Her eyelids felt glued to the flesh of her face that she had to work to separate. Triumph brought Sweater sitting on the floor outside her cell into view. The hall was darker, the alien rectangles she was starting to suspect weren't windows after all now emitting a soft blue light.

Sweater pushed a dish that had found its way inside her cage into her foot.

"You should drink."

Her neighbor gave a sardonic snort as Snow closed her eyes and turned her heavy head away.

"Isn't it your lucky day?" Sweater said, his voice sharp with venom. "Back together at last."

"I long for the day I rip you open, eyes to groin, Methuselah," he said, lip curling on the last word as if it were a slur.

"You're going to be waiting a long time, dog."

Her neighbor growled.

Everything hurt. Snow wished they'd shut up.

"Make sure she drinks," Sweater said. "You wouldn't want your flower to wilt."

Her eyes flew open, but Sweater had already gone, the swish of the glass door the only proof he had been there at all.

"He's right," her neighbor said after a moment. "You should drink. They won't bring more until you do."

Her throat was parched and her mouth rancid, but Snow was stubbornly determined to furnish what little wiggle room she had left with resistance, so she pulled her knees to her chest and stared at her kneecaps, wishing she had been placed next to a less chatty cellmate.

A scream erupted from a cage further down, seemingly unprompted. Snow wondered how many abductees were here.

"I don't suppose you remember me."

Her brow crinkled at the insinuation. Having spent most of her life in solitude, she of course remembered everyone she had ever met.

"How could you? I was much fuzzier and on four legs, then."

That familiar prick of déjà vu brought her head around and she really looked at him for the first time. The beard and regular wear she thought likely the result of prolonged containment made it impossible to pinpoint his age. What she could see was his sinewy build and nasty scar, black and scabby, around his neck, but what made her hair stand on end were his eyes.

"My name's Hurgo, but I don't get to use it much."

Her breath caught at the shrapnel of a memory. The thought felt too preposterous to voice but she did it anyway: "Outside my house."

He stood a little straighter. "Yes."

A voice in her head giggled as she realized what she had admitted to herself. "You. You're a wereling."

The light in his eyes sharpened and he said: "Yes." She got the distinct impression that she had offended him.

Hand gripping the bar for support, Snow struggled up into a standing position. "I always thought that was a fable, another lie told by the humans to make the faeries seem all the more sinister, their keeping shapeshifting slaves--"

"I'm no slave." Definitely offended. "Faeries and solthus are paired in infancy. Tres and I chose one another."

Snow took Tres for the faery with hair the color of a cardinal's plumage, eyes that of an exploding star.

"What were you doing there?"

"We were always close by."

Her brow crinkled. "What does that mean?"

Nothing.

Fine. She remembered how the wolf had whined. "You didn't want him to come close to me."

"No."

"Why?"

"It was too early. We were supposed to wait."

"Wait for what?"

She could see a war raging behind his eyes, as if he was contemplating whether to give up a secret. Snow twisted the bar in frustration. A tiny hurt laced with appreciation for Mat and the enormous patience he had shown her swelled in her chest. Maybe she simply had to ask the right questions.

"Why approach me, then, when you did?"

"Tres thought your brother would try to take you away," he said slowly, as if thoughtfully selecting the right words to say. "But he was drawn to that place, I think—that house, or maybe the Holókaustos. There's a pull for all of us back to our birthplaces, don't you think? 'An umbilical cord that can't be snipped,' Tres said."

"But that day," she said in an effort to redirect him back to the matter at hand.

"Tres got nervous when the man planted that girl and her pet in the yard."

That sentence lent a stabbing pain to her gut.

"Tres thought he would want to leave the place where it had happened, that he would get scared that girl's someones would come looking for her. So Tres gave you memories—"

Her brain was melting as she fell back into her front yard, fresh patches of naked dirt mounds beside where she played, remembered the faery kneeling, remembered him reaching up to brush back a lock of her hair—

The dream. All the air in her lungs left her and, for a moment, she forgot to suck more in.

