Phoenix Flame - Sara Holland Page 0,59

for the Silver Prince. Even if it’s just a cover story, he must have the Prince’s blessing to be in Fiordenkill, otherwise it would get back to Oasis.”

I press my nails into my palms. The same thing had occurred to me, and even if Nahteran has a secret life of his own, the thought of him being that beholden to the man who tried to kill me hurts.

“You’re sure it was him?” Marcus asks me.

I nod. “I wish I wasn’t.”

A knock on the door makes us all jump. Marcus gets up, his movements stiff, and cautiously opens the door. Willow stands in the hall. Her face is pale.

“Marcus, Maddie,” she says, her gaze shifting from my uncle to me. “I … something’s happened.” She shifts on her feet. “Something you should see.”

She crosses the room to Marcus and bends to whisper in his ear.

My heart sinks down into my stomach as I watch the color drain from his face. We can’t catch a break, I think numbly. What will the next blow be? Where will the mallet fall? Have the delegates found out what we’re doing and rioted? Did Cadius find some way to follow us out of Fiordenkill? Has Nahteran already deposited the armor in the hands of the Silver Prince? Are the two of them tearing open a new rift between Oasis and Colorado as we sit here?

Willow finishes whatever it is she’s telling Marcus and steps away. For a moment, Marcus is very still; then he reaches to the side table and grabs his laptop. I glance at Willow, confused, but her face gives nothing away. We all drift in closer by mutual agreement, fearful silence thick in the air. Brekken ends up next to me, his arm pressed against mine. I can feel the tension in him.

Marcus pulls a news site up on his laptop and then props it open on the coffee table; we all squeeze onto the couch to watch as the opening music of Good Morning Colorado plays. Then an image of Sterling Correctional appears.

SCF. The building I’ve walked into so many times I could do it in my sleep.

It fills the TV screen, huge against a light gray sky. There’s a ragged hole in the brick wall on one side, and smoke pours from it, obscuring the building and making it only an outline, then revealing it again. Dark smoke, thick and strange, moving slower than it seems like smoke is supposed to move.

A headline scrolls at the bottom of the screen in screaming capital letters: EXPLOSION AND BREAKOUT AT STERLING CORRECTIONAL FACILITY.

The shot changes to a young woman reporter standing in the familiar parking lot in front of the building. Behind her, I can see that they’ve roped off the prison with yellow crime-scene tape, and policemen move around the perimeter. In this wider shot, I can see that the smoke doesn’t look normal. It rises into the sky in a slender, dark plume, not dissipating as quickly as it should. The smoke is gray with a greenish tint.

“Good morning, Colorado,” the reporter says. “Ella Martinez here at Sterling Correctional Facility, where in the wee hours of the morning an explosion was reported which could be heard for several miles around. Three guards have been taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and one prisoner is missing.”

Without warning, the scene changes, and my stomach drops and my skin contracts. Mom’s face fills the screen. It’s a picture they took of her in court a couple of years ago. Her skin is sallow above the tan jumpsuit collar, her hair long and limp, and her strange eyes lightless. She stares out of the TV at us, not afraid, not defiant, not anything, just empty.

Then her picture shrinks to one corner of the screen, and facts pop up on a blue background. Ella Martinez’s voice floats brightly over it all.

“Inmate Sylvia Morrow was discovered to be missing soon after the explosion, which took out a chunk of the wall of her cell. She has been an inmate here for ten years following the murder of her young son, Nathan, in 2009.”

My eyes burn, and I take a sip of coffee, trying to chase the feeling away. I know, I know that’s not true. Obviously Mom didn’t kill Nahteran. But it still hurts to hear someone say it, especially in such a dispassionate voice. Especially after what happened in Winterkill, the sudden fury in Nahteran’s eyes when I invoked our family.

“Recently, she was put