“This is a school that has existed for, what, more than three hundred years? So every permutation has been seen. Every problem we face has been designed to be overcome. Sevro, you say the fortresses cannot be taken? Well, the Proctors have to know that. So that means we have to change the paradigm. We need an alliance.”

“Against whom?” Sevro asks. “Hypothetically.”

“Against Minerva,” Roque answers.

“Stupid idea,” Sevro grunts, and cleans a knife and slides it into his black sleeve. “Their castle is tactically inconsequential. No value. None. The land we need is near the river.”

“Think we need Ceres’s ovens?” Quinn asks. “I could do with some bread.”

We all could. A diet of meat and berries has made us muscle and bones.

“If the game lasts through winter, yeah.” Sevro pops his knuckles. “But these fortresses don’t break. Stupid game. So we need their bread and their access to the water.”

“We have water,” Cassius reminds him.

Sevro sighs in frustration. “We have to leave the castle to get it, Sir Numbnuts. A real siege? We’d last five days without replenishing our water. Seven if we drank the animals’ blood like Morgdy. We need Ceres’s fortress. Also, the harvest pricks can’t fight to save their lives, but they have something in there.”

“Harvest pricks? Hahaha,” Cassius crows.

“Stop talking, everyone,” I say. They don’t. To them this is fun. It is a game. They have no urgency, no desperate need. Every moment we waste is a moment the Jackal builds his strength. Something in the way Mustang and Fitchner talked about him scares me. Or is it the fact that he is the son of my enemy? I should want to kill him; instead, I want to run and hide at the thought of his name.

It’s a sign of my fading leadership that I have to stand up.

“Quiet!” I say, and finally they are.

“We’ve seen fires on the horizon. War consumes the South where the Jackal roams.”

Cassius chuckles at the idea of the Jackal. He thinks him a ghost I conjured up.

“Will you stop laughing at everything?” I snap at Cassius. “It’s not a gorydamn joke, unless you think your brother died for amusement.”

That shuts him up.

“Before we do anything else,” I stress, “we must eliminate House Minerva and Mustang.”

“Mustang. Mustang. Mustang. I think you just want to snake Mustang,” Sevro sneers. Quinn makes a sound of objection.

I snatch Sevro’s collar and lift him up into the air with one hand. He tries to dart away, but he’s not as fast as me, so he dangles from my grip, two feet off the ground.

“Not again,” I say, lowering him nearer my face.

“Registers, Reap.” His beady eyes are inches from my own. “Off limits.” I set him down and he straightens his collar. “So, it’s to the Greatwoods for this alliance, right?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s to be a merry quest!” Cassius declares, sitting up. “We’ll be a troop!”

“No. Just me and Goblin. You aren’t going,” I say.

“I’m bored, I think I’ll come with.”

“You’re staying,” I say. “I need you here.”

“Is that an order?” he asks.

“Yes,” Sevro says.

Cassius stares at me. “You giving me orders?” he says in a strange way. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I go where I want.”

“So you’ll leave control to Antonia while we both go risk our necks?” I ask.

Quinn’s hand tightens on his forearm. She thinks I don’t notice. Cassius looks back at her and smiles. “Of course, Reaper. Of course I’ll stay here. Just as you’ve suggested.”

Sevro and I make camp in the southern highlands within view of the Greatwoods. We do not light a fire. Our scouts and others roam these hills at night. I see two horses on a far hill, silhouetted against the setting sun behind the bubbleroof. The way the sun catches on the roof makes sunsets of purples and reds and pinks; it reminds me of the streets in Yorkton as seen from the sky. Then it is gone and Sevro and I sit in darkness.

Sevro thinks this is a stupid game.

“Then why do you play it?” I ask.

“How was I to know what it’d be like? Think I got a pamphlet? Did you get a slagging pamphlet?” he asks irritably. He’s picking his teeth with a bone. “Stupid.”

Yet he seemed to know on the shuttle what the Passage was. I tell him that.

“I didn’t.”

“And you seem to have every gory skill required for this school.”

“So? If your mother was good in bed, you suppose she’s a Pink? Everyone adapts.”

“Lovely,” I mutter.

He tells me to cut to the point of it.

“You snuck into the keep and stole our standard and buried it. Saving it. And then you managed to steal Minerva’s piece. Yet you don’t get a single bar of merit for Primus. Doesn’t strike you as odd?”

“No.”

“Be serious.”

“What should I say? I’ve never been liked.” He shrugs. “I wasn’t born pretty and tall like you and your buttboy, Cassius. I had to fight for what I want. That doesn’t make me likeable. Just makes me a nasty little Goblin.”

I tell him what I’ve heard. He was the last one drafted. Fitchner didn’t want him, but the Drafters insisted. Sevro watches me in the dark. He doesn’t speak.

“You were picked because you were the smallest boy. The weakest-looking. Terrible scores and so small. They drafted you like they drafted all the other lowDrafts, because you’d be easy to kill in the Passage. A sacrificial lamb for someone they had plans for, big plans. You killed Priam, Sevro. That’s why they won’t let you be Primus. Am I on target?”

“You’re on target. I killed him like I’d kill a pretty dog. Quick. Easy.” He spits the bone onto the ground. “And you killed Julian. Am I on target?”

We never speak of the Passage again.

In the morning, we leave the highlands behind for the foothills. Trees intersperse with grass. We move at a gallop in case Minerva’s warbands are near. I see one in the distance as we reach the trees. They didn’t see us. Far to the south, the sky is smoke. Crows gather over the Jackal’s domain.

I would like to say more to Sevro, ask about his life. But his gaze penetrates too deep. I don’t want him to ask about me, to see through me as easily as I saw through Titus. It is strange. This boy likes me. He insults me, but he likes me. Even stranger, I desperately want him to like me. Why? I think it is because I feel as though he is the only one, including Roque and Cassius, who understands life. He is ugly in a world where he should be beautiful, and because of his deficiencies, he was chosen to die. He, in many ways, is no better than a Red.

I want to tell him I’m a Red. Some part of me thinks he is too. And some other part of me thinks he’ll respect me more if he knows I am a Red. I was not born privileged. I am like him. But I guard my tongue; there’s no doubt the Proctors watch us.

Quietus does not like the woods. At first the shrubbery is so thick that we must cut our way forward with our swords. But soon the shrubbery thins and we enter the realm of godTrees. Little else can exist here. The colossuses block the light, their roots stretching up like tentacles to sap the energy from the soil as they grow tall as buildings. I am in a city again, one where animals bustle and tree trunks instead of metal and concrete obstruct my view. Then, as we venture deeper into the woods, I’m reminded of my mine—dark and cramped beneath the boughs, as though there is no sky or sun.

Autumn leaves the size of my chest crinkle underfoot. I know we are being watched. Sevro does not like this. He wants to slink away to find the eyes at our backs.

“That would defeat the purpose,” I tell him.

“That would defeat the purpose,” he mocks.

We break for a lunch of pillaged olives and goat meat. The eyes in the trees think I’m too stupid to shift my paradigm, as though I would never suppose they’d hide above me instead of on the ground. Yet I don’t look up. No need to frighten the idiots or let them know I know their game; I’ll have to conquer them soon, if I still am the leader of my House. I wonder if they have ropes to traverse the trees. Or are the limbs wide enough?