“I guess it would have been awkward to tell her you were a murderer in thrall to Master Joseph,” said Call.

Alex raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t notice you running around blurting your little secret to everyone, Constantine.”

“Well,” said Call, “they all know now.”

Alex gave him an odd look. “Yeah, they do. And Kimiya knows about me.” He bent over the stoat. “So.”

“So,” echoed Call. “Time to share your wisdom. How do you raise the dead?”

“Anastasia said you brought back Jen Matsui,” said Alex.

“Yeah, but she was … Chaos-ridden.” Call shuddered. “She was all wrong.”

“She was able to answer questions. Chaos-ridden can’t do that. It’s a start.”

Call frowned at Alex. Of course Chaos-ridden could answer questions. They could talk! Did that mean that Alex couldn’t hear them?

Now that Call thought about it, it was weird that Jen had come back being able to be heard by everyone. Did that mean Call had done something different with her, something Alex wasn’t doing with his own Chaos-ridden?

Call held up his gloved hands. “I thought you were the expert here. I thought you’d been ‘practicing with Constantine’s methods’ or whatever.”

“I know a lot,” Alex said angrily. “For starters, we’re chaos mages. Chaos is unstable energy. Our instinct is to grab that chaos and shove it into an empty body without a soul. That’s how you get Chaos-ridden.”

“Uh-huh.” Call nodded, following so far, although the part about instinct was creepy.

“But every element has access to its opposite. And the opposite of chaos is the soul. The human stuff that makes people who they are. Stoats, too.” Alex looked as if he was amusing himself. “We’ve got to reach out there and find this weasel’s little weasel soul and shove it back into its body, just like Constantine shoved his soul into you.”

“Right,” Call said, remembering how it had felt to look for Jennifer Matsui’s soul. He and Aaron had caught traces of it to make her talk, but then it had started to fade away, back into nothing. He had grabbed for it and it had come apart in pieces. How he’d channeled magic into those shining threads to hold on to it.

She had woken up Chaos-ridden.

“Right,” Alex said, like Call wasn’t listening.

“That’s it?” Call demanded. He was realizing, with dawning horror, that Alex didn’t know more than he did about bringing back the dead.

And what did that mean, when Alex was supposed to have been studying Constantine’s methods and Call had stumbled into the same — or possibly even a better — technique? Was Master Joseph right about Call — did having Constantine’s soul make him automatically better at raising the dead?

Alex stared at Call with a superior expression on his face. “You might not think it’s much, but it’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Call sighed. “I already tried it.”

“What?” Alex frowned. “You have not —”

Call didn’t care about Alex or his attitude. “That’s how I brought back Jennifer. I didn’t mean for her to come back Chaos-ridden. There just wasn’t enough of her soul left.”

For a moment, Call thought Alex was going to hit him. “I know things, secret things,” he said, stabbing a finger toward Call.

It was clear, though, that he didn’t. “If what you’re saying actually worked, then we wouldn’t have to do any experiments. Master Joseph said Constantine was on the verge of a breakthrough, not that he’d had one.” Call sighed. “I want to see Constantine’s notebooks myself.”

“Why?” Nothing about this situation was going Alex’s way, but he was clearly unwilling to give an inch.

Call was tired of arguing. “If you don’t let me see them, Master Joseph will.”

“Let’s just try to bring back this stoat,” Alex said. “Come on — concentrate.”

“I don’t know —” Call said.

“Then I’m going to do it myself.” Alex closed his eyes tightly, as though he were trying to burst a vein in his forehead.

Call could feel the chaos magic in the air, could almost smell it, like a hot wind.

On the table, the stoat began to stir. It shuddered all over. Its back paws pinwheeled. Its whiskers quivered. And then it opened swirling eyes.

Chaos-ridden.

Alex opened his own eyes expectantly, but when he saw what was on the table, he slammed his fist against the wall.

“You should have helped me,” he said. “What we need is more power!”

The stoat jumped off the table and was making for the door when Havoc roused himself from sleep and began to chase after it. Call heard something smash, then a high-pitched cry.

“And a different stoat,” Call told Alex, vowing to never let him anywhere near Aaron’s body.

They decided to break for lunch, though Call wasn’t exactly hungry. Several hours with a dead stoat will do that to you, he thought.

As Alex headed for the dining room, Call pulled off toward the kitchen to get something quick … and to not have to see Alex while he ate. There, he found a young man putting tea things on a tray.

“Hello,” the young man said.

Call, not wanting to be rude, said, “Hi.”

Seeing Call’s confusion, the young man laughed without guile and said, “My name is Jeffrey and I help out around here. I didn’t pass the tests to get into the Magisterium, but Master Joseph offered to teach me anyway, instead of having my magic bound.”

“Oh,” Call said. He had to admit, that was a pretty good way of getting recruits, although Call wasn’t sure how much magic they could learn. But what if the answer was a lot? Call thought of Hugo driving the van, of all the prisoners in the Panopticon, and wondered how many people were on the island.

“You’re Callum, right?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Come with me. Assemblywoman Tarquin wanted me to bring you to her when you came out of your lessons.”

Call wasn’t sure exactly what Jeffrey thought he’d been doing, but he followed to a small Victorian parlor where Jeffrey set his tray of tea and sandwiches down on a table between two big velvet armchairs.

There was a large bay window that looked out at the green lawn where a Chaos-ridden pushed a lawn mower in a strange pattern on the grass. Presiding over the room was Anastasia, wearing another of her white power suits. She gestured for Call to sit down in the armchair opposite her.

Jeffrey left and Call took his place awkwardly. The silver stand of iced cakes and crustless sliced sandwiches was between them. He took an egg salad one and held it gingerly.

“You must be very angry with me,” Anastasia said.

“You think?” Call took a bite of the sandwich. On the whole he preferred lichen. “You mean, because you lied to Tamara and betrayed us and let Master Joseph kidnap us? Why would I be mad about that?”

Her lips tightened. “Call,” she said. “You were in the Panopticon. I had to do what I could to get you out. Do you think there was going to be any freedom for you? No. You would have been pursued by the mages from the moment they realized you were missing.”