A sour voice said, “Yeah?”

Something felt peculiar. Mother was standing in the hallway, leaning toward their protectors. Everyone listened as the sentry said nothing. They heard his boots sliding on the bloodwood floor, and the man taking a deep nervous breath. It was easy to imagine neck veins bulging, and maybe his hand shook a little. Then the same voice said one more word.

“Understood.”

But the sentry didn’t quite understand. He got as far as Mother before he stopped and delivered the news.

“That was the Archon,” he said, amazed by the important voice. “They found another one and they’re bringing it to big abattoir on Jakken’s Tree.”

“Another what?” Nissim asked.

“You know,” the man said, trying to sound sharp and informed. “It’s one of those special coronas.”

What did that mean?

“A detachment’s coming to take you,” he continued. “All of you. The Archon and King are already leaving . . . but he wants all of you brought after him.”

“What special corona?” Diamond asked.

But the answer had already popped into his head, and it was probably in everyone else’s head too.

Another silence got started.

And then as they were sharing numbed, astonished looks, Elata suddenly stood up, throwing her pencil down, a loud grim half-happy voice saying, “Well, good. Now we can finally be outside.”

Elata had known her intentions for the last few days.

As soon as she had the chance, whenever that was, she was going to climb over a convenient railing or open a likely window and then jump to her death.

The image found her one morning, clear and sharp and perfect. Her plan had one immediate benefit: for the first time in ages, Elata felt something that resembled happiness. She wasn’t joyful or ready to laugh, but the massive ache dragging at her soul was gone. A decision was made. Like the old phrase said: “One branch left to walk.” All that remained was finding the means while not losing her focus. She didn’t want others watching her when she did it, because that would be mean. But she also couldn’t afford to be picky with time and place. The others would try to stop her. Give them any warning, and they’d throw words at her, kindness and lies wrapped together, and they would use their own bodies too. But none of their warm-hearted efforts would work. Elata was certainly the dumbest person inside this house, and that might include Good. But better than anyone else, she didn’t bother trying to find the best answers to every smart, unanswerable question, and when given an answer to what mattered, she would never waste time with doubt or thinking twice.

Life wasn’t big enough for doubts, and after the first day of being alive, everything started filling up fast.

Elata knew that better than anyone.

Her bedroom was a mess of stuffed drawers and overflowing boxes and dirty clothes thrown over the clean, and standing in the middle of that unmapped chaos, she yelled at people who probably weren’t even thinking about her, telling them that she would be there in another two breaths.

Where did she hide her purse?

There. The leather-and-brass satchel was tucked at the bottom of a wooden box filled with secondhand dolls. It made her a little sick, reaching past those brightly painted big-eyed faces. She never liked playing with dolls. They were nothing but fancy sticks. Real babies and grown people never looked this way. But some old woman decided that she was another orphan needing toys, and the gift came with a soft pat on the shoulders. Elata had threatened to throw all of them away. But that was when they first arrived here and everybody was trying to be nice. Haddi took Elata aside to talk. With her most reasonable voice, the despairing widow told the gloomy orphan girl, “You should keep them, in case you have a daughter someday.”

Elata was living with strange, sick people, and talk about a daughter was just another example of how screwed up everyone was.

People they knew and people they didn’t know were always looking at Diamond and then at her.

She knew what they were thinking.

And she knew even better what she was thinking, which seemed like a blessing lately. This was the day to leave the world, she knew. Unless a different day would be better. Either way, Elata had a fancy purse filled with folded up drawings—the big drawings of blackwoods that others had seen, and also the secret drawings of her mother and her long dead father, plus her friends, including half a dozen careful drawings showing Diamond at various ages.

Seldom called plaintively to Elata.

She ran back to the main doorway, except nobody was there except one young soldier, and his only duty was to wave her towards the half-secret emergency exit in the back of the house.

Haddi was the first person she saw. The old woman was telling the monkey to stay behind, and Good stuck out his chest, glad for the order. New soldiers had appeared, unfamiliar faces and muscles and office clothes bulging where the guns tried to hide, and only one of those men had a voice. He told Elata that she was wasting time. She smiled, making apologetic sounds. The hidden door led into a tunnel that existed only in reality and inside a few heads. No map or official diagram included this passageway cut through the bloodwood’s trunk. She had used it twice before, and it emptied onto a private landing owned by a fictional citizen, and there were three routes off the landing, into the mayhem of this overpopulated District.

This group would take one of those routes.

It didn’t matter which.

And that’s where she would take her break for freedom. The decision would be made with instinct, with her feet. She let herself imagine nothing but the running. If she grabbed a lead, then the only person fast enough to catch her was Diamond. But on the list of what was important, Diamond was a thousand slots higher than whoever happened to be second place, and these soldiers would almost certainly wrestle him down before he could confuse the situation.

Bodies were waiting inside the tunnel. The space was narrow and infinitely long, the only lights carried by hand, and the black air was always stale in the middle reaches. Rough, hurried tools had punched through the bloodwood, the rounded walls bristling with splinters that could shred fingers or entire hands.

She got into the line.

Everybody walked down the tunnel’s middle.

Nissim was ahead of Elata, his tall body hiding everyone else, and Seldom was directly behind her, long feet catching her heel once and then again.

“Sorry,” Seldom said.

From the front, the boss soldier said, “Quiet.”

Nobody could hear talking from inside the tree. But soldiers always wanted people to be quiet, if for no other reason than to keep their own heads clear.

The stale air got worse. Even good quiet soldiers coughed.

Diamond never coughed. That was one of those odd details in a boy who was built on oddities. Spending all of her days and nights with Diamond had made her understand just how strangely different he was.

Diamond was walking ahead of Nissim, she sensed.

Some kind of “good-bye” wanted to be said. But that would ruin everything. The perfect plan was to run away, buying distance and surrounding herself with strangers. And when nobody was paying attention to one girl, she would make the jump and be gone. The world could spend thousands of days hunting for her. Nobody could ever be sure what had happened, which was perfect. They would remember her with her purse. Maybe she had been carrying money. Maybe Elata was living somewhere close, or maybe she found some way home to the Corona District. The purse and the layers of mystery would help her friends imagine her living as an adult, wearing an assumed name and ten lives worth of happiness.

That’s what she liked best about her plan. Everybody would be spared, believing whatever they wanted.