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on his knees and hands dangling.
    â€œRegretting coming with me on this suicide mission yet?” I asked lightly.
    His eyes flicked up to meet mine, though I could barely see them through the messy hair falling down over his brow. “Give it time.” His voice betrayed nothing, and his face gave away even less.
    Still, a flicker of relief coursed through me. A joke meant we were okay. I moved toward him until I could run my fingers through his hair, brushing it away from his eyes. “I’m going to need you in there.”
    Unmasked, his pale blue eyes were more telling. His brow furrowed as he gazed up at me, silent for a long time. “You’re going to need him too,” he said finally. “We’re lucky he found us.”
    He was telling the truth. We needed Kris’s information—without him we’d be going in blind. But there was something else there, a deeper wound Oren was hiding. And no one hid wounds better than Oren. I reached out toward his face again, but he straightened before I could touch him and my hand fell away.
    â€œI saw your face,” he said softly, unprompted. “Back there, with him.”
    My heart stuttered a little, remembering how it had felt watching him with Olivia in Lethe, even when nothing was going on between them. “I’m not—”
    â€œI know. That’s not—” It wasn’t like him to stutter or hesitate, but he stopped, his gaze searching mine. “I mean that I saw the way you held his hand. He felt normal, didn’t he? He didn’t feel like a shadow.”
    Oren knew that every time we touched I could feel the tingle of magic flowing from me to him. It was a constant reminder of what we were, that neither of us was quite human, that there was a part of him that was and always would be a monster.
    â€œThat doesn’t matter,” I said fiercely.
    For once, Oren’s face wasn’t hard to read. There was a naked longing there in his expression, one that cut me so deeply I struggled to breathe. “Of course it matters.” He lifted a hand as if to touch my cheek, but his fingertips just traced a lock of hair and then fell again, avoiding the skin-to-skin contact that would trigger the flow of magic.
    It doesn’t matter to me, I wanted to say. But that wasn’t what he meant. It mattered to him.
    I could still sense the shadow in him, even when he wasn’t touching me—but it wasn’t as visceral a feeling. I could ignore it, and so could he. At least, we could pretend to ignore it. I let out a slow breath, willing my heart to slow too. His wasn’t the only presence I could sense, anyway. “I think there are some shadows out there, way in the distance. I should—I should get to work.”
    I let him go to get Kris and Nix back and turned to face the Wall. I pulled the chain around my neck over my head so I could inspect the vial in my palm. My brother had given it to me when I left Lethe, saying it was what the architects had given him when he crossed the Wall, fully expecting to return.
    The stopper was made of lead, and I reached for the knife in my boot as the others returned. Kris came up to look over my shoulder, fascinated. “What is it?”
    â€œYou don’t know?” I asked, pausing to look up at him. “It’s something the architects gave my brother.”
    â€œBefore my time,” Kris replied. “Basil was long gone before I became involved in the Iron Wood project.”
    â€œIt was supposed to help him get back inside the Wall once he’d located the Iron Wood,” I said, sliding the tip of the knife underneath the edge of the lead.
    â€œMaybe some kind of magic amplifier,” Kris mused aloud. “Or a signal that’d alert the architects to come get him when he got back.”
    â€œA signal?” Oren echoed, straightening. The last thing we needed was to bring a dozen architects to meet us when we entered