The Bronze Key (Magisterium #3)(43)

After a moment, Aaron rose. “Okay.” As they made their way toward the food tables, he spoke to Call under his breath. “Thanks for sticking up for me.”

Call nodded. He felt bad for even considering Aaron might be the spy.

And yet, the thought of it wouldn’t go away.

By the time they got through the line for food, Call’s plate was piled high with lichen, mushrooms, and tubers although both Aaron’s and Tamara’s plates remained uncharacteristically bare. The three apprentices slid into their usual spots at the same table where Jasper and Celia were, but they took care to pick seats as far from them as possible. Celia looked away from Jasper long enough to glance in their direction with pity, but Call’s evil glare made her turn away fast. He’d always known she liked to gossip, but he’d never thought that she’d tell everyone something like this. Of course, Jasper had probably made Aaron’s family seem worse than it was, to impress her. Probably Jasper and Celia deserved each other. Call hoped they’d suck face for so long they ran out of oxygen and choked.

“We need to find the spy,” Aaron said, bringing Call’s thoughts back to the here and now. “None of this is going to go away until the real spy is caught. And we — especially Call — won’t be safe until then, either.”

“Okay,” Call said slowly. “I mean, I’m in favor of that plan, except for the part where it’s more of a declaration of the end goal and not a plan at all. How are we going to find the spy?”

“Anastasia must know something,” Aaron said. “I mean, given what we found, she has to be involved in some way.”

“Her password is the name of the Enemy of —” Tamara began whispering and then stopped herself. “I mean, Captain Fishface. Her password is Captain Fishface’s brother. She has a picture of Fishface himself in her room. So she’s got to be on the side of his people. The only problem with this theory is that they’re not the people who want Call dead.”

Call opened his mouth to object, but Tamara interrupted him. “Or at least they didn’t want him dead when Automotones was sent to kill Call. Even if Master Joseph’s changed his mind since then.”

“Maybe she hates Master Joseph, hates the Enemy, and keeps that stuff around to remind her of her quest for revenge,” Aaron suggested. “Maybe she sent Skelmis after Call because she knows he’s really Captain Fishface.”

“She doesn’t seem like that,” Call objected.

“Yeah,” Aaron said, his voice brittle. “That’s the same thing you said about Celia. Stop acting like the spy is going to be someone who’s mean to you or who you hate. You can’t just believe that because someone is acting like your friend, they really are your friend!”

“Oh, really?” Call asked, letting Aaron’s words hang in the air.

Aaron sighed and put his head down on the table, cradled in his hands. “That’s not what I meant. That came out wrong.”

“Maybe we should let my sister out. Maybe she could help us,” Tamara said in a small voice.

Call turned toward her, shocked. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pushing at some greens on her plate with a fork. “I need to think more about it. After Ravan became one of the Devoured, everyone — my parents, her friends — acted like she was dead, so that’s how I thought of her. I mean, sometimes I tried to picture her happy, swimming around in the lava of a volcano or something, but I never thought she was trapped here in the Magisterium. And now, seeing her, I feel like everyone lied to me. I feel like we didn’t try hard enough. And I feel like I don’t know how to feel.” Tamara let out a ragged breath.

“If you want to get her out, we’ll get her out,” Call said, with feeling.

“But we need to be careful,” Aaron cautioned. “We need to know more about the Devoured. In our Iron Year, we promised you, Tamara, that we wouldn’t let you be drawn into becoming one of them. I think that promise extends to not letting you be drawn in by them. Once someone is Devoured, are they still themselves? How much of them is left? If it was a relative of mine standing there, I would want to believe it was really them.”

“You’re right,” Tamara said, but she didn’t look totally convinced. “I know you’re right.”

“We’ve got a morning class today, right? The first thing we need to do afterward is go to Anastasia’s room and apologize to her,” Call said.

“And if she is the spy, we have to make it out alive,” added Tamara.

“Master Rufus knows where we’re going to be, though,” Aaron said. “It would be crazy to attack us. She’d get caught.”

“Depends on whether she’s going to stick around after,” Call said. His arm ached — he was still wearing both wristbands, even though he was extra conscious of the Enemy’s now. “Look, either she’s out to get us and she’s been nice to me to lull us into a false sense of security, or she’s in league with Master Joseph and she’s being nice to me because I’m Captain Fishface. Either way, she’s dangerous.”

“You’re not Captain Fishface,” Tamara hissed under her breath.

“You know what I mean.” Call sighed.

“We’ll get in and out of her room fast,” Aaron said. “Eat nothing, drink nothing, stick together. We deliver an apology, then we go. And we stay on high alert the whole time.”