Chapter 10 · A Ticket to the Trial

The golden eye beneath the blueprint room went dark.

For one breath, Nora heard nothing but the blood rushing in her ears.

Then the city came back all at once—the groan of ancient machinery beneath the floor, the hiss of steam through cracked pipes, Beckett’s ragged breathing, and the distant shriek of alarm bells rising through the walls.

The hunters had found the lower chamber.

Kane stood three paces away, one hand braced against the edge of the projection table. Blue-white lightning crawled beneath his skin, turning the veins in his wrist into threads of living fire. His eyes had lost their usual gray. Thunder churned in them, silent and furious.

His gaze remained fixed on the final line of the blueprint.

NORA VEY—AUTHORIZED ARCANE SIGNATURE.

Six years old, perhaps younger, when the Thunder Crown was erased.

Nora’s left shoulder throbbed beneath her torn coat. Blood had soaked through the bandage she’d tied there, but the pain barely reached her. Her mind was trapped in the shape of that signature: a crooked loop, a three-pronged mark, a childish imitation of the Vey family seal.

Her mark.

“I didn’t do it,” she said.

Kane’s jaw tightened. “You don’t remember doing it.”