind. “Give us a moment,” he said to the housemaid with the shaved head. She gave him a short look and then closed the door to the music room behind her, leaving Ayla and Benjy alone.
“Benj,” Ayla managed, “we don’t have time—”
“Ayla.”
He was closer than she’d thought. Closer than they’d been since the night of the feast, the night they’d danced together in the sea cave. His eyes searched her face, and part of her knew what he was looking for, and the other part of her wondered if he was finding it.
“We couldn’t have done this without you,” he whispered. “This never would have happened without you. You know that, right? Everything you’ve done, all the information you gave us, no matter how small, all of it was vital. Remember that. People are gonna know your name. Ayla, the handmaiden. The spy. The girl who lived with leeches.” He grinned, a flash of white, and then his fingertips were under her chin, tipping her face up. “You’re making history, Ayla.”
It was time. They had to go.
“You know, it’s not even really killing,” Benjy said almost soothingly, “not if she was never alive to begin with. You’ve trapped your butterfly, little spider. You know what to do next.”
Never alive. Living things were born, not synthesized. Living things grew. They stretched upward or curled into themselves, into the center of themselves—the core, the heart, the old shriveled seed-bit—and turned brown and gave off that sweet wet rotting smell and turned at last, again, to dirt. Living things grew and rotted and grew from the rot. That was how it worked. Leeches didn’t rot. When Crier died, her body would just sort of go stiff like petrified wood, and they could dump her in the ocean or a grave or string her up for the crows to eat, and she wouldn’t rot and the crows wouldn’t eat her anyway because her skin wasn’t made of skin.
“It’s time,” said Benjy, eyes huge in the darkness. “Are you ready, Ayla?”
Was she ready?
All she had to do was open her mouth and say yes.
Why couldn’t she do it?
Why couldn’t she move?
“Okay,” said Benjy. “Okay. Run it back one more time. I take the safe. And you . . .”
“I go straight to Lady Crier’s room,” Ayla rasped. “At five to midnight—”
“You stab her in the heart.”
Benjy’s face was so close. His eyes were so strange in the moonlight, like the eyes of a ghost. His hands were on her jaw.
“See you on the other side, Ayla,” he said, and then he kissed her.
It lasted only for a moment, his mouth hard against hers, an instant of heat and pressure, his big hands holding her steady. Then he pulled away, staring at her, still searching. Always searching.
Ayla didn’t have any answers for him.
It had been so long since she’d felt sure of anything, anything at all.
“Be safe,” said Benjy. And then he was gone, the door to the music room closing behind him. Ayla hadn’t breathed since he’d kissed her. (Twice she’d been kissed. One so different from the other. One had awakened her, one had felt like—like closure.) She glanced at the battered old pocket watch she’d swiped from one of the other servants. It was fifteen minutes to midnight.
There was a knife hidden in the waistband of her handmaiden’s uniform. It was cold against her hip.
11:46.
At some point, she must have started moving, because she blinked and realized she was no longer in the music room. She was creeping through the white marble hallways, her soft leather boots silent on the flagstones. Nobody tried