"Memories. Whose memories?"

His. It was a whisper in her deep-fried brain. Fried with indecision at what was real. She suddenly felt incredibly fragile, like if anyone so much as breathed on her, she would crumble into a million pieces.

Hurgo's prattling rolled over, unintelligible until--

"--snowstorm, we knew he had gone, but he had left you before, so we went inside, but the soldiers had beaten us there."

"Tres is here?" she asked, grabbing at her mind's fraying edges.

He made an affirmative noise.

"Why give me his memories, how would that protect me--" she couldn't finish. From my brother.

"You were so dependent on him. We thought that if Tres gave you something to doubt him, it might give you some agency--"

"Why should you care?" she interrupted, boiling with anger and confused; she couldn't decide if she was mad at Hurgo, Tres, Eli or herself. And did she even believe this? "What am I to you that you would care what Eli did to me?"

"You are intended for a greater purpose."

"What purpose?!"

Again, nothing. In the breath of silence that followed, flowers crept back into her mind.

"The man who put me in here, he called me a flower. What did he mean by that?"

"You must know you are not human."

Of course, she thought with a funny little mental shrug. "So, what am I?" she asked, inching closer, one bar at a time.

"Bloúsma sotívor."

"In human, please."

"There is no translation."

"So, explain it to me," she said, now gripping the bars that separated their cells, feeling the desperation rising inside her like vomit, but before he could utter a word, a guard rapped his baton on her cage.

"That's enough chitchat. It's playtime," he said with a nasty grin as another shoved a keycard into the box outside Hurgo's cell.

Hurgo's face turned stony and a growl gurgled in his throat as two guards moved into his cell.

"Where are you taking him?" Snow asked, still white-knuckling the bars.

"That's none of your concern, is it?" said the freckly blonde one who had rapped on her bars. He swapped his bludgeon for the long, black stick in his belt as his comrades wrestled Hurgo's arms behind his back, but he was putting up quite the fight. Freckly pressed a button and lightning sizzled on the end a split second before he shoved it into the back of Hurgo's thigh. He yelped and fell to one knee. It occurred to her the weapon was familiar a hairsbreadth before she realized she had seen it in an old agriculture catalog in Father's study--it was a cattle prod, technology she would have guessed was long lost to this world.

"Stop, you're hurting him!"

"Shut it, or he won't be the only one," Freckly spat, right before he kneed Hurgo in the face.

Stunned, he slumped to both knees. Freckly stepped forward, put a collar with a chain around Hurgo's neck and dragged him out.

Freckly slowed outside her cell.

"You know he usually goes much quieter than that. Must really be lamenting giving up any one-on-one time with his new...perky neighbor," he added, eyes lingering on her chest.

Feeling very unlike herself, Snow shoved her face between the bars and without much thought said: "You remind me of a very small, very dead man I once knew."

He scoffed. "Keep running that pretty little mouth of yours, and your companion's gunna get a zap for every cheeky thing you say."

"You sound threatened. What are you, afraid of a little girl?"

As if to prove her wrong, he came close and Snow grabbed his face with both hands, fingers pushing in, nails digging in deep.

He spit a curse at her, wrapped his hands around her neck and yanked her against the bars. Focusing on the wall behind his head, stars erupted in her vision and her hands fell to twitch at her sides as she began to lose consciousness. The last thing she remembered was another guard rushing up and taping her with an electric spark--

She chased a boy with golden tufts of wistful curls through a maze of manicured hedges so tall that they disappeared into the ivory-yellow sky choked with clouds. His laugh echoed in her ears every time she lost him around a corner. The ground was slick with blood, the mud sucking at her bare feet, the smell of iron heavy in her head as she searched and searched, until all she could hear was her own harried breathing, dashing hot plumes onto her flushed cheeks and the slap of her soles against the wet earth. She knew she had lost something, though could not remember what, when she found her brother at its center.

