I saw Pal is all Gideon needs to say. Three words send the structure she'd been trying to maintain for the last week into shambles, the texted evasions and grimly willful silence she'd kept up all swept away like so much dust. The Warden is as clever as she is, nearly as superior a necromancer and--acrid as the taste of it is in Harrow's mouth to admit--the one who'd understood the lyctorhood theorem first and best and most completely. If anyone knows what Gideon's recovered memories mean, if anyone can understand the importance of it, it's Palamedes Sextus.

In agony, Harrow lies awake all night, sick with something she refuses to call fear and cannot begin to think of as hope, even obliquely. She stays in the spare room, leaving Gideon to their bed, and in the morning she gives her only the barest, numbest nod as Gideon heads out the door for her morning run. The knock that comes only a half-hour later fails to surprise her; getting up from her curled position on the couch, Harrow walks to the front door to meet her doom.

"Warden."