The darkness inside the cube made it impossible to see anything. A sliver of light leaked in under the door from the hallway. When my eyes finally adjusted to the darkness, I stumbled toward what looked like a lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in the center of the unit.
And promptly barked my shins on something. I yelped in pained surprise, then clapped my hands over my mouth. I took a long, slow breath, then let it out, and the pain eased away. I reached up to the lightbulb and groped at its smooth surface. My fingers found the switch on its socket and turned it sharply to the right, careful to use my knuckles rather than my fingertips to avoid leaving prints.
The bulb turned on with a loud click and filled the cube with a warm glow. It was ten feet on a side, though most of that space was unused. The room’s only furnishings were the desk that had attacked my poor shins. It crouched in the center of the bare concrete floor, the lightbulb directly above it. The walls were naked cinder blocks streaked with glistening rivulets of rust-colored water that leaked through the dropped ceiling’s spongy tiles.
“What’s in the desk?” Hagar’s voice crackled in my thoughts.
I jumped at the unexpected question and got to work.
To keep my fingerprints off anything in the room, I pulled the sleeves of my robe down to cover my hands. Being a little clumsier was a fine tradeoff for not making it obvious who’d been in here.
The desk’s shallow sliding drawer held a pair of fountain pens that had leaked black ink from their exposed nibs onto a sheet of pink blotter paper. There was nothing else in the drawer, and its back seemed solid when I rapped against it looking for secret compartments.
The file drawer to the right of the seat, though, was filled with hanging folders. I had no idea which of those held important information, so I took a seat in the chair and pulled half of them onto the desk in front of me. I made a neat stack at my left hand, took the top folder off it, and dropped it on the desk. It held a short stack of plain white paper covered in dense rows of handwritten block letters.
“Look at a page, then blink to take a picture,” Hagar advised me. “I’ll store the pictures on my end.”
A golden frame appeared around the page the instant my eyes focused on the text. When I blinked my eyes, the light stayed superimposed on the darkness behind them and flickered to green before returning to gold. I had no idea how Hagar could store the pages I sent to her, or what she’d do with the information. That was above my pay grade. I flipped through page after handwritten page, blinking at each one, taking time to skim only a few of them out of sheer curiosity.
What I saw was confusing. I’d expected to see some mention of the Locust Court. After all, those were the biggest enemies of the Empyrean Flame and its Grand Design. If they were notes from a heretic cell, I’d assume they would have reams of spirit propaganda. Instead, most of what I saw seemed to have something to do with a technical theory of something called the Machina. There were hand-drawn diagrams, too, of some sort of complex mechanism. None of it made any sense to me, and I wasn’t sure it would even if I took more time to read it.
I’d gone through three-quarters of the stack from the file folder when I saw something that stopped me. A list of names in two columns. My eyes landed on three names in the left column: Grayson Bishop, Tycho Reyes, and Eve Warin. They were near the top of the page, surrounded by names I didn’t recognize. My interest piqued, I scanned the right column for any other familiar names.
Hagar Inaloti.
Elder Sanrin.
Melody Hark.
Jace Warin.
My name was the last on the right-hand list, in black ink where the rest of the list was in blue. I’d been added to this page last. The implications of that whirled through my thoughts. The bad guys knew my name, and it was on the same side as Hagar and Sanrin. That could mean the right column was their enemies list. But Adjudicator Hark’s name was on that side of the list, too, and I wasn’t sure she was working with the Shadow Phoenix.
And if the right side was the enemy list, then the left side would be friends. But that list had both Tycho’s and Grayson’s name, and they absolutely hated each other. It also had my mom’s name, and—
A faint warbling sound from the hallway raised goose bumps on my arms and sent chills racing up my spine.
“Guardian.” Hagar’s thoughts were a faint whisper in my head. “Get out of there.”
I restacked the folders and replaced them in the file drawer, then stood carefully from my chair so as not to make any noise. The guardian might just be on the prowl. If it didn’t know I was in the storage unit, maybe it would move on by.
The strange sound was closer, now. It had to be right outside the door.
I reached up and covered the lightbulb with my hand to shield the light. Turning it off would have been better, if the switch hadn’t made so much noise when I turned it on.
I held my breath, unsure what to do next.
The door creaked open and an amorphous haze drifted into the storage unit. The cloud twitched and pulsed in strange rhythms, extending tendrils from its mass to grope around the edges of the room. The warbling sound it made set my teeth on edge and amplified the headache the eye-snapper had started. I was sure those tentacles would close in until they’d touched every inch of the cramped room.
My veiled core kept me hidden from the guardian for the moment. If
