I held my head in my hands, trying to keep it from breaking into pieces and spilling out onto the table in shards.

"They were the first we took," Norris said. "It made it feel less wrong somehow, taking them away from that madness. Those conditions."

"You took them from Essential?" Aaliyah's voice came to me like a sound being played in the background.

"One of their collection sites, yes." Valyn inserted the answer.

"They're the ones that didn't survive." My own voice was overly loud. It pulsed inside my head. I squeezed my eyes tight and pressed my hands against the sides of my head.

"They were too weak," Valyn answered, but her voice was like Aaliyah's. Background noise.

"They were drained!" Norris hissed, anger replacing the mourning in his voice. "They didn't just use them, they sucked them dry. Forced them to keep trying even when they were being hurt." He cleared his throat, and even without looking I could imagine he was taking a moment to rub his face, pass a hand over his eyes. "It damaged something inside them. We didn't know... we didn't know how badly until it was too late."

There was a long moment of silence. When I finally opened my eyes, somber faces met my gaze. In several eyes I saw tears.

In Valyn's I saw defiance.

"That's when you started taking the others."

She met my gaze head on. "Yes."

"We had to," Corwin insisted. "We couldn't let them keep on sapping them."

"We have to get them all out of there!" Norris surged to his feet, slamming his palm flat against the table. He pointed a finger at us. "That's why we need you. You have to help us get them kids outta there."

Kaelinda put a hand on his arm again, and this time he let her. She pulled him gently back down into his seat.

Valyn turned her gaze on us, looking one-by-one into our faces. "Why did you come here?"

She turned the focus on us like a laser.

Why had we come here? Was it truly just so that I could fulfill my mission to find my sister or to dole out retribution? Was it to escape the net that Janis was trolling?

It was Thoris that spoke the true answer.

"We no longer trust for our safety."

Corwin's eyes widened in shock. "But you are council members yourselves!"

Aaliyah folded her hands on the table and breathed a deep sigh. It was as much emotion as I had seen her display. "We have long suspected that the Council has become... unsecure."

Blade glanced at me before adding, "It's why we made sure there was a way to get out if things became too unstable."

"And they have?" Valyn pressed. "Become unstable?"

"We found hidden monitoring software embedded in the link that feeds the council systems," Aaliyah said, "as well as some other, more disturbing security breaches."

Wonderful.

I had been invited to the dance, but I was obviously the last one to arrive.

"When Janis had Bana arrested we knew it was time to act."

Valyn looked at me, brows lifted in surprise.

"It's a long story," I grumbled, unwilling to explain.

"We'd made a couple of exploratory jumps," Aaliyah continued, "so we knew Benterra was more habitable than we'd been led to believe."

"We just didn't know how habitable," Blade added, her mouth twisted on one side.

"It seemed like the most logical place to go," Aaliyah went on, ignoring the interruption. "We assumed we would not be followed here, and that even if someone suspected this as a possible end point it would take them long enough to get here that we could escape them by going back the way we came."

It was never about me at all. Not about my vendetta or my search for Camille. It had been a strategic move, that was all.

Valyn turned those laser eyes on me. "And you," she said pointedly. "Why did you come?"

In spite of everything I'd learned, I felt the burn of bitterness that had become my constant companion for the last six years fill my throat.

"I came to kill you," I answered truthfully.

A new light filled her dark eyes.

I was shocked to realize it was respect I saw glimmering there.

She nodded, as if she would have done the same in my place. "And now?"

I swallowed down the bitterness, pushing it back where it belonged, down into my guts where it would await its rightful target. I forced my hands to unclench, releasing the fists I had held tight for so long.

"Now I'm ready to learn the truth."

It was as much as I could give her.

I'd spent too long hating her for taking Camille to just forgive her. Even knowing what had been going on, why they had felt justified, I still couldn't quite color them as blameless. Their purpose was just, but their means was not.

"There's something else you should know," Blade said, taking Valyn's focus away from me. "The reason Bana was arrested was because he was trying to break out."

Valyn frowned. "Break out?"

Blade nodded, her storm green eyes filled with portent. "Janis is raising the domes."

There was a beat of silence, and then the room exploded in a flurry of scraping chairs and pale faces. Valyn and the others leapt from their seats and raced for the door, leaving us gaping.

"What is it?" Blade shouted, but Valyn was already gone, Norris and Corwin on her heels.

Only Kaelinda, still in the doorway, turned back. Her face was as pale as a fish.

"She's doing it," she said, her voice low and breathless, "If she's raising the domes it can only mean one thing. She's turning them all off."

And then she was gone, running after the others, leaving us with only the staccato of retreating feet to match the pounding beat of our hearts.

Blade's eyes met mine.

"Raising the shielding was never about the renegades." I'd suspected it all along, but I still felt the cold shock of incredulity.

Janis had been turning off the dispersion units in small groups, conditioning the prism children to redirect the power and radiation so that when the time came, she could turn them all off. The entire grid. Every dispersion unit we had. All so that Essential could harvest the energy and turn it into a profit.

"She was waiting for an excuse to use the domes again," Aaliyah agreed, "and the renegades gave her one."

"And we gave her everything else." The words were ash in my mouth.

None of us had objected. Once the shielding was in place Janis would open the floodgates. The full force of the twin suns would come down, and there would be nothing to stop it except the domes... and any prisms trapped beneath them.