“Just imagine all the orders I could give,” Cress says, idly trailing her blackened fingertips over the railing. “All the things I could command them to do with those daggers before they take their own lives, like Laius did. It will be a massacre, if you don’t do exactly as I say.”

Though I know Blaise and Heron are behind me, I don’t hear anything from them at all—I’m not even sure they’re breathing. I understand it. No matter what I think Cress is capable of, she somehow always manages to surprise me.

“What do you want?” I ask her, surprised my voice comes out as evenly as it does. Inside I am a trembling mess.

Cress turns her attention from the garden to look at me, eyes cold and glittering like silver under the light of a full moon.

“What would you want, if you were me?” she asks curiously, tilting her head to one side.

“Surrender,” I say.

Cress smiles, but it is a cruel and bitter thing. “After you charge into my palace? After you destroy two of my mines, leaving me to burn the others before you could reach them?” she asks. “After you lost me my Sta’Criveran allies? After you stole my prisoners? After you killed my friends? You really think surrender would be a worthy fate for you? Try again.”

I swallow. “You want me dead,” I say. It’s nothing I didn’t expect. We’ve been here before, after all, the same choice, more or less, laid before me. I know what I chose then, and I know I’ll do it again now. And this time, death will actually stick.

Cress shakes her head. “Oh no,” she says. “That’s still too easy, still too good after everything you’ve done. No, I intend to see you live a long life, full of all manner of torments. Some I can’t even imagine yet—but I will. We’ll have such a long time, after all. Especially once I have a steady supply of velastra to give you.”

I swallow the bile rising in my throat. I will be made her puppet, my body held very much alive but my mind gone from me, given over to her. It is a fate worse than death, worse than I ever imagined. But I force myself to nod.

“What else?” I ask, because I know that can’t be all. “What about my armies?”

“I’m not unreasonable,” she says with a sigh. “If they surrender, they’ll be spared and sent to the mines, to rebuild them and work them, dosed with velastra—once we’ve figured out how to make it in bulk. Anyone who resists will be executed. I’m done with rebellions, Thora. They bore me.”

For a moment, I don’t say anything, searching the garden and the windows overlooking it, searching for any possibility of saving them, of all of us making it out of this unscathed. But there is none. Only the reality of thousands of my people, facing certain death unless I sacrifice thousands of others.

It is an impossible choice.

“Why didn’t you give me that dose of velastra as soon as I set foot in the throne room?” I ask her.

Her smile turns brittle. “Because it would have been too good for you,” she says. “And I want to hear you beg for mercy—not because I command it of you, but because you want to. Because you need to.”

“You’re afraid,” I say, hoping to buy time. Time for what, I don’t know. Time for a miracle, time for another option, time left in a world where I am not plagued by guilt. “You think we might actually win.”

Cress’s eyes narrow. “I think you’ve exceeded all expectations,” she admits. “But this was never a fight you were going to win.”

“Then why make a deal at all?” I ask her. “If you truly believed you could win fairly, you wouldn’t have dragged me over here. I know you enjoy a good spectacle, Cress, but your father would be so disappointed in you, for placing that above logic.”

That hits a nerve, but she doesn’t reply. Instead she looks out over the railing and gestures. Before I realize what’s happening, one wraith drops her ball of velastra. It hits the ground, shattering at the feet of the Astrean woman below, with the dagger clutched in her hand.

I see the moment the velastra takes effect, the way her eyes glaze over and her shoulders go slack, the same way Laius’s did.

“You will kill anyone you see before you,” the wraith calls to her, her voice high and bright and almost giddy. “And you will not stop until I stop you.”

The reaction is immediate. The woman’s hand tightens around the hilt of the dagger, and without hesitation, she lunges forward, plunging the dagger into a man’s stomach. She is already moving on to the next person before his body hits the ground. With the people packed as tightly as they are, it’s easy for her to move from person to person and in a mere handful of seconds, a dozen bodies fall, and dozens more screams pierce the air. But she is only one woman, and as frightened as the people around her are, there are some fighters among them still, and soon they have her wrestled to the ground, the dagger pried from her fingers.

It is over quicker than I thought, and though there are still so many dead bodies piled around her now, the damage was at least contained. Yet as soon as I look at Cress, I realize that this is only part of her plan.

“Do you know why I picked her?” she asks me. “Why I picked all of them to be my weapons?”

Without waiting for an answer, she motions to the wraith again, who drops something else into the madness below—a Spiritgem, I realize, a glittering deep-blue Water Gem.

“No,” I whisper, but it’s too late. I know what will happen a mere second before it does, before the woman pinned to the ground begins to twitch, a high scream prying itself from her throat.

“Let go,” the wraith calls down at her. “And kill as many people as you can.”

No sooner are the words out of the wraith’s mouth than the woman sparks, just like the girl I saw on the battlefield at the Fire Mine. One moment she is a woman; the next there is a typhoon tearing through her skin and the hundred or so people around her are drowning in air, spitting up water, choking on it until they fall to their knees as waterlogged corpses, bloated and blue.

The screams die when she does, and those Astreans outside her radius are shocked to a silence that echoes in my bones. I feel sick to my stomach, but the wraiths only smile, watching the pandemonium unfold, the other nine still holding their own orbs of velastra, ready to do it all over again.

“No!” I shout, my hands gripping the railing. I swallow, lowering my voice. “Stop it, Cress.”

“You agree to my terms?” she asks me, raising her eyebrows.

I can’t answer that. My mind spins. There are more warriors fighting in the palace now than there are slaves in the courtyard—the logical part of me knows that I shouldn’t surrender. If the people below die, Astrea can still triumph. We will win our country back and rebuild it. But we will rebuild it on the bones of innocents, and what kind of country would that be?

A free one. A country with a future.

“You are always fighting for Astrea, above all else,” Blaise told me once. And he was right.

It’s a difficult choice, yes, but not an impossible one.

I swallow and take a step back, reaching behind me to find Heron or Blaise, to find some source of comfort before I give the order that will doom thousands of people, but there is nothing behind me except air. I listen closely and detect no sounds at all, no breathing, no stirring.

“What are you doing?” Cress asks, nose wrinkled.

“Thinking,” I say, which isn’t a lie. My mind is a whirl of possibilities, of where Heron and Blaise could be, what they’re planning. Part of me worries that whatever they’re up to, it might be dangerous for them, might make things worse for everyone. But they’ve followed me this far, they’ve trusted me. Now I have to trust them, and that means buying more time.

“What is there to think about?” Cress scoffs. “I think I’m being awfully generous, all things considered. You’ve killed me, Theo—or as good as. And I’m not even going to return the favor. If that isn’t a kindness, I don’t know what is.”

“I need more information before I decide anything,” I say, scanning the windows overlooking the garden, the wraiths behind each one. If I were Blaise or Heron, that’s where I would start, but they can only eliminate—at most—two at a time, and there are nine wraiths still with orbs. As soon as something happens to two of them, the other seven will throw their own orbs of velastra.

“What about the Vecturians?” I ask Cress. “What will happen to them?”

Cress shrugs, disinterested. “I’ve heard that one of the Chief’s daughters is fighting alongside you, leading the Vecturians in your army. I suppose the Chief might be interested in a trade, though I’ve heard he has so many children that I can’t imagine one will be of much worth to him.”

“And S?ren?” I ask her, leaning over the railing, trying to see more of the garden below without looking suspicious. The five entrances to the garden are all closed, unsurprisingly. I’d wager they are locked as well, guarded on the other side. Cress wouldn’t be one to take chances.