Sade entered my room, all formality forgotten. Her hands were restricted by the handcuffs we used on the Shifts in the basement.

We stood in tense silence, Sade standing there as I analyzed every detail about her. She looked exactly the same. One gray eye visible, one eye covered by an eye-patch. Her brown hair was the same chin length, pulled into the same tiny bun. Freckles dotted her pale cheeks.

But she wasn't the same. She was a Shift.

"What do you want?" My voice sounded hoarse, even to me. The benefits of coming back from the dead.

"To talk."

"Like Pilvi I'll talk with you."

"Wonderful." She sat down on my bed, and I cursed, remembering she was the Shift we all cursed to.

Another tense silence ensued.

I broke it again.

"Why do you want to talk?"

"Because, Elliot," she said, talking to my floor and using my full name, "I know big things about you. You are the sister to Princess. You are a splendid archer. None of the boys on our team can fluster you. You have a strange and unhealthy obsession with melted cheese. But small things? I do not know your favorite color, or your birthday. I wish to know you better."

My mouth split into a cruel sneer. "So what? You can torture me all the quicker?"

She drew in a deep breath and stood. For a second I thought she was going to leave, but then I saw the scale pattern forming slowly under her right sleeve.

She faced me and promptly ripped off her eye-patch.

The team had gossiped, of course, what her eye looked like and why she kept it covered. We wondered if there was any eye left, or if it was a socket. Sam always told us to shut up.

It was, in a word, extraordinary.

Or extraordinary because of how normal it was.

The same gray eye as her other stared at me, pupil expanding and contracting as the eye became used to the light.

"Jordan saw me get shot with a crossbow bolt straight through this eye." She said quietly. "Of course, it would heal, but how would I explain to the girl I had saved from a Shift that I was, also, a Shift?" She sat back down slowly, bed creaking under her.

"Simple, really. Pretend it was lost. Sam helped me fake it. We salvaged the eye of the Shift that had been holding her as proof, since she wanted to see."

She took a deep breath and let it out, and I could've sworn a little bit of smoke filtered through the air.

"That was something small about me. Your turn."

I bet my lip. I did my best to fulfill every bargain, and I wouldn't back down from this one either.

"I used to sleep with a stuffed dragon a street vendor gave me," I admit quietly, almost shamefully. "Her name was Rain. My dad burned her when he found out I had her."

Sade half smiled. "Rain, huh?"

I flushed. "Not my fault I accidentally named the dragon after The Dragon!" It wasn't, really, I was four, and the silver dragon burning was one of my worst memories.