sensor.”
I tugged Mirela back by one arm while Lala pulled Rommily by her ankles, and as soon as they were more than a foot away from the door, the convulsing stopped. Mirela blinked up at me in confusion, and I suddenly wished I’d pushed her into the hall instead. Surely the convulsing would have stopped once she was away from the doorway, whether she was inside or out. The sensors were based on proximity, and they didn’t care which direction the signal came from. Right?
“Are you okay?” Lala asked her sisters, and her voice drew me out of my thoughts.
“Yeah.” Mirela sat up and leaned over her middle sister, who only looked up at us, blinking tears from her eyes. “Rommily, what hurts?”
Heavy footsteps clomped toward us from the hallway, then two armed handlers stepped into the room. The first held his remote at the ready, the screen facing away from me. “Back up,” he warned, one finger poised to cause more pain.
When Lala carefully pulled Rommily back, Mirela and I followed her.
“What happened?” the second handler demanded, glancing at the screen on his own remote. “Our system indicates that Oracle 02—known as Rommily—tried to breach the doorway.”
“She wasn’t trying to breach.” Mirela stood, putting herself between the handlers and her younger sisters. “She just got confused.”
The second handler pointed to the doorway, where I noticed that a pinpoint of red light glowed from the apex of the arch. “Do not pass. It’s pretty damn simple.”
“She’s...disoriented.” I joined Mirela, trying to decide how best to explain about Rommily, to protect her. “Traumatized. She doesn’t always understand what she’s told. Or what she sees. It’s not her fault, and it can’t be fixed. So I suggest you get ready to make some exceptions on Rommily’s behalf.”
The second handler stepped closer, as if his presence could possibly intimidate me more than the collar around my neck already had. “Is that a threat?”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Most definitely.”
Neither of them seemed to know how to respond to that.
“Just keep an eye on her,” the first one said at last, glancing from me to Mirela, to Rommily, then back to me.
Evidently I’d just become an honorary oracle. Which was fitting, considering that I’d just predicted an early death for anyone who messed with Rommily.
Or with me.
Breakfast was delivered by two of our fellow captives—a selkie and a dryad, whose hair looked like a curtain of woody vines and whose fingers and toes branched like delicate tree limbs. They pushed a steel cart into the room and passed out trays from two different stacks—one for the shape-shifters, who were largely carnivorous—and one for the rest of us.
The food was bland but nutritionally sound, a definite improvement over the menagerie, but what I found truly noteworthy was the fact that captives were allowed to perform work duties with minimal supervision, because their collars wouldn’t allow them to go anywhere they weren’t supposed to be, or do anything they weren’t supposed to do.
If I earned a work detail that let me roam the property, I might be able to observe Vandekamp’s security systems and procedures in search of a weakness that could be exploited.
After breakfast, two handlers in tactical gear came in to call six more women out for work duty. Lala and Mahsa were among those chosen, but they weren’t told what their chores would be or when they’d be back.
Sometime later, the squeal of hinges drew my attention to the door as it opened, and the familiar, waiflike figure who stood in the hall drew a gasp from me. I stood, and Mirela joined me, but we both kept our distance from the ifrit—a fire djinni—in spite of the drugged haze lingering in her eyes. “I didn’t even know they’d bought Nalah,” Mirela whispered.
“Me neither.” I’d secretly been afraid she’d been euthanized. After all, we’d had to keep her sedated since we took over the menagerie, and we weren’t even trying to hold her prisoner.
Nalah looked tired and disoriented, standing there in the doorway, but she wasn’t trying to melt the walls and her gray scrubs weren’t even smoldering. Either because the sedatives we’d given her hadn’t worn off yet or because Vandekamp’s collar had succeeded where we’d failed.
“Go on.” The handler behind her gave her a small push, and as the ifrit stumbled into the dormitory, long strands of tangled hair fell over her face, reflecting light in every conceivable shade of red, yellow and orange. Her hair resembled the flames the fire djinn lived and breathed, and could kindle out of the air with little more than an angry thought.
From the hall, the handler aimed his remote at her, then clicked something on its screen. A red light flashed in the front of her collar, and the sensor over the door flashed at the same time.
Nalah was now restricted to this room just like the rest of us.
She wobbled on her feet, and I saw no awareness or recognition in her expression. She appeared to be in a total drug fog.
“Come help me with her.”
Mirela grabbed my arm. “As soon as the drugs wear off, she’s going to roast you.” Nalah blamed me for Adira’s death.
“Not if her collar works.” If Vandekamp’s tyrannical tech made Nalah easier to deal with, I was more than willing to take the good with the very, very bad. “She needs help, Mirela.”
“Fine.” The oracle let go of my arm, still staring warily at the ifrit. “I’ll get her some water and a mat to lie down on. You get...her.”
While Mirela pulled one of the gymnastics mats from the pile stacked against the wall, I approached the teenage djinni cautiously. “Nalah?”
Her gaze snapped up, fiery copper eyes focused on me with a familiar, burning hatred. But a second later, they glazed over again. That was all the malice she had the strength for, at least until the drugs were out of her system.
“Do you want to lie down? Mirela’s getting you some water.” I reached for her arm, but the djinni stumbled backward to get away from me, putting her dangerously close to the doorway sensor. “You need to move away from the door. It’ll—”
“Nalah?”
I turned to find a woman about my age staring at the ifrit through wide ice-blue eyes. Waist-length silvery hair hung down her back and the fall of light made it shimmer like water flowing in sunlight—easily the most identifiable feature of a marid, a water djinni. And she didn’t look friendly.
“I’m Delilah Marlow.” I stepped back, so I could keep both djinn in sight. “What’s your name?”
“Simra.”
“Do you know Nalah?” My understanding was that the young ifrit and her royal marid companion had been captured by Metzger’s shortly after they’d sneaked into the United States and had no friends
