Chapter 389: Pink Eyes.

Melissa came out of my room in the long black dress.

The fabric moved with her as she came down the corridor toward me, jaw set, bare feet quiet on the stone. Colour still high in her face from what she had read out of Max’s head.

"I told you what was in his head. I told you it was rotten. Sinn was better. I’d take Sinn back tomorrow."

I went to Ingrid.

She hadn’t said a word since she hit the floor. Blood still sat at the corner of her mouth where the stone had caught her. Hands still bound behind her back, the rope dark against her wrists. But her eyes were doing something I couldn’t read. Holding mine and not letting go — fixed, bright, with something in them that had no business being in the face of a woman who’d just been thrown into a cell to die.

It looked like excitement.

"That lunatic is going to kill every one of us, Bram." Melissa stopped behind me as I crouched down. Her shadow fell across Ingrid’s tied hands. "Every thought he has is evil. I was in there. There’s nothing else in it."

"Nobody dies today," I said, and turned to the girl on the floor. "You okay?"

Ingrid nodded. Once. Small. The bright thing in her eyes didn’t dim.

"What does that mean?" Melissa’s feet had stopped right at my back — close enough that I felt the heat of her through the air between us. "Nobody dies today. Do you have a plan?"

"Not yet." I got my fingers into the knot at her wrists. The rope was coarse, pulled tight, the kind of knot made by someone who expected the prisoner to struggle and had allowed for it. "Get me a knife, please."

A knife? This is a cell.

"It’s in Sophia’s room."

A pause behind me. I’d answered something she hadn’t said out loud.

"Okay," Melissa said, and went. Her steps moved away up the corridor toward Sophia’s door. The white light took her and left me with the woman on the floor.

The knot was pulled tight and had been pulled tighter since — fibres compressed, the loops sitting deep against the skin. I worked at the first one with my thumbnail, trying to find enough slack to turn it.

"Did you get Code?"

"No."

"Where’s my comms, then?"

She didn’t have it in her hands. The dress she had on had no pockets anywhere I could see. Fabric smooth over her hips. Nothing clipped at her waist.

"It’s with Ingrid," she said.

My fingers stopped on the rope.

"What do you mean it’s with Ingrid?"

I looked up. Straight into her eyes.

"You haven’t worked it out yet?" she said.

And I watched it happen.

The colour came up into her iris from the middle outward, slow, like ink dropped into water. Pink. Spreading through the ordinary colour until there was nothing else left in them — pure, familiar pink — and the eyes looking back at me weren’t Ingrid’s at all.

I knew those eyes.

Wait.

I got her up off the floor.

One arm under her shoulder, the other steadying her as she found her feet with her hands still useless behind her. Then I pulled her in and held on. She was solid against me, warm, breathing fast against my chest. Her hands were still tied; she couldn’t hold me back.

She put her forehead against my shoulder instead and stayed there, the way someone does when the only contact available is the one the other person gives them.

I’d known we’d see each other again. When all of this was finished. Somewhere quiet, at the end of it — a road that wasn’t on fire, a room that wasn’t a cell.

I’d never once pictured her in this Capital.

"What happened?" I let her go enough to hold her by the shoulders.

The smile was already on the borrowed face and she wasn’t doing anything to hide it. Bright. Almost laughing at the impossibility of standing here.

"I got into the capital yesterday. I tried to reach you before I left, and I couldn’t get through to you." Her words were coming quicker than they usually came — the spill of someone who has been holding a story in and can finally put it down. "So I called you again yesterday, and Ingrid picked up."

"Ingrid."

"She didn’t want to say anything at first. Then she told me all of it. Where you were. What Max was doing. And we met."

"So Ingrid’s still out there."

The hope came back up into me so fast it hurt — a physical lift under the ribs, the same place the anger at my father had been sitting an hour ago, cleared out and filled with something else.

"She’s out there." She nodded. The pink eyes held mine without flickering. "I met her last night, and it turned out I already knew her. She was at school with me before she dropped out. We were the only two shapeshifters in the whole place. That’s why we were close."

"So what’s the plan?"

The plan I’d lost at that door ten minutes ago was sitting in front of me with its hands tied, and the rest of it was somewhere above us walking around free in a city that didn’t know which face was which.

"Max already suspects her. She knows it." She kept her voice down — a glance toward the sealed door. "So she asked me to be her. Walk around as Ingrid, keep his eyes on me, while she works out how to get you out of here."

Okay.

Okay.

The plan rearranged itself in my head in real time. The card I thought I’d lost. The door I thought would stay shut until the execution. Both of them still in play.

"And the second I got down here, he arrested me." It came out fast, almost laughing — the absurdity of it catching her the same way it caught me. "So. Here I am. And she’s still working on it."

"Great." I let a breath out that I’d been holding since the door opened.

The plan I’d gone to sleep with last night came back to me whole.

It had a way out in it again.

Melissa came out of Sophia’s room and walked back toward us with the knife in her hand — blade catching the hard white light once, her steps quick now, the dress moving with her as she closed the distance down the corridor.