Chapter 39 · The Nameless Choice

The glass chamber broke without making a sound.

Shards hung in the air around Evelyn, each one reflecting a different face. A child with dark, wet hair. A girl with silver eyes. A woman who looked like Noa and yet did not. Beneath them, the naming core pulsed like a second heart, its light bleeding through the cracks in the floor.

Then the woman inside the chamber opened her eyes.

They were silver from edge to edge.

Evelyn's breath caught. Her injured shoulder struck the stone as she pushed herself backward. Blood slipped beneath the leather strap of her uniform and dripped from her fingertips, bright against the black floor.

The woman stepped through the suspended glass.

No shard touched her.

"Don't," Noa's voice whispered from the walls.

It came from the pipes beneath the floor, from the brass vents in the ceiling, from the dead channels of the core. It was one voice split across a hundred throats.

The silver-eyed woman smiled. "She always says that when she is afraid."

"You're not me."

"I am what you were before they taught you to be small."

Evelyn forced herself upright.