Chapter 112

Sloane

I didn’t go and watch.

I had promised myself that much, lying awake in the dark with my leg on two pillows, and I kept the promise. When the trucks started up behind the training hall an hour before dawn, I was already in the wheelchair by the window, and I stayed there. The window looked out over the kitchen garden and the back of the packhouse and nothing else. There was no border in it, no road. Only frost on the dead bean poles, and the sky going gray and then pale, and a long time later, the sound of one truck coming back.

One. Not two.

I sat there until the light reached the floor. Then I sat there some more, because there was nowhere else I needed to be. I had no seat at any table. I had no patrol. I had a pardon, a year under Cassandra’s roof, and a window.

Rhea had lifted her head last night, at the top of the cell stairs. This morning she had put it down again. I could feel her somewhere deep, lying very still with her nose towar