Snow came to with her heart hammering away. She bolted up into a sitting position and her cage blurred into focus. It was dark. The rectangles of light now emitted a hushed blue glow and she could faintly hear snoring down the hall. Stumped by the absence of flame or sky behind the glass, she decided that it might be magic. A twinge at the back of her head had her prodding a tender spot back there where a dull pain quickly swelled to a roar. She guessed the guard hadn't bothered to lower her gently to the ground once he had strangled her unconscious.

Hurgo was back in his cell, curled up against the wall, the back of his neck bloody where the scar had been reopened. Despite the dark, she swore it was red.

"Hurgo," she said hoarsely, and discovered her throat hurt, too. She crawled to the bars. "Hurgo."

Nothing. The subtle movement of his shoulders was the sole testament he still breathed.

She started and spit a curse when Sweater, now wearing a coarse, maybe maroon shirt, materialized in the tail of her eye. The glass door shut behind him.

"What did they do to him?"

"Nothing they haven't done before and won't hesitate to do again."

She made a slow go of standing up, her legs feeling like detached appendages.

"What's a methuselah?"

The edge of his mouth twitched irritably. "It means old one in Faen," he said and brought another bowl out from behind his back.

"You don't look very old."

"Looks can be deceiving," he said, looking at her pointedly, then placed the dish containing green shoots on the floor and pushed it under the cage where it clinked with the one she had no reason to think contained anything but water other than that she was here against her will and her captors had already proven themselves abusers.

She tried to swallow, but her throat was so dry she coughed.

Her resistance waning, she fell on it like a cur and gulped it all down, then prodded at the shoots, plucked one up and tested an end with her teeth. Her inspection bore no clues, it simply tasted green.

"How old are you?" she asked, then grabbed all the sprouts in one hand and tore into them like they were a single piece of jerky.

"1,200 orbits, give or take."

Snow barked a laugh, sending unchewed shoots down her front, but bit her lip at his countenance, warped with startled anger at the outburst.

"That's impossible."

"By whose standards?"

She shoved the escaped greens back into her mouth.

"Do you know what you are?"

"You're the second one to ask me that today," she said, using a nail to dig at the shreds stuck in her teeth as the rest struggled to slide down her lightly watered throat.

His eyes bore into her.

Not a conversation so much as an interrogation, then.

She studied him and was struck by how different he looked than what she remembered. His eyes were lighter, and with faint lines, not exactly wrinkles but actual cracks, fanning out from his eyes and mouth, he did look older.

"What happened to your face?"

"That's not a very nice thing to say."

Something tells me nice doesn't get very far with you. "Are you a faery?"

"I haven't been a faery in a very long time."

She had no patience for riddles. Enough about him. "Iz bloúsma sotívor," she tried to repeat but knew she had butchered it when he smiled snidely. "What does it mean?"

"A savior begotten of sap, soot and magic. Did the mutt not share your origin story?"

"Tell me." Every emotion inside her stuck to the walls to make room for another tale.

He leaned in. She mirrored the movement.

"I watched you be conceived. A monstrous sight your host mother made gobbling up all those flowers laced with magic. I was certain she'd explode, but magic—it's a witchy thing, and instead inside her that preternatural goop morphed into a morsel that grew fingernails, veins, and a brain; she got landed with you." Snow knew this story. Not this story, but had seen that woman gobbling up flowers—dreamed that memory that Tres had planted in her brain with the deft touch of a finger to her temple. How could she know he hadn't planted a false memory, that Maroon here wasn't in cahoots with Hurgo and Tres? How could she still trust her own mind?

Before she could even start to wade through this nonsense, he grabbed her hand and yanked it through the bars, and before she could react, he pricked her finger with something that looked like a tiny blade and held her wrist as she squirmed and grabbed at him, trying to push him away. For all her efforts, he might as well have been made of stone. He stared at her finger with a naked fascination as a globular orb of green budded there.

"They made sure that a single drop would not bear fruit, not while the whole still walked about—that you would bleed like any plushy human, except what you bled. No, to achieve real results, one would need to spill it all."

