An Ember in the Ashes (Ember Quartet #1)(34)

The silence lengthens, and I remain still as a post, too afraid to even blink. Two minutes with the Commandant and she’s already cowed me.

“Slave,” she says. “Look behind me.”

I look up, and the peculiar impression of faces I’d gotten when I first walked in resolves itself. The wall behind the Commandant is covered with wood-framed posters of men and women, old and young. There are dozens, row after row.

WANTED:

REBEL SPY . . . SCHOLAR THIEVES . . . RESISTANCE HENCHMAN . . .

REWARD: 250 MARKS . . . 1,000 MARKS.

“These are the faces of every Resistance fighter I’ve hunted down, every Scholar I’ve jailed and executed, most before my tenure as Commandant. Some after.”

A paper cemetery. The woman is sick. I look away.

“I will tell you the same thing I tell every slave brought into Blackcliff. The Resistance has tried to penetrate this school countless times. I have discovered it every time. If you are working with the Resistance, if you contact them, if you think of contacting them, I will know and I will destroy you. Look.”

I do as she asks, trying to ignore the faces and letting the images and words fade into a blur.

But then I see two faces that will not fade. Two faces that, however poorly rendered, I could never ignore. Shock courses through me slowly, as if my body is fighting it. As if I don’t want to believe what I see.

MIRRA AND JAHAN OF SERRA

RESISTANCE LEADERS

TOP PRIORITY

DEAD OR ALIVE

REWARD: 10,000 MARKS

Nan and Pop never told me who destroyed my family. A Mask, they said. Does it matter which one? And here she is. This is the woman who crushed my parents under her steel-bottomed boot, who brought the Resistance to its knees by killing the greatest leaders it ever had.

How did she do it? How, when my parents were such masters of concealment that few knew what they looked like, let alone how to find them?

The traitor. Someone swore allegiance to the Commandant. Someone my parents trusted.

Did Mazen know he was sending me into the lair of my parents’ murderer? He’s a stern man, but he doesn’t seem like a willfully cruel one.

“If you cross me”—the Commandant holds my eyes relentlessly—“you’ll join the faces on that wall. Do you understand?”

Ripping my gaze from my parents, I nod, trembling in my struggle not to allow my body to betray my shock. My words are a strangled whisper.

“I understand.”

“Good.” She goes to the door and pulls on a cord. Moments later, the one-eyed girl appears to escort me downstairs. The Commandant closes the door behind me, and anger rises in me like a sickness. I want to turn around and attack the woman. I want to scream at her. You killed my mother, who had a lion’s heart, and my sister, who laughed like the rain, and my father, who captured truth with a few strokes of a pen. You took them from me. You took them from this world.

But I don’t turn back. Darin’s voice comes to me again. Save me, Laia. Remember why you’re here. To spy.

Skies. I didn’t notice anything in the Commandant’s office except for her wall of death. The next time I go in, I have to pay closer attention. She doesn’t know I can read. I might learn something just by glancing at the papers on her desk.

My mind occupied, I barely hear the feather-light whisper of the girl as it drifts past my ear.

“Are you all right?”

Though she is only a few inches smaller than me, she seems tiny somehow, her stick-thin body swimming in her dress, her face pinched and frightened, like that of a starved mouse. A morbid part of me wants to ask her how she lost her eye.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Don’t think I got on her good side, though.”

“She doesn’t have a good side.”

That’s clear enough. “What’s your name?”

“I—I don’t have a name,” the girl says. “None of us do.”

Her hand strays to her eyepatch, and I suddenly feel sick. Is that what happened to this girl? She told someone her name and she had her eye gouged out?

“Be careful,” she says softly. “The Commandant sees things. Knows things she shouldn’t.” The girl hurries ahead of me, as if wishing to physically escape the words she’s just spoken. “Come, I’m supposed to take you to Cook.”

We make our way to the kitchen, and as soon as I walk in, I feel better. The space is wide, warm, and well lit, with a giant hearth and stove squatting in one corner and a wooden worktable sprawled in the center. The roof drips with strings of shriveled red peppers and paper-skinned onions. A spice-laden shelf runs along one wall, and the scent of lemon and cardamom permeates the air. If not for the largeness of the place, I could be back in Nan’s kitchen.

A stack of dirty pots rises from a sink, and a kettle of water boils on the stove. Someone has laid out a tray with biscuits and jam. A small, white-haired woman in a diamond-patterned dress identical to mine stands at the worktable, chopping an onion with her back to us. Beyond her is a screened door that leads outside.

“Cook,” the girl says. “This is—”

“Kitchen-Girl,” the woman addresses her without turning. Her voice is strange—raspy, as if she’s ill. “Didn’t I ask you to wash those pots hours ago?” Kitchen-Girl doesn’t get a chance to protest. “Stop your dawdling and get to it,” the woman snaps. “Or you’ll be sleeping with an empty belly, and I’ll not feel a shred of guilt.”