“We need to find the spy,” Aaron said, bringing Call’s thoughts back to the here and now. “None of this is going to go away until the real spy is caught. And we — especially Call — won’t be safe until then, either.”

“Okay,” Call said slowly. “I mean, I’m in favor of that plan, except for the part where it’s more of a declaration of the end goal and not a plan at all. How are we going to find the spy?”

“Anastasia must know something,” Aaron said. “I mean, given what we found, she has to be involved in some way.”

“Her password is the name of the Enemy of —” Tamara began whispering and then stopped herself. “I mean, Captain Fishface. Her password is Captain Fishface’s brother. She has a picture of Fishface himself in her room. So she’s got to be on the side of his people. The only problem with this theory is that they’re not the people who want Call dead.”

Call opened his mouth to object, but Tamara interrupted him. “Or at least they didn’t want him dead when Automotones was sent to kill Call. Even if Master Joseph’s changed his mind since then.”

“Maybe she hates Master Joseph, hates the Enemy, and keeps that stuff around to remind her of her quest for revenge,” Aaron suggested. “Maybe she sent Skelmis after Call because she knows he’s really Captain Fishface.”

“She doesn’t seem like that,” Call objected.

“Yeah,” Aaron said, his voice brittle. “That’s the same thing you said about Celia. Stop acting like the spy is going to be someone who’s mean to you or who you hate. You can’t just believe that because someone is acting like your friend, they really are your friend!”

“Oh, really?” Call asked, letting Aaron’s words hang in the air.

Aaron sighed and put his head down on the table, cradled in his hands. “That’s not what I meant. That came out wrong.”

“Maybe we should let my sister out. Maybe she could help us,” Tamara said in a small voice.

Call turned toward her, shocked. “Are you serious?”

“I don’t know,” she said, pushing at some greens on her plate with a fork. “I need to think more about it. After Ravan became one of the Devoured, everyone — my parents, her friends — acted like she was dead, so that’s how I thought of her. I mean, sometimes I tried to picture her happy, swimming around in the lava of a volcano or something, but I never thought she was trapped here in the Magisterium. And now, seeing her, I feel like everyone lied to me. I feel like we didn’t try hard enough. And I feel like I don’t know how to feel.” Tamara let out a ragged breath.

“If you want to get her out, we’ll get her out,” Call said, with feeling.

“But we need to be careful,” Aaron cautioned. “We need to know more about the Devoured. In our Iron Year, we promised you, Tamara, that we wouldn’t let you be drawn into becoming one of them. I think that promise extends to not letting you be drawn in by them. Once someone is Devoured, are they still themselves? How much of them is left? If it was a relative of mine standing there, I would want to believe it was really them.”

“You’re right,” Tamara said, but she didn’t look totally convinced. “I know you’re right.”

“We’ve got a morning class today, right? The first thing we need to do afterward is go to Anastasia’s room and apologize to her,” Call said.

“And if she is the spy, we have to make it out alive,” added Tamara.

“Master Rufus knows where we’re going to be, though,” Aaron said. “It would be crazy to attack us. She’d get caught.”

“Depends on whether she’s going to stick around after,” Call said. His arm ached — he was still wearing both wristbands, even though he was extra conscious of the Enemy’s now. “Look, either she’s out to get us and she’s been nice to me to lull us into a false sense of security, or she’s in league with Master Joseph and she’s being nice to me because I’m Captain Fishface. Either way, she’s dangerous.”

“You’re not Captain Fishface,” Tamara hissed under her breath.

“You know what I mean.” Call sighed.

“We’ll get in and out of her room fast,” Aaron said. “Eat nothing, drink nothing, stick together. We deliver an apology, then we go. And we stay on high alert the whole time.”

Call and Tamara nodded. As plans went, it wasn’t the greatest, but with Tamara worried about her sister and the whole room whispering about how chaos mages were bad news, it was the best they were likely to come up with. Call couldn’t help remembering what he’d realized after the Collegium ceremony: that there was a problem with the Enemy of Death being considered officially dead and the war over — in this new world, where Makars weren’t desperately needed, they made everyone afraid.

Call wondered how class would go that morning with Master Rufus when all three of them were in such a somber mood, but to his surprise, a special guest lecturer had been scheduled for their group.

To his even more extreme surprise, it was someone he knew: Alma from the Order of Disorder. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been trying to kidnap Havoc so she could add him to her massive stable of Chaos-ridden animals in the middle of the forest.

She still didn’t look like a dognapper. She looked like a kindergarten teacher. Her white hair was braided into a coil against her dark skin. She wore a gray shirt over a dark green skirt. Several long strands of jade beads hung around her neck. When she saw the three of them, her gaze went immediately to Aaron. She smiled, but the smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, which remained deep and watchful.

“This is my old friend Alma Amdurer,” Master Rufus said. “She taught at the Magisterium when I was an apprentice and knew my Master, Marcus.”

Call wondered if Alma knew what had become of Marcus. Her expression didn’t change at the mention of him.

“She knows a great deal about chaos magic. Far more, I am sorry to say, than I do. Call and Aaron, you are going to spend the morning working with Alma while I teach Tamara alone. I have been thinking a great deal about what Assemblywoman Tarquin said at the meeting of the mages and I’ve decided that, as much as I don’t like to admit it, she was correct. You need to know things, and I don’t believe I am the right person to teach them. Alma agreed to come here on very short notice, so I want you to be polite and listen very attentively.”

The whole speech made Call more than a little nervous. Alma had been thrilled when Aaron had turned up at the Order of Disorder. She’d been dying to get her hands on a Makar. He recalled her trying to talk Aaron into returning to the Order of Disorder so she could experiment on him. Now, Master Rufus was practically handing him over.

“Okay,” Aaron said slowly, not sounding entirely enthusiastic.

“We’re going to stay here and work, though, right?” Tamara sounded as if she shared Call’s concerns and didn’t want to leave Aaron alone.

“We’ll be next door.” Master Rufus waved, and the stone wall parted, rock groaning and opening a crack, wider and wider, to clear a way for himself and Tamara. He turned back to Alma. “Let me know if you need anything.”