He leaned in so close—nostrils flaring, the lines etched into his cheeks stretching. Her skin prickled at the thought of him slurping up the sap from her finger right before he let her go and she tumbled back into her cell.

"And that complexion," he drawled. "An added bonus. The faeries were certain it'd make the humans hate you--it doesn't take much, to be fair, humans are cruel—and that you'd grow up resenting them enough to return to the place you were made with a vengeance."

"You sound mad," she said, nursing her hand from her spot on the floor. "Why—what could the faeries want with me?"

"They've been stuck in the Holókaustos, that dead forest, for a long time. Trapped by a curse. They're dying, not in the way humans die—more like an eternal fading. The curse stipulates that should a child born of mortal flesh and magic after the Fínmortem forfeit its own life for the faeries that the tear sapping their faculties will mend and their power be restored."

A laugh bubbled up her throat and tumbled from her lips, her sides soon aching as she doubled over in hysterics that were no doubt exasperated by exhaustion and her increasingly absurd situation.

"Does magic not sometimes slip out of you?" he asked. "Is that not cause enough for you to at least question that perhaps not all things are as they seem?"

"I don't disbelieve you because the story is absurd," she said, wiping her watery eyes. "Because you're right, my upbringing has been a master class in absurdity. Honestly, the biggest hit to your credibility is that I'm in here and you're out there.

"That's why I'm here, isn't it? Highness thinks I'm the real deal."

"She does indeed, but not because of this tale of which she knows nothing about. No, your being here is all thanks to brother dearest. He spilled the honey and now Highness wants to gut you to see what's inside. Unluckily for you, it's pure happenstance that a faery who's been tasked with hauling you back to the Holókaustos for a little bloodletting is aboard this very ship and this one," he said, nodding toward Hurgo, "is his running mate."

She saw where this was going.

"But fear not, for I can set you free," he said, with all the venomous honey of a demon who you're all too eager to sell your soul to at a crossroads.

"I thought you said all the faeries were trapped."

"All but one. The son of the traitor, that one got a key."

Lucky him.

Snow scrutinized Maroon's empty belt. "You're no freer than I am."

"I'm not the one in a cage."

"Just because you can't feel the walls doesn't mean you're free to leave as you please."

"You sound like Highness."

A scream shot up from below, making her skin crawl. How many bodies were packed in this trash heap closest to the heavens like insects shoved in a jar?

"What's in it for you if you help me escape?"

"I'm no fan of the faeries or my mistress," he said with such vehemence, Snow was certain it was the truest thing he had said to her yet. "There was a time I thought Highness had a plan for a grander world but she's little more than a child playing make-believe."

"So, I'm supposed to believe you'd help me escape and just let me go."

"I did your brother."

No, him you killed. And though she believed that with her entire being, she couldn't bring herself to snuff out this one sliver of hope. Her brother had been dumb enough to return for her, but she had no one to return to. She had ruined Mat's life. She would run and never look back. Besides, if her inclinations were true, this one had let her go once before.

"Rath!" someone shouted from down the hall. "Highness is waiting."

A flash of irritation tightened his jaw before he turned from her.

"Give Elsie my best," she said and saw that she surprised him. The small triumph that she had known something sputtered as he reatreated down the hall.

She stared at the empty space he had occupied moments before, seeing a world of white, the phantom touch of snowdrifts skimming her toes, and a silhouette she was certain was Rath, tall and reedy like the burnt trees she knew so well, following not far behind.

I'm right where Eli died to have me not be.

Her breath caught as she remembered another something she had forgotten. Her hand went to her hip, feeling the fabric for the lump that was her brother's tooth, but of course, it wasn't there. The scabbed-over wound inside her ruptured like a collapsed dam giving way to putrid water. A choking sob skipped up her throat, and still it was not for her dead brother for whom she had never shed a single tear.

The dead don't miss us, he had told her, dirty with fresh grave dirt after burying their parents. It's us still living who we feel sorry for.