Up in the freezing wind of the Listening Crown, Nara Soth sat cross-legged at the center of the dark needle lattice and listened to the sounds rising through the hollow bronze floor beneath her knees.
Twenty-four hours ago, on the first night the visitors climbed her stair, Nara had rotated a single collar-needle by a fraction of an inch inward to show how her prison worked. The instant Mina’s sharp warning cry had echoed up the bronze steps—telling her that three testers’ pulses were tearing under the displaced pressure—Nara had twisted the needle back into its lock. Then she dropped back onto the stone.
For twenty winters, that was how the Aperture Court had kept a five-hundred-year-old Crown fighter sitting still without chains. By wiring twelve fragile human chests underneath her floor so that her own refusal to hurt the innocent became the bar on her door. As long as sitting still kept the twelve people below alive—or gave them a chance at survival—Nara Soth had endured the cold, the cramped stone, and the slow fraying of her own memory without moving an inch.
Now, Nara listened down the sound throat of the black bronze pillar. She heard the math change.
