Even then, I didn’t sleep. I could feel Elsewhere hanging somewhere between waking and dreams, and again I probed the futures in which I travelled there, searching for Anne. Again I couldn’t see any trace of her . . . but then I couldn’t see much trace of anything else, either. My magic is unreliable when it comes to Elsewhere. I’ve always been much better at physical divination than mental; it’s easy for me to see what’ll happen to my body, less so my mind. I’m not sure whether it’s because my talents lean that way or because mental divination is just more difficult. Whatever the reason, the pathways in which I visited Elsewhere felt like shifting sand, and I only felt blurred impressions before they closed off again.
I could just go to Elsewhere anyway. I could see what I’d find, try to find a way into Anne’s dreams . . . but I had the feeling that was a bad idea. My instincts were telling me that something very nasty could be waiting inside, and over the years I’ve learnt to listen to those feelings. Elsewhere is not a safe place, and I’ve pushed my luck there enough times. I didn’t want to risk it again.
I was still worrying over it when exhaustion caught up with me and I fell asleep.
I woke early and lay in bed for a few minutes looking out of my window at the sunrise, watching the light creep across the chimneys. When I was fully awake I headed for the bathroom and spent a while re-dyeing my hair. I’d never realised just how much work colouring is. When my hair was somewhere close to its natural shade I emerged into the kitchen.
Luna was sitting at the table, going through messages on her phone. “Morning,” she said without looking up. “Sonder says he wants us to meet at his flat in an hour.”
“Good.” I put the kettle on and started making toast. I wasn’t hungry—I don’t eat much when I’m worried—but fuel is fuel.
“Anything from Elsewhere?”
I shook my head, leaning against the counter. “I can’t see if she’s there, and I’m afraid to go poking around without a path to follow.” There aren’t many people I would have admitted the last part to, but I’ve come to trust Luna over the past two years. She’s one of the few people I’ve been to Elsewhere with, and she knows exactly how scary it can be.
“Why can’t you find her?” Luna said. “You found me.”
“Just because it works with one person doesn’t mean it’ll work with another.”
“Then why not her?”
I took the toast out from under the grill and began spreading butter on it. “Maybe she isn’t asleep when I’m trying to do it,” I said at last. “Anne can stay awake for days if she has to. Or maybe she is asleep and I just can’t reach her. Because I don’t know her well enough, because she doesn’t trust me enough, because there isn’t enough of a connection for us to find each other . . .”
I took the food to the table and sat down. Luna was silent and I knew she’d figured out the third possible reason, the one I hadn’t said out loud. You have to be alive to sleep. I finished my breakfast in silence, and Luna didn’t speak again. Eventually Variam appeared and we headed to Sonder’s flat.
The meeting went a lot less smoothly than the last one.
Things kicked off with both Sonder and Caldera chewing me out. I’d expected it and pursued my normal strategy for dealing with angry people in a position of authority: avoid a confrontation, don’t commit to anything, and wait. Caldera gave up after only a few halfhearted threats. I think underneath the posturing, she was a bit embarrassed that I’d had to help Sonder out. More surprising was that Sonder actually seemed more angry about the whole thing than Caldera was.
“We told you not to come!” Sonder said for the third time. He was standing in front of his whiteboard, glaring at me.
“Strictly speaking, you said you didn’t need us,” I said, leaning back against the wall. I didn’t bring up how he’d needed bailing out within ten minutes of getting through the front door.
“You knew what I meant!”
“Well, I didn’t exactly. I mean, you did make it clear that you weren’t expecting to need any extra help, but we never discussed what we were going to do if extra information came up that changed the situation.”
“There wasn’t any extra information!”
“Sonder,” Caldera said from where she was sitting. “Let’s move on.”
“Yeah,” Luna said. To begin with she’d found it hilarious that Sonder and Caldera were reprimanding me, but the joke had obviously gotten old. “What about those apprentices? What did they say?”
The mention of Sagash’s apprentices was enough to get Sonder’s attention. “They . . .” Sonder hesitated. “It wasn’t any good.”
“Did they do it or not?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, they didn’t talk about Anne.”
“They recognised her name,” Luna said.
“Okay, they knew who she was, but I don’t think they knew anything else.”
“What else did they say?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Sonder said. “Something about a third apprentice—some other girl. It wasn’t Anne.”
“That was it?” I asked. “That was all you could see in the whole conversation?”
“There wasn’t anything else,” Sonder said in annoyance. “Anyway, you were distracting me.”
I held back my retort, feeling frustrated. Normally when it comes to timesight, Sonder’ll tell you everything you could possibly want to know—the hard part is getting him to shut up. He’d picked a hell of a time to start being uninformative.
“What about Sagash?” Variam asked Caldera. “You spoke to him, right?”
“Sagash claims he hasn’t had any contact with Anne since she left his apprenticeship,” Caldera said.
“Is he lying?”
“I’m not a mind mage,” Caldera said. “I was asking in my capacity as a Keeper. If Sagash did have Anne, he could have just told me. There’s nothing more I could do without a Council order.”
“Maybe there was something else he was covering up,” Luna said.
“He’s a Dark mage, of course there’s something he’s covering up. But there’s no evidence that it’s what we’re looking for.”
“Jagadev?” I asked.
“Stonewalled.”
“What about Crystal?” Sonder said.
“I got the latest report from the Crystal team this morning,” Caldera said. “I’ll read it more thoroughly later, but the short version is there aren’t any leads connecting her to Anne.”
“Can’t we just give up on Crystal already?” Variam said.
I had to hold back a sigh. The whole reason I’d explained where Sonder was coming from to Vari yesterday was so that he wouldn’t push Sonder about Crystal. Vari’s a good guy to have at your back in a fight, but he’s not a great listener.
“Crystal was responsible for the deaths of four Light apprentices over several months without anyone suspecting her,” Sonder said. “We wouldn’t expect to see any evidence that it was her, not easily.”
“Let’s go back to Sagash’s apprentices,” I said, looking at Caldera. “Luna found out a bit about them, but I guess you’ve got their files?”
“We’re not Big Brother,” Caldera said. “We don’t have files on every mage in the country.”
I looked at her with eyebrows raised.
“I know a little bit of common knowledge about them,” Caldera said with a scowl. “Sagash has three apprentices—Darren Smith, Yun Ji-yeong, and Samuel Taylor. First two are living family, third is an elementalist. The two boys have been his apprentices for at least one year, the girl at least six months, but those are lowball estimates.”
Luna stirred. “Wait. Elemental and living?” She looked at Sonder. “Wasn’t that what you saw when Anne was kidnapped?”
“Not exactly . . .”
“You said lightning and death magic.” Luna looked around. “Doesn’t that fit?”
“We don’t know that. They could—”
“They’re both guys,” Luna interrupted, and started ticking off points on her fingers. “They’re the right height and weight and skin colour. Their magic types match. They’ve got a connection to Sagash. Isn’t this making kind of a pattern here?”