Chapter 29 · Opening on the Missing Page

The theater breathed around Maeve.

Not metaphorically. The walls drew in a long, damp breath, and every cracked panel of Saint Veyre’s old plaster flexed as if the building had lungs beneath its skin. Dust trembled from the ceiling. Somewhere beyond the stage, a door slammed once, then again, each impact perfectly timed with the slow, uneven beeping Maeve could still hear in her head.

Jonah’s monitor.

Flatline.

The sound had followed her through the black doorway and into the theater, stripped of wires and machines but not of meaning. It pulsed beneath the orchestra pit. It shivered through the floorboards under her boots.

“Maeve.”

Eli’s voice came from her left, low and strained.

She turned. He stood in the aisle between rows of empty seats, one hand pressed against his ribs where the theater’s last scene had opened him with a blade of light. Blood had soaked through his shirt, dark and glossy in the candle-colored glow. His face was pale, but his eyes remained fixed on the stage.

On the stage, Orla stood beneath the dead chandelier.

Or what looked like Orla.

Her body was rigid, arms hanging at her sides.