After the fire, Laila stopped playing with dolls. But despite her father’s efforts, she had not stopped carrying around her own death. Even now, all she had to do was look down at her hand and the bright garnet ring waited to taunt her.

Laila stood in the icy makeshift morgue, the only living girl in the room. For today, she wore a funereal-black dress. On a small table beside her lay pen and parchment, and the diamond necklace Séverin forced her to wear. It hadn’t felt right to lean over these girls with such extravagance on her skin, even if it was only a fancy means of summoning her.

Spread out on nine ice slabs were the dead girls taken down from the walls of the ice grotto. In the dim light of the Forged lanterns, the girls looked as if they were made of porcelain. As if they were simply playthings that had been loved too hard, and that was why their pearl-pale legs were mottled, why the thin shifts they wore clung to them in tatters, why the crowns placed on their heads had been knocked askew and tangled into the frigid clumps of their hair. At least, it seemed that way until one looked at their hands. Or, rather, the lack of them.

Laila fought back a wave of nausea.

It had taken all the attendants of House Dazbog, House Kore, and House Nyx combined to remove them from the walls. Forging artists brought in from Irkutsk had created a morgue, and House Kore’s artist gardeners had crafted ice blossoms that gave off heat without melting. A physician, a priest, and a member of the Irkutsk police force had been summoned to administer final rites and identify the bodies, but they would not be here for a couple of hours, which left Laila some time alone with them. The others thought she was there to document what she saw, but the real reason lay in her veins. Her blood let her do what no one else could for these girls—know them.

“My name is not Laila,” whispered Laila to the dead girls. “I gave that name to myself when I left home. I have not said my true name in years, but since I don’t know if we’ll ever discover who you were … I hope you find peace in this secret.”

One by one, she walked among them and told them her real name … the name her mother had given her.

When she finished, she turned to the girl closest to her. Like the others, her hands been removed. There was a crown around her head, and in some places frosted petals still clung to the wire. Laila withdrew a piece of cloth from a basket at her feet. For what she had to do, she could not bear to look at the girl. What was left of the girl’s face reminded her too much of a young Zofia … the suggestion of a pointed chin and a delicate nose, the slightest lift of her cheekbones and the fey-like sharpness of her ears. This was a girl who was too young to be beautiful, but might have become so had she lived long enough.

Laila covered the girl’s face, her eyes stinging with tears.

And then, she read her.

Laila started with the crown of wire, the cold metal burning her hand. Her abilities had always been temperamental. The memories—sights, sounds, emotional impressions—of an object lingered close to its surface for a month before vanishing. After that, what remained was residue, an impression of the object’s defining moment or emotion. Usually, they were textures to Laila—the spiked-rind of panic; the silk-melt of love; the thorns of envy; the cold solidity of grief. But sometimes … sometimes when it was strong, it was like living through the memory, and her whole body would feel strung out from the weight of it. That’s how it had felt with Enrique’s rosary, like witnessing a scene.

Hesitantly, Laila closed her eyes and touched the crown. In her head flowed a piercing tune. Haunting and vast, like what a sailor might grasp of a siren’s song seconds before drowning. Laila drew back her hand, her eyes opening. The wire had been taken from an instrument, like a cello or harp.

Next, her fingers coasted over the cloth covering the girl’s mauled face and the strange symbols cut into it. Laila’s soul recoiled at the thought … whoever had done this to them hadn’t even seen them as people, but something to be writ upon like so much parchment.

She didn’t want to look, but she had to.

Laila touched the strap of the girl’s dress. Immediately, the taste of blood filled her mouth. The force of the girl’s last moments of life shrieked through her thoughts like a thunderstorm—

“Please! Please don’t!” screamed the girl. “My father, Moshe Horowitz, is a moneylender. He can pay whatever ransom you name, I swear it, please—”

“Hush, my dear,” said an older man.

Laila’s skin prickled. The man’s voice was kind, like someone soothing a child in a temper tantrum. But Laila felt the pressure of the knife as if it was pushed to her own throat. She tasted the ghost of blood in her mouth, the same iron-tang the girl must have felt when she realized what was happening and bit down too hard on her own tongue.

“It’s not about money. It’s about immortality … we are the made creatures that have surpassed our creator, why should we not become His equals? The sacrifice of your blood shall pave the way, and you shall be an instrument of the divine.”

“Why me?” whimpered the girl. “Why—”

“There now, my flower,” said the man. “I picked you because no one will look for you.”

Laila clutched her throat, gasping for breath.

For a moment it had actually felt as if … she touched the skin of her neck and looked at her fingertips, wondering if they would come away red … but they didn’t. It was just a memory from long ago, strong enough that it grabbed hold of her whole person. Laila forced herself not to cry. If she wept now, she wouldn’t stop.

Though the ice blossoms kept her warm, Laila couldn’t stop shivering. When Enrique had shared his findings about the symbols on the girls, he had told them he believed they were meant to be sacrifices … and he was right. She couldn’t get the sound of the man’s voice out of her head. He had to be the patriarch of the Fallen House, and yet she hated how sickeningly kind he sounded. Nothing at all like the flat affect of the doctor when he’d descended upon them inside the catacombs.

Laila gripped the edge of the ice slab, her stomach heaving. Months ago, she remembered hearing Roux-Joubert’s confession:

The doctor’s papa is a bad man.

They had all assumed it meant the doctor’s father had once been the patriarch the Fallen House. It had sounded so silly. “A bad man.” Like something a child would say. But the girls, their mouths, the ice … they didn’t fit in the scope of words like “bad.” Laila had always thought that the Fallen House’s exile was about power. They wanted to access the power of God by rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but all they achieved was exile. And yet, he had sacrificed these girls, cut off their hands, and for what? She needed to find out.

Heart pounding, Laila reached for the next girl. Then the next, and the next. She read them in a daze, the same words knifing into her thoughts over and over:

You shall be an instrument of the divine.

No one will look for you.

The patriarch had grabbed the girls too dark to be visible in the world’s eyes; whose languages fell on deaf ears; whose very homes at the edge of society pushed them too far into the shadows for notice. A part of Laila hoped he was still alive, if only so she could show him what vengeance meant.

When she reached the last girl, her hands shook violently. She felt as though she had been stabbed and strangled, dragged through the snow by her hair and thrown into the dark and kept there for hours. In her head, she heard what sounded like the slosh of water. On the soles of her feet, she felt the slide of freezing metal. Always, she tasted blood and tears. And at the very back of her thoughts curled a terrible dissonance. What decided that they should die while she—born dead, as it were—would walk between their bodies? Laila wanted to believe in gods and inscrutable stars, destinies as subtle as spider silk caught in a shaft of sunlight and, beautiful above all, reason. But between these walls of ice, only randomness stared back at her.