It came twenty minutes later.

“It’s Lukas. Let me in.”

She opened the door. Lukas stepped inside, his face unreadable. He closed the door behind him and stood there, studying her as if seeing her for the first time.

“Did you already know?” she whispered.

“I suspected. After the raid, after Iago… the way you were so careful about changing clothes, using the head. But I told myself I was imagining things.” He ran a hand through his hair, and when he looked back at her, something sharper had crept into his voice. “Months, Fallon. Months of training you, teaching you to fight, watching your back — and the whole time you let me believe—” He stopped, jaw working. “Do you know what it’s like to find out everything you thought you knew about someone was a lie?”

“I didn’t lie about everything,” she said, her voice small.

“You lied about the one thing that mattered.” He paced a few steps, then stopped and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I trusted you. I put men at risk for you on that raid. I’ve been covering for a boy who doesn’t exist.”

“Because they would have killed me. Or worse.”

“I wouldn’t have—”

“You would have told Schmidt. Or Aden. And they would have made me leave, or made me…” She couldn’t finish the sentence.

Lukas was quiet for a long moment, some of the anger draining out of him, replaced by something more tired. “What’s your real name?”

“Faline.”

He nodded slowly, as if testing it out. “Faline.” Then: “How old are you? Really?”

“Thirteen. Almost fourteen.”

“Creator’s mercy.” He sat heavily on the edge of the bed, all the fight going out of him at once. “A child. I’ve been training a child to swing a sword and gut a man.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “Do you have any idea how much danger you’re in? A girl your age on a ship full of—” He stopped himself. “And now Argus knows. And Montague. What’s going to happen when—”

“I don’t know,” Faline said, her voice small. “I don’t know what to do.”

Lukas looked at her for a long moment. Whatever softness had crept into his face a moment ago hardened again, like a door swinging shut. “That’s not my problem to solve,” he said finally. “You made this mess. You lied to everyone on that ship, me included, for months.” He stood and moved toward the door. “I don’t know what happens to you now. Maybe Montague keeps his mouth shut. Maybe Duncan finds you first. I can’t say I much care which.”

“Lukas—”

“Lock the door,” he said, not turning around. “That’s the only advice I’ve got left for you.” He opened it, stepped through, and pulled it shut behind him without another word.

Faline sat alone in the small room, listening to his footsteps fade down the corridor. She’d expected anger. She hadn’t expected him to simply leave — no threats, no plan, nothing. Just the flat, final sound of a door closing.

She locked it, sat on the narrow bed, and pulled her knife from her belt, holding it for whatever comfort its weight could offer.

If anyone came through that door, she’d fight.

She’d survived this long. She could survive a little longer.

She had to.

She just wasn’t sure anymore if that included Lukas.

She sat there a long while, listening to nothing, the silence worse than any sound could have been. Her leg ached. Her chest ached more. Sleep wouldn’t come, not with her mind circling the same useless loop — Lukas’s face, the flat sound of the door, the knife heavy and cold in her hand.

Eventually the stillness became unbearable. She didn’t dare leave the passage entirely, not with Duncan somewhere in this town, but she needed to move, needed something other than these four walls and her own thoughts. She unlocked the door and slipped into the corridor, her knife still in hand, staying close to the rock wall.

Voices drifted from somewhere ahead — low, familiar. She recognized Argus first, then Duncan. She should have turned back. Instead, she crept closer, drawn by old habit, the same instinct that had kept her alive on the Reaver.

“—still sore about it,” Duncan was saying, somewhere just around the bend in the passage. “Can’t say I blame you. Your plan, and it fell apart because some brat with letters ran her mouth to Schmidt.”

Faline went very still.

“Keep your voice down,” Argus growled.

“Nobody’s listening.” A pause, then something like a laugh, ugly and short. “Would’ve been you sitting in Schmidt’s chair by now, if not for her. Me standing beside you. Instead we’re both still taking his orders, and you’re down here bargaining over what to do with the little rat that cost us both.”

The words settled into her like stones dropping into still water, one after another.

Your plan. Sitting in Schmidt’s chair. Cost us both.

Argus. It had been Argus’s voice that night at the mast — the second voice, the one she’d never been able to place. Argus had been planning to take the ship. Argus, who’d healed her eye, who’d taught her to light fires, who’d wondered aloud what it might be like to have a daughter.

The knife slipped from her fingers. It struck the stone floor with a bell-like sound, bright and unmistakable in the narrow passage.

The voices stopped.

“Someone’s there,” Duncan said.

Faline turned and ran, her bad leg screaming with every step, but she was already too slow, already too late. Behind her, she heard Argus’s voice, quiet now and cold in a way she’d never heard before.

“Find her.”