It takes them three days to dissect the body.

They meet in the morgue, where it is laid out on a cold stone slab. Allayria, who has seen her fair share of violence and horror, feels her stomach give a queasy lurch when she glances down at it, and Hai Sofo gives voice to this with a sudden retch held behind a withered hand.

"As you can see," Dynast Wren intones in a bland, almost bored tone, "none of the primary organs have been tampered with. Nor, interestingly, was the spine touched—as it had been in those diagrams the Paragon had collected. It is only when you open the skull that you find something amiss."

He taps the side of Wey's head and a sallow-faced assistant reaches over, lifting the skull back. Allayria feels Lei shift next to her, pulling subtly back.

Inside are all the normal things Allayria would expect—things she has frankly never wanted to see, especially when she knew the person they belonged to—but there is also something else. A small band of cold, shining metal lies across the top of the brain, glinting innocently in the candlelight.

"It's quite brilliant," the Dynast continues. "They hid the scar in the hairline, which is why our doctors never identified it."

"What is that?" Aren Dost demands.

"We're not entirely certain," Wren answers, "I was hoping this would be something the Paragon could help us with."

Seven pairs of eyes suddenly fix on her, sharp, with an added layer of suspicion—another consequence of the prior day's events—and Allayria swallows back the nausea.

"How might I be of assistance?" she asks, relieved that her voice does not shake.

"Reach out with your Spirit Skilling," Wren requests. "Tell us if you can sense anything."

She fights not to glance at Ruben, not to give any indication that this request causes her uneasiness, because even with an already dead subject she's remembering the last time she used Spirit Skilling on a body and the horrendous feeling twitches along her fingers, a ghostly echo of shock and shattered things. She tries to stamp something like a courteous smile on her face and steps forward, though her feet do not want to carry her this way. She reaches out a hand but she can't bring herself to touch it, instead hovering far too closely above. She closes her eyes because it's slightly easier to forget all the stares trained on her as she does so, and she seeks.

A beat passes, then another. And when she opens her eyes confusion crinkles across them.

"I don't feel anything," she tells Wren.

He hums, a finger tapping his lips as he surveys her.

"What about Smith Skilling?" he queries, a vaguely calculating expression crossing his face. "Try it with your Smith Skill."

She nods and turns back, and when she reaches out she feels something. Her hand jerks back, a shiver crawling up her fingertips as the muted sounds of low murmuring reach her ears.

"I can hear whispers," she says, her voice dropping to one as the sovereigns around her tense. "They are muffled by something... but they are in there."

Her fingers drift out further on their own accord, toward the metal strip.

"They are coming from the strap," she says, her voice distant in her ears, and the tip of her index finger makes contact with the slimy steel.

The voices are deafening now, but it is one voice—a woman's voice, low and murmuring over and over again:

Power is Might. Might is Power. Power is Might. Might is Power.

It's a cacophony, a dizzying mix of the words, reverberating, and her vision swims when suddenly she is yanked, a pair of hands clamped tight on her shoulders. She falls back, finger breaking contact with the steel, and the world goes quiet.

Allayria blinks, the lights seeming overly bright all of the sudden, and something trickles down her lip.

She wipes under her nose and the back of her hand comes away tinted a rusty, staining red.

"What happened?" Dost demands, her voice cutting through the silence, and she is suddenly in Allayria's line of vision, peering over as sides of her gray hair fall forward, out of the messy bun fixed at the nape of her neck. "What did you see?"

"Not see," Allayria corrects, twisting in the tight grip still set on her shoulders. Behind her, Lei lets go, though wariness still tints his expression. "Hear. I heard someone."

The room shifts again and she shakes her head against it, blinking furiously against the unnerving sensation. The words are no longer whispering in her head but she feels their absence like the negative of a bright light, flickering alongside wordless thoughts. She feels suddenly nauseous, more even nauseous than before, and for one awful minute she thinks she's going to cast up her breakfast in front of four of the five kingdom rulers.

"Send for some water," someone murmurs, and she thinks it must be Ruben, because Lei's hand is back on her shoulder, less tense, but still persistently keeping her upright.

She shakes her head again and lets the shimmer travel down her shoulders and spine, as if the eerie echo can be shaken off like drops of water.

"It was a woman's voice," she presses on, her voice stronger now. "She kept repeating the same words over and over again: Power is Might. Might is Power."

She knows whose voice it is when Lei's hand spasms on her shoulder, clamping down to hide it, and she shifts, to put her back to the body but also to shield his reaction from the others.

She turns in time to see the sharp look Feuilles exchanges with Dost, a wordless, urgent communication that causes feet to shuffle and mouths to twist in silent grimaces.

"If that isn't Abadi Chaudri I'll eat a cat," Hai Sofo announces, his thin, wrinkled fingers pressing together with a wobble.

"But the Imperator is no Spirit Skiller," Feuilles interjects, his cold drawl twisting with the curdling of his mouth. "So what is her voice doing in other people's heads?"

