The Book Eaters(89)
Personally, she didn’t see how reclaiming Redemption or the use of dragons was going to save the knights in the long term. But that didn’t matter to Ramsey and his ilk. He only cared how it affected him in the short term.
Aloud, Devon said, “None of that has anything to do with putting an explosive device in Cai’s body.”
“Can’t you guess?” he said. “My commander and I have developed a little plan, rather straightforward, and it goes like this. We find out where the Ravenscars have gone, and we get someone to join them. Someone who they’ll believe and feel sympathetic toward, who shares their values and whatnot. Then we use that person to track the Ravenscars to their hiding spot, and descend in the night. Capture them, take their drug supply, and wring the siblings for information on how to make it.”
“That’s fucking insane,” Devon managed.
“Yet here you are, Dev, falling out of the sky like a pot o’ gold with a rainbow attached. I could not have planned that fiasco with Matley if I’d tried!” He was laughing again; the whole world and its relentless cruelty was endlessly amusing to Ramsey. “Pretend to go on the run for Matley’s murder, and we will pretend to pursue. The Ravenscars, should they find you, will believe you are a fugitive. Except none of it is quite pretend. Isn’t this a wonderful bit of drama?”
“I…” Her head was reeling, her heart wrung with bewildered misery from the complexity of it all. “Why would they ever want to find me? How am I supposed to join a random group of dissidents I’ve never met?”
Ramsey held up a finger, poked it in his own ear, and then mimed an expression of dying that was somewhere between ridiculous and grotesque. Mocking Matley, she realized, and didn’t know how to feel about that.
“Cai is guilty of patricide, as they are,” he said. “I think they will find you both very tempting indeed. Birds of a feather, and all that. Must get lonely by themselves, eh?”
In the theater below, the procedure was wrapping up. Hands washed up, aprons crumpled and tossed away, gloves discarded neatly. Cai lay still and inert.
“I’m not a spy,” she said. “I’m not even a knight. I’m just—”
“Authentic,” he said, leaning toward her. “Desperate. Trapped. A good thinker on your feet. Occasionally imaginative, in a way that many of us are not. You are everything we need and more, Dev. Perfect for the role.”
Cai was being wheeled away, out of her agonized and fretful sight.
“Lucky me,” she said, watching until Cai’s trolley was gone and the theater completely empty. “How about, you don’t give me that rubbish? Because I’ve been playing roles all my life like a good little princess and now I’ve just watched my brother implant his nephew with a device that can kill him.”
Ramsey’s amusement faded. “Fine, allow me to rephrase. You’re a core piece in the game, but you’re not a player, or in a position to win. Only a position to be useful. Be useful, or get discarded.” He rapped her forehead with a finger. “You’re free to go anytime you like, but I don’t think you will. Because that would mean abandoning Cai, and you’ll never do it.”
He was right. She hated that it was true, but hated the thought of leaving Cai even more. Wasn’t that what it came down to, in the end? Every single time. She wasn’t stupid, knew he’d “dispose” of her and Cai when done with them. The alternative was one or both of them dying even faster.
“I don’t know how to survive out there,” she said through clenched teeth. “I’ve never lived among humans or … or anything.”
“We can prep you. It’ll take a few months, but we’ll need that time anyway to track down their human suppliers.” Ramsey stood and stretched leisurely. “I’ll go and make sure the procedure has gone smoothly. If it has, you may come see your boy. Wait here.”
He strode out of sight, leaving her in the darkened viewing gallery. No one else was in sight, but she knew better than to run. This was a sealed compound, full of knights and dragons, and her son was still elsewhere in the building. Held hostage, now, with an explosive in his belly.
Devon curled up in the quiet emptiness.
If she disobeyed the knights, they’d either turn her over to the Families or kill Cai from a distance. If she refused to comply, neither of them would leave this building alive. Even if she could remove the device later, her son still needed the drugs—still needed the Ravenscars.
And yet if she obeyed the knights dutifully, she would end up in a shallow grave, scapegoated for their crimes while her children were fed like grist to a mill. She was too dangerous a loose end to leave hanging.
All her options ended in death and failure, her usefulness expired; she was a dead woman walking.
Devon smiled.
There had to be a moment, she thought, where you could pinpoint the tides of an ocean turning. A single specific flicker of time, recordable, measurable, where the waves stopped retreating and started advancing up the beach again. This, surely, was such a moment for her.
For the first time in years, her heart seemed to float within her chest, free and light and calm. Fear had been an anchor, dragging her down, and the certainty of death had finally cut that chain. If all this politicking were a card game, the knights believed they had stacked the deck against her, to cover every eventuality.