“Fine. Can we go in now?” She reached around him to pull the rope for the chimes, and a tinkling melody filled the air.

Sophie was stunned to realize she recognized it.

“Was that… the Beatles?” she asked when Tiergan pulled open the door.

His lips curled into a smile as he stepped aside to let them in. “No one’s ever recognized it before. But I suppose I should’ve known you would. Ready for your meeting? Your guest is waiting.”

He led them down a brightly lit hallway, past rooms that looked surprisingly warm and cozy. All the couches and chairs were covered in soft, squishy pillows, and the tables and shelves were filled with worn books and framed photos and carefully selected knickknacks.

Sophie wondered how Tiergan felt about having a former member of the Neverseen staying in a place he’d worked so hard to make feel like a home—especially since they had no idea if Glimmer was involved with the Neverseen’s abduction of Wylie. But it wasn’t the right time to be thinking about things like that.

They stopped at a carved wooden door, and Tiergan knocked in six very specific places before the door swung open, revealing Bo with his sword drawn like he’d expected some sort of trickery.

He had no smile for his former charge, but Sophie wasn’t expecting one.

Bo wasn’t a fan of making friends.

“The space is small, so it’s best if you wait out here,” he told Sandor, Grizel, and Woltzer. “Don’t worry, if she makes any threats, I will end her.”

“There won’t be any threats,” Tam grumbled from somewhere behind Bo.

He was still rolling his silver-blue eyes when Sophie made her way into the narrow sitting room.

His smile also looked guarded—but this was the first time Sophie had seen him since Loamnore.

It probably felt even weirder for him than it did for her.

“Where’s Linh?” she asked, trying to ease some of the tension—but Tam’s shoulders went rigid again.

“She’s still at Choralmere,” he mumbled. “She thought it was too crowded around here.”

“No, she just doesn’t like me,” a new voice said—one that was both familiar and not familiar enough.

It came from the corner of the room that Sophie had been trying her best to ignore—trying to prepare herself for the sight of a black cloak and the Neverseen’s creepy eye symbol. But she couldn’t avoid it anymore.

Glimmer rested on a chaise near the window, her face completely obscured by her hood, and her head was turned as if she was staring outside and not paying them the slightest bit of attention.

“To save us all time,” she said without turning toward them, “I don’t know where Gisela is—or anyone else, for that matter. I also don’t know what they’re planning. Or what’s happening to your friend.”

“Good,” Sophie said, turning back to Tam. It made it easier to sound cheerful when she added, “That’s not what we’re here to talk about.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not telling you who I am either,” Glimmer informed her.

“Also not why we’re here,” Sophie promised.

“We are curious about why you joined the Neverseen, though,” Biana jumped in—which seemed to catch Glimmer’s attention.

“Why?” she demanded, turning toward Biana. “So you can tell me how misguided I am?”

Tam sighed. “Glimmer—”

“It’s fine,” Fitz assured him. “We’re not here to judge you, Glimmer. We’re here to see if we can work together.”

Glimmer snorted and turned back to the window. “No, you’re here because you want something.”

“You’re right,” Sophie agreed, taking a breath to steady her temper.

Her brain kept replaying the moment when Glimmer unleashed that light beam toward Keefe’s head—but she couldn’t let herself fixate on that.

“We need help,” she said quietly. “Lots of it. And since we probably wouldn’t have gotten out of Loamnore without you, we thought you might be willing to work with us.”

“I won’t be working with you, though, will I?” Glimmer snapped. “I’ll still be stuck right here, waiting for the next group of people to show up to ask me a bunch of endless questions even though I don’t know anything!”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Biana told her—but her tone was friendly. Teasing, even. “I mean, I get it. I’m always grumbling about how the Black Swan never tells us anything. But if I really think about it, there is stuff I know. Things I’ve seen. Comments I’ve overheard. All kinds of tiny little pieces that add up, you know?”

Sophie could practically hear the eye roll in Glimmer’s voice when she said, “Yeah, well, the Neverseen are too smart for that.”

“Then why did you leave them?” Fitz wondered. “You joined for a reason, right? And you had to know that leaving would mean you’d end up in a room like this—which, by the way, doesn’t have to stay that way. We want you on our side, Glimmer. You just have to trust us.”

“Oh good, we’re finally to the part where you tell me I can prove myself by sharing this wealth of information you all seem to think I’m hiding—except I’m not. And no one believes me, and instead everyone acts like I’m just being uncooperative. So here I sit, locked in a room with an ogre who keeps reminding me that he can end me anytime.”

“I can,” Bo agreed unhelpfully.

Sophie sighed and glanced at Tam, whose shrug seemed to say, She’s not wrong.

“Fine, you know what?” Sophie said. “There is one piece of information we’re hoping you might have—but if not, it won’t change us wanting to work together. So let’s just put it out there so we can move on, okay?”

She paused for Glimmer to agree but was met with only silence.

“Okay, I’ll take that as a yes,” Sophie pressed on. “We need to find Councillor Kenric’s cache. Keefe stole it from me to prove his loyalty when he joined the Neverseen, and he thought he stole it back when he left, but it turns out that was a fake. So now we need to track down the real one—and we have no idea where to look, so if you have any information that might steer us in the right direction, that’d be awesome.”

“Doesn’t have to be anything huge,” Biana added. “We realize it’s probably asking too much for there to be some sort of secret Neverseen storehouse where they hide all their important things.”

Biana was probably trying to lighten the mood with a joke.

But Glimmer flinched.

Even Tam noticed.

“What?” he asked her. “And don’t say ‘nothing.’ ”

The silence stretched and stretched and stretched.

Tam moved to sit beside her. “These are my friends, Glimmer. You really can trust them. And if you know something that might help, it’ll be better for everyone.”

“No, it’ll be better for you,” Glimmer argued. “All it’ll do for me is prove that I need to stay in this room and have more people annoy me with questions. Maybe they’ll even order a memory break—”

“They won’t,” Sophie assured her. “And even if they did, they’d order me or Fitz to do it, and we won’t.” She took a cautious step closer, like she would if she were approaching a frightened animal. “We’re not lying about wanting to work with you. We need your help.”