"That is the question," Qui Wren agrees. He hasn't moved from his perch by the body's head and he watches the goings-on with an air of professional interest. "I do think we can establish one hypothesis though..."

He pauses, his middle finger pushing his spectacles farther up the bridge of his nose, and his eyes, now luminous and magnified, blink owlishly at them.

"However they work, the plates act as some kind of conduit for mind control."

"So any prisoner of war, any kidnapped child..." Feuilles begins and his voice trails off as they all silently finish his sentence. Allayria finds her gaze flitting over to Ruben, who meets it with a grave one of his own.

Anyone who has been abducted by the Jarles could have one of those plates in their head.

The realization seems to hit them all differently: Dost runs a nervous hand through her hair, eyes flitting out to the sky; Wren's brows raise; and Beinsho looks like someone's taken a fist to his jaw while Feuilles' face blanches and Hai Sofo buries his head in his withered hands.

Feuilles is the first to recover.

"Chaudri will have released some back amongst us. We have to find them all," he says, fingers curling into fists. "We can't trust any of them."

And then his gaze lands on Lei.

Allayria can feel the three other rulers follow suit, feel the collective dawning, and she steps in front of him.

"Lei does not have anything in his head," she says and Feuilles' green eyes narrow.

"How do you know that?" he demands, his gaze now locking onto her.

"I already checked," she lies.

One of his brows arches.

"How could you have possibly—?" he begins snidely, but she quickly counters, the fabrications fashioning themselves out of nothingness just as they reach the tip of her tongue:

"I checked after the attack. I remembered the diagrams from the book, the illustrations of metal placed inside children, and I had a suspicion something similar might have happened to Wey. It was just a hunch—nothing I could prove until the autopsy came back—but I knew if it was true, and he was guarding me..."

She holds Feuilles' disbelieving gaze, refusing to break eye contact first.

"I checked him, but there was nothing—no metal on his spine or anywhere else, nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn't enough to disprove my theory, but it was enough to make me think it less likely."

She hears Lei shift behind her and she prays that, for once, his inability to act is not on display.

"Well, it does prove one thing," Dynast Wren interjects, oblivious to the tension of the room. "If Lei is unaffected then it implies the program began after he escaped the Jarles."

Feuilles' green eyes dart over to him.

"Perhaps," he says, though his tone is cold and flat. "Perhaps."

"Get in," Allayria orders, her voice a low hiss as she steers Lei into her room, throwing a self-conscious glance down both ends of the hall, checking to see if anyone has seen.

She only feels secure when the door clicks shut and the lock clinks into place, putting a solid barrier of wood between them and prying ears. She turns back, ignoring the anxious expression on Lei's face and gesturing toward the bed.

"Sit down,"

He does one of his double-takes, but she has no time for his prissiness and she shoves him down, grabbing the sides of his head, her palms skimming the sides of his cheeks and thumbs sitting in the curve of his temples.

"Stay still," she snaps, holding his head in place, and she stares at a crease in his forehead, letting her sense flow out through her fingertips, questing in the skin beneath them.

She holds him there for several minutes, searching over and over again, ignoring the strain around his eyes, the way his jaw clenches in a suspended fear.

He watches her hawkishly when she releases him and rubs her fingers and thumb under her own eyes. She sighs.

"Nothing," she confirms and he seems to collapse inward.

"Thank you," he murmurs and she only nods. The consequences of the avoided positive result lurk unsaid between them, a vague threat sidestepped by a fraction of a second, a hairline of luck, and there's a shaky relief in validating the lie.

"This is still going to be ugly," Lei continues after a moment. "You need to clear the others before Feuilles or the other rulers suspect of them too."

"How are we going to check everyone?" she asks, her head turning toward the window where, out beyond, a swath of shifting, bustling people eek in and out of corners, alive and compromisable.

"By finding a lot of Smith-callers," Lei answers grimly. He pulls a hand through his hair, upsetting its sleek appearance.

"You say that like it's going to be easy," she murmurs, thinking of Caj, thinking of her own experiences pretending to be an unwanted, feared Smith Skilling child. The few that didn't starve, the few that didn't just go to the Jarles will not be trusting.

Nor should they.

"We need more information," Lei continues, aggravation drawing scrunching lines around his mouth. "We need to know how the Jarles are doing it, and what exactly they can do, how far it extends. We need books or someone who knows the history of calling—of Smith-calling, Spirit-calling. But it could take months to find someone, yet alone for them to find the necessary information. But without it we're just stumbling in the dark—"

Allayria feels the shadow of a cloud pass over her, throwing a blanket of coolness across her skin, the world darkening for a brief moment as all the pieces culminate into the solution, the thing she must do, another piece of personal desire sacrificed at the altar of the greater good.

"I know someone who might have the answer," she says.

A/N: A mixture of excitement and fear is the appropriate response to anticipating the next chapter. Time to visit an old friend... for a second time.

(*flails hands frantically*)