She shook her head. “Not in a conventional sense, no. But that man, he’d come every night, whispering, trying to poke around inside my head. And he won’t stop. Not until he gets what he wants to hear.” Tears filled her eyes, threatening to break the dam of her lashes. “But I swear he won’t find more answers. I already told him everything I know.”
“He’s looking for something they can use, something to go on.” I placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently. “You have to think, Mona. You have to remember. There was a silver light behind you. I thought that was just part of the show. Do you remember the light?”
She sniffed, wiping under her eye. “I do, but that was the last thing I remember happening. The stage flooded with silver light, and then my mouth opened, and I began to sing. Only – it wasn’t me. I didn’t even know that song. I didn’t know the melody. I couldn’t sing it for you now if you threatened to break my neck. I was in my body – but I was somewhere else.” She wiped angrily at one eye. “Gods but it doesn’t make sense. Who would even believe me?”
“I do,” I said. That look on Mona’s face that night – hell, her face in the prison, she’d have to be a damn good actress to pull that off. Either that, or she was warping my brain with her words. I should have confirmed with the others whether sirens needed to sing to manipulate humans. “But is there really nothing else you remember? Anything about the light that was strange at all?”
She sniffled. “I thought I might have heard something. A voice. ‘Sing,’ it said. And later, I thought I heard something about a culling. The culling? But it could have been anyone. It could have been one of the sound guys, or the DJ. I told Royce everything, and he still won’t let me go.”
One word, and silver light. “Sing,” the voice had told her. And out on Silk Road, “Filth,” it said, when it tried to destroy Sterling. But what kind of celestial being does that? What avenging angel had come to Valero to kill and slaughter so indiscriminately? And what was the culling?
I clutched Mona by the shoulder again, staring into her eyes. “Listen to me. We can talk more about this later, but for now, we’re going to get you out of here. Okay? They’re not going to keep you here forever.”
Her hand clutched at mine, her face twisting with anger. “You’re damn right about that. I’m not staying a minute longer.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay. So all we need to do is – ”
My mind began whirling with the sheer impossibility of smuggling an entire other person with me back out through Lorica HQ. Fuck. I hadn’t thought this part through. At least I could shadowstep. How was Mona going to pass through walls?
But damn it, I’d improvised enough times in the past. I was sure we could overcome something as insane as this obstacle, too.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Thank you.” She pulled herself closer to me, heaving in relief, burying her face in my shoulder. “Gods, thank you. I – didn’t catch your name. I’m – well, you already know. But my real name is Desdemona.”
“Dust,” I said, pulling her towards the corridor, prepared to take out the watcher with a well-placed fireball. “It’s Dust. And I’m going to get you out of here. Take you somewhere safe.”
“Commendable, but wrong,” a gruff voice called out from the corridor.
Mona whimpered, clinging even tighter to my back. “It’s him,” she whispered.
Royce – part Mouth, part Wing, all Scion – barred the way to freedom, his arms folded, his presence filling the very corridor.
“Neither one of you is leaving the Prism. Not now. Not ever.”
Chapter 16
“Did you really think you were going to break in that easy, Graves? Were you really so confident that you’d get in without being noticed? We knew you were here the very second you materialized in the building.”
Damn it. A trap. I should have known.
Royce leveled me with a narrowed gaze, the corner of his lip turning up in a sneer. “Really, I should have taken our intel on you more seriously. You’re even more arrogant than I thought.”
“What the – my dossier says I’m arrogant?”
Royce held two fingers to his temple, his eyes unfocusing, like he was looking at a screen only he could see. “It says it right here. Bold, overconfident, dumber than he looks.”
I flinched.
“Whatever,” I said. “I’m not so dumb that I don’t know what’s going on here. I thought the Lorica was above torture. I never would have worked here if I’d known.”
I held one arm over Mona’s torso, like I could even be enough to defend her with my body. My eyes flitted to either side of Royce, assessing our options for getting past him, but something about him was so stalwart. Immovable.
“Oh, I’d hardly call it torture.” Royce rolled his neck about, his joints popping. “Think of it as tactical coercion. Force and fulcrum. We don’t like the T word around here. I’m more of a communications specialist.”
“You sifted around in my head,” Mona said, shaking. “I told you everything I knew and you still picked at parts of my brain that should have stayed untouched.”
“Leave no stone unturned,” Royce said, his voice still so infuriatingly impassive.