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They don't know how well it works. Until they can be sure, they'll be cautious. They'll want more data.”
    Talus chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment, his attention straying toward the dying boy. “Nigel will need more blood,” he says.
    “No.” I shut that conversation down.
    He whirls on me, a blur of motion, and his hand moves even faster. I feel it coming, but I don't move out of the way. My head snaps to the side, and my mouth fills with the warm taste of blood. “Know your place, liar ,” he hisses.
    I don't cringe, nor do I reply right away. I take a moment or two to watch his eyes. “I do know my place,” I respond. “And that is to respect and serve. But if you fail to uphold the first, then I am not bound to the second.”
    He starts to sneer at me, and then his gaze flickers to Phoebe behind me, and the expression vanishes like a shadow fleeing the rising moon. “The reporter is dangerous,” he says, recovering and retreating to a safer position.
    “Agreed,” I reply, meeting him halfway. “But to whom?”
    He growls in his throat, and I hear the accusation caught there. Liar.
    Suddenly weary of this conversation, I turn away from Talus. “I will find out what she knows—because she will tell me—and then we will decide if she can still be useful to us,” I say. “We will decide together. It will be a group decision.”
    I watch the light go out of the boy's eyes. His face goes slack, and Nigel lifts his mouth from the boy's neck. A shudder runs through his frame, and it isn't the same sort of spasm he had been exhibiting earlier.
    Talus glares at me. I've challenged his authority. I will have to answer for my insubordination eventually, but he's smart enough—he's old enough—to know the truth of my words. We need better intel. We need to know who we are fighting and why. He doesn't like it, but we need Mere.
    He doesn't like having to trust a human.
    I don't blame him, but we don't have any choice.
    We're cut off from Arcadia. On our own and in dangerous terrain. In such conditions, there are rarely good choices. Only the expedient ones that increase your chance of survival.

FIVE
    O stensibly, our mission was an intelligence-gathering assignment, but I had been party to enough cluster-fucks designed by an armchair committee to know the signs. We were being exiled, and the Grove wouldn't be terribly saddened if none of us returned. I suspected my previous incident with Meredith was the reason I had been chosen—and it was starting to occur to me that her presence on the boat simply made thingseasier if the Grove was attempting to purge weeds from the garden. It had been a couple of decades since I had seen Phoebe, and it had never been easy to tell what she was thinking. She was like that though—perpetually inscrutable. In many ways, it didn't matter if we were talking to one another. She and I were bound together. There may be more animosity than love between us, but there would always be respect.
    I had heard stories about Talus—the man had a hair-trigger and a history of letting the bloodlust rule him. Nigel was the odd man out—nothing I had heard suggested he was anything other than a perfect soldier—and perhaps his secondary objective was to push the rest of the team overboard somewhere below the sixtieth parallel. By the time we managed to return to Arcadia, we'd crave Mother's embrace so much that we'd agree to anything. She'd strip the incendiary memories from our heads while we lay in her arms—the revolutionary zeal, the incessant need to question authority—and when we were born again, we'd be resplendent with the pure spirit of Arcadia.
    It never worked quite right with me, and I suspected it had something to do with the auguries I had performed before coming to Arcadia. I had seen the world differently than the rest. I remembered more than I was supposed to—I knew there were holes in my history that weren't entirely the result of decades-long slumber. I