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“I know.”

“He doesn’t sleep unless he can hear me in the next room.”

“He slept tonight.”

The words take the last of the fight out of me. “You...” Nothing else comes. No argument. No anger. Nothing at all.

“Yes.”

I stand in the middle of my room, my brother’s charger in my hand, looking at the wall. Nine years of a green world in pencil, pinned up by a man who’s never once been able to fix what mattered.

They didn’t have to threaten me. Ash didn’t need to. He took my brother somewhere I couldn’t follow, then left the choice here, waiting for me.

You don’t get to reach into my life and move things around because you can afford to.

I said that to his face in the kitchen yesterday morning. He heard me.

And he did it anyway.

Onyx is going to live.

I’d never have managed that. Not in ten years down the shaft. Not if I’d won the whole Hunt with my own hands.

Because he beat me. He beat me at the one thing I was for. Keeping my brother alive.

Ryven pushes off the wall, checking the time on his slate. “So what’s it going to be, Jade? You can stay here because you’re furious with him. You can spend the next few years being furious from Calder if that makes you happy. Or you can get on that shuttle, go after your brother, and figure out what the fuck you actually want when you get there.”

I look down at the charger. It’s the cheap kind, with the plug worn loose so you have to wedge it with a folded card.

I put it in my pocket.

Ryven pockets his slate. “Shuttle leaves in forty minutes.”

“I need a bag.”

His mouth kicks up before he turns for the door. “Yeah. Thought you might.”

He goes out onto the landing to wait.

They’re still out there. All of them, at half past one in the morning, in coats thrown over nightgowns.

“Jade?” Mrs. Varga already has the soup pot in her hands, morning or not. “Jade, where are you⁠—”

“Tempest.”

Someone speaks behind her. Someone else says my brother’s name. Ferro asks who’s paying for it and gets shushed. Widow Okafor gives me a sudden hug.

I stand there with a bag over my shoulder, nine years of these people looking back at me, and I can’t find one sentence big enough for any of it.

“Please water the plants,” I manage.

Then I go down the steps and get in the car.

19

JADE

Icount the crossing in doses. Two a day for Onyx, morning and night. The ship’s clock says we’ve been out three days, which is six doses he’s had ahead of me, given by someone whose name I don’t know, in a room I’ve never seen. I do the sum again in case it comes out smaller.