“I realize at your age,” he said carefully, “dating and relationships can feel like everything. But it’s truly only one small fraction of your life—and something you definitely don’t need to be rushing into. Perhaps in a few hundred years—”

“A few hundred years,” Sophie repeated, suddenly despising the elves’ indefinite life span with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.

It didn’t matter how he was planning to finish that sentence. In a few hundred years, everyone she knew would already be matched up.

Actually, they’d probably all be matched in the next decade. Fitz definitely would be. Even with all the drama surrounding his family, he was still basically elvin royalty. And he was handsome, and charming, and talented, and sweet, and thoughtful, and powerful, and—

“Time is relative,” Mr. Forkle said, interrupting her mental swooning. “Things can feel so urgent, and yet be so small in the grand scheme. I realize that’s a difficult concept to grasp at such a young age—and I’m sure it’s even harder for you, given your upbringing.”

“The upbringing you forced on me,” she spat back at him.

“Yes, that is one of the few things we didn’t give you a choice in. And yet, I suspect you wouldn’t trade the time you spent with your human parents and sister.”

“I wouldn’t,” she conceded. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to know who my biological family is—especially since not knowing them ruins everything.”

“Not everything,” he corrected. “And not ruins. It simply complicates certain things.”

Sophie shook her head.

It would ruin what she had with Fitz. That was more than enough.

“Please don’t do this to me,” she whispered to him as Flori started humming again, trying to keep her calm.

Mr. Forkle dragged a palm down his face. “I’m not doing anything. We’re just… at an impasse. And I wish I could change that. But right now, this is where we must stand—and given everything going on, I’m begging you to put this out of your mind. You cannot let it distract you from everything we’ve been discussing. Focus on the dwarves. There’s too much at stake. Too many people we care about who could get hurt. I know you’re smart enough to see that, so I won’t say any more.”

Sophie turned away, counting her breaths and willing herself not to cry. But she could still feel the tears burning behind her eyes as Mr. Forkle tilted her chin back toward him.

“You’re the strongest, most resourceful person I’ve ever known, Miss Foster. And after everything you’ve survived, I know you can survive this.”

He was wrong.

This was officially too much.

But…

Maybe he was also right.

She was strong and resourceful.

And she wasn’t backing down.

She’d spent the last few years learning how to focus on multiple challenges at the same time. She had multitasking down to an art.

So she let him lead her and her bodyguards into the sunlit meadow and pulled her home crystal out from under her tunic. She had to light leap out of there fast, before he caught a glimpse of the new plan forming in her mind.

If he wouldn’t tell her who her genetic parents were, she’d find the answer herself.

TWO

SO HOW’D IT GO?” GRADY called as Sophie and her bodyguards glittered onto the flower-lined path at Havenfield—and it took Sophie a second to spot her adoptive father standing near the triceratops pen, along with her adoptive mother, Edaline.

Havenfield was one of the rehabilitation centers for the Sanctuary, so there was always an abundance of bizarre animals milling about the lush pastures that stretched all the way to the steep ocean cliffs bordering the property. And one of Sophie’s favorite creatures was bounding around Grady and Edaline on wobbly legs, flapping his blue-tipped wings and shaking his gleaming mane.

Wynn wasn’t just adorable. He was a true miracle baby, since he and his twin sister, Luna, were the first alicorns to ever be born in the Lost Cities. And with their birth nearly two weeks earlier, they’d doubled the population of their severely endangered species and reset the Timeline to Extinction. Both the babies and their mama had only survived the incredibly high-risk delivery thanks to the help of the trolls and Luzia Vacker—which was one of the reasons the Council kept struggling to find the right punishment for what happened with the illegal hive at Everglen.

The line between hero and criminal was sometimes very gray.

“What’s all that for?” Sophie asked, pointing to the large spool of glowing wire that Grady was holding, and the bulging sack Edaline had slung over one of her shoulders.

Grady tipped his chin toward Wynn. “The gnomes are helping us baby-alicorn-proof the gorgodon enclosure, since this guy seems to think the gorgodon is his new best friend—and it turns out he’s scrawny enough to wriggle through the bars.”

“I nearly had a heart attack when I found him trotting around in there this morning,” Edaline added as Wynn reared back with a whinny.

“Is he okay?” Sophie asked, sprinting over and searching Wynn’s silvery body for signs of injury.

“He’s fine,” Edaline assured her, stroking Wynn’s forehead right where his nubby horn jutted out of his wild mane. “Don’t ask me how, but he didn’t get a scratch on him.”

Sophie couldn’t understand it either. The gorgodon was the last of the mutant hybrid beasts that Lady Gisela had created as creepy guard dogs for her version of the Nightfall facility. Part flareadon, part gorgonops, part eurypterid, and part argentavis—it was huge, ugly, and as deadly as possible. It could fly, could breathe underwater, and had enormous claws, fangs, and a stinging scorpion tail. The gnomes were always fixing giant gouges in the bars from the beast thrashing against its cage—and feeding time was super challenging.

“Will that really be strong enough?” Sophie asked, frowning at the glowing wire. It looked so thin, she had a feeling even her weak right hand could bend it.

“Oh yeah.” Grady shook the spool, filling the air with a clinking noise that reminded Sophie of ringing bells. “This is iron tempered with lumenite. Even an angry T. rex couldn’t break it.”

“But you might also want to let Silveny know what her son’s been up to,” Edaline suggested. “Wynn’s already tried to sneak back to the gorgodon three times since I lured him out of there, and I think a nice long mama lecture will put some proper fear into him.”

Sophie nodded.

One of the many unique aspects of her enhanced telepathy was her ability to communicate with animals—and Silveny was particularly easy to understand, because the Black Swan loosely modeled Sophie’s genetic enhancements on alicorn DNA. She almost wished she could tell that to the matchmakers and see if it made them decide that her biological parents didn’t matter, since her genes had been so drastically manipulated. Which showed how desperate she was, if becoming “the horse girl”—on official record—suddenly sounded appealing.

“Everything okay?” Edaline asked, her turquoise eyes narrowing and her delicate eyebrows pressing together. It was a look she’d been giving Sophie a lot lately. Ever since Sophie had stepped out of the matchmakers’ office empty-handed. And Sophie had a feeling it meant her parents had guessed that something had happened in Atlantis—but she was hoping their theory had to do with her changing her mind about registering and being too embarrassed to admit it.