had been transplanted from a hospital, or from the facility he’d been held in before. That had been in DC,
he reminded himself. This was New York. It wasn’t the same, but he promised himself that the end result
would be the same. He’d get out of this. He had to.
They passed door after door, all offset so that from the window of each, one could see nothing else but
the opposite wall.
“You’ll be safe in here.” A swipe of a key card Lourdes pulled from her purse opened a door like all
the rest, and she gestured for Lindsay to step in. He dug in his heels, but Hesham and Mahesh pushed him
forward—gently, like a parent urging a child into class on the first day of school—and he crossed the
threshold.
The first thing Lindsay recognized were the markings on the walls and floor and ceiling: one from the
floor of Ezqel’s study, and another from the white marble circle, one from the symbols Taniel had written
in a book that Lindsay had seen from the corner of his eye, another from the mirror’s frame.
“We don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
Lourdes’s voice came from a distance, reaching where Lindsay was caught in his memories. A needle
slid into his arm and, before he could panic, warmth and pain spread out from the prick of it in his skin.
Lindsay could see, in his mind’s eye, Moore’s notes. He remembered watching, strapped upright in a cage,
his mind recording his surroundings long after his consciousness was gone. Why his mind was tormenting
him with that, he couldn’t tell.
“It’s for your own good.”
Tatterdemalion
Hesham and Mahesh were coaxing his faltering body into a straitjacket. Lindsay wanted to protest, to
scream, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t move and it wasn’t just the drugs. What did you do to me?
“Just a little cocktail,” Lourdes answered. The twins were guiding him down to the floor in a corner of
the dim room, taking his shoes and socks and belt, everything he could use to hurt himself or someone else.
Lourdes crouched so that she could see his eyes, and Lindsay realized that she thought he was talking to
her. “The twins know what they’re doing.” She took his face in her hands so that he could see her in spite
of how heavy his head was on his limp neck. “No one wants to hurt you, Lindsay,” she said tenderly.
“Sometimes, to save everyone else, one of us has to suffer. I promise we’ll make it up to you when we’re
done.”
Lindsay tried to spit at her, but the medication made him so uncoordinated, he only dribbled saliva
down his chin.
“I know.” Lourdes wiped his face clean with her sleeve, mopping his cheeks as well. It was only then
that Lindsay realized he was crying. “It’s going to be okay.” She kissed him on the forehead before she
rose. “It was hard for me, too. And look at me now. I’m fine.”
She left, swiping her key card through the inner lock this time, and the ghostly figures of Hesham and
Mahesh followed her out. Her mind slid away from Lindsay’s at last, her presence and her locks drawn
away, and he could feel his magic again. He could feel it, for all the good it did him. The medication and
the cage of runes locked him down, locked him in. He let his head fall on his knees, and dreamed.
His dreams were strange, and in them Dane was dead, and he woke sobbing and high and he knew
that Dane was dead. He knew it like he knew there were walls around him. The runes made him sick and
dizzy. They floated down and loomed large in his vision, jostling with one another for his attention, as
though they all knew each other and him. He had seen all of them before, he realized, in the memories that
Ezqel had dredged up from his time with Moore.
“I know you.” His voice was loud even though his mouth didn’t move because of the drugs. His
muscles spasmed against the straitjacket, but it was as though he wasn’t there to experience it.
On bypass.
What had Ezqel done to him? Or had the mage done anything but show Lindsay where he had been?
Now, Lindsay wished that he’d been less filled with loathing and self-pity and fear, that he’d had the
detachment to watch his own torture. Now, he understood the detachment he’d hated in Cyrus and Ezqel,
the detachment Dane lacked because of what he was.
Ezqel had seen Moore’s research as much as Lindsay had, or more. He had seen, through Lindsay’s
memories, the way that Lindsay had escaped the collar and the cuffs. The runes fell over one another to line up in three rings. One for the throat, two for the wrists. And, now, they were on the walls.
The haze of drugs was wearing thin. He’d been given them the entire time at the Institute and now
they didn’t last. As they cleared, Lindsay remembered that he had escaped the runes once. He knew that
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Anah Crow and Dianne Fox
they had broken him when he did it. And he knew that Ezqel, healing him, had known what they were.
Maybe even that Lindsay would see them again.
No one was coming for him, though his body said that hours had passed. It was time for another
injection, and yet it hadn’t come. Lindsay reached for his magic, and through it, he reached for the runes.
Come on, he said to them. I remember you. Slowly, his mind slid up and down the razor edges of them, tracing them over and over until he found the weak places into which he could sink his magic.
Moore understood that he had broken the artifacts—by sheer strength, it had seemed. Lindsay’s magic
was huge, yes, but it was not the size of it that had broken the collar and cuffs. It had been his will to survive and the strangeness of his mind that had found the way out. Moore had done it to herself, his
parents had done it to themselves—it was their own fault that he was shaped as he was.
Lindsay wedged his will into the cracks in Moore’s knowledge, the places where the world and magic
had changed over the centuries and the runes were no longer strong enough to hold either in check. He
pressed slowly and cautiously, bracing illusion up against reality to give him more strength, and when he
felt the bindings crack, he stopped and waited.
Time passed. Hesham came and attended to Lindsay’s body, and went. Mahesh came and filled him
up with drugs, but not full enough. Lindsay let the little illusions of his body hide his awareness with closed eyes and slack limbs, hid his magic away in the runes around him. Finally, finally, Moore came, and Lindsay’s fear, peering through the cracked runes, could feel her coming from far down a long hall.
The door opened and the twins came in first. Hesham—and Lindsay still had no idea how he knew
which was which—picked him up and set him on a chair put in place by a white-clad tech. Another chair
was set across from him for Moore. Mahesh pressed a hypodermic injection to the base of Lindsay’s skull.
The cold sting had hardly faded before Lindsay was awake, shockingly awake, with the hardness of the
world all around him bruising his tender consciousness.
“Hello again, Lindsay.” Moore sat, crossing her legs at the ankles and letting her empty hands lie
folded in her lap on the tight stretch of her tweed skirt over her rounded thighs. Today, her chestnut hair was loose and fell around her shoulders in soft waves. It made her seem disarmingly gentle. Behind her
glasses, her eyes were the color of tea, with dark flecks like leaves. “I’m glad you’re back, and well.”
Lindsay’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, but he managed to peel it away and speak. “I’m not.”
“Not glad or not well?” Moore smiled at him and gestured for Hesham to bring forward a glass of