“Hey. Hey! What are you trying to find?” Uncle Mike’s hand settled on my shoulder. His thumb grazed the skin above my collarbone. As always, the skin-to-skin contact did what it would normally take months of close contact to do: his mind snapped into sharp relief, a picture seen through a window blind that I could open if I needed to. Touching people does that for me, especially when it happens repeatedly in a short period of time. It’s why I try to avoid it whenever I can when I’m not dealing with people I’m already attuned to.

Uncle Mike was petrified. He knew Verity was dead. Not because he had some fact that I was missing; just because he’d been in situations like this one before, and he knew the odds had been against us from the start. Should never have let her go out alone, no matter what she was used to, he was thinking, blame and self-loathing dripping off every thought/word and sense/impression. This is my fault. How am I going to tell Kevin that I let his baby girl go out and get herself killed? Hell, how am I going to tell Evelyn? She’ll never be able to look me in the eye again. This is all—

I shrugged his hand off, breaking the endless loop of his thoughts before it could drag me even further down. If he wanted to put on a brave face and pretend that he thought everything was going to be okay, I’d let him. As long as I made sure not to touch him again, it might even make me feel better.

“The charm. The one the Covenant uses to block telepathy.” I looked up at him. “Margaret was a hole when we met her. She wasn’t a human, she wasn’t an individual, she was a hole. When Verity put the thing on to test it, she was a hole, too. She vanished completely from any sort of nonvisual spectrum.”

Uncle Mike nodded slowly. “So you’re thinking that, if she’s wearing one of those things, that might explain her disappearing the way she did?”

“I’ve never been attuned to someone who died, but I can’t imagine it’s as easy as ‘ow that hurts oh I’m gone.’” I stood up a little straighter, trying to ignore the waves of curiosity emanating from Istas. At least she hadn’t come over. That probably had something to do with the rope she was still holding, and the desire not to drop Uncle Mike’s deadfall on the slaughterhouse floor. “She’s not dead. She’s just missing.”

“So can you track holes?”

“No. I can follow dead spots, maybe, if I see people with my eyes who don’t appear to my mind, but . . .” I shrugged helplessly. “There are two Madhura in the building. I only know that because I’ve seen them both. If the one I can’t read decides to leave, I won’t know about it. He’ll just be gone, and I’ll have no idea.”

“Your ability to observe the minds of others seems exceedingly limited in scope,” commented Istas. She switched the rope to her other hand. “Of what use are you?”

“I’m really, really good at calculating how much I need to leave for a tip when I eat out, even if I never pay for my actual meals,” I said flatly.

“So what you’re saying is that you won’t know you’ve found someone you can’t read until you see them with your eyes,” said Uncle Mike. “Okay. That’s not as convenient as it could be, but it’s something. You saw Margaret, right?”

“She forced her way into my hotel room.”

“Could you describe her well enough for the mice to draw her?”

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep myself from saying something I’d regret later. Then, carefully, I said, “My eyes don’t work that way. Or, well. I guess they do, since I see on a human wavelength, but that’s not how I process visual information. There’s no way I could describe her.”

Cuckoos can see—we’re not blind, and I’m glad, since that would make answering my email really hard—but our brains aren’t wired to register the same things that human brains are. We don’t need to recognize individuals by their faces when we can recognize them by their thoughts, the unique mixture of ideas and emotions that make them who they are. All those shows about mistaken identity and identical twins or cousins are lost on me, because to my eyes, pretty much everyone looks cosmetically alike, and it’s totally impossible to mistake anyone for anyone else. Oh, hair and eye and skin colors differ, but faces? They’re just faces. It’s what’s behind them that’s unique.

Uncle Mike nodded again. “If that won’t work, we’ll have to think of something else. What did Kitty have to say?”

“She’s afraid the people who have Verity will torture her and get her to reveal secrets regarding our plans and whereabouts,” said Istas, sounding bored. Mike and I both turned to face her. She shrugged. “It is a logical concern. The current situation presents great potential for mayhem, and very little for a peaceful resolution.” This said, she yawned broadly, displaying teeth that were twice the size of the human norm. The laconic waves of thought drifting off her were almost entirely focused on the idea of destroying things.

“I’m not going to just sit around waiting for Verity to die,” I said hotly. “I don’t care if she’s being tortured. If she’s alive, we have to find her.”

“We have a duty to the cryptids of this city,” said Mike.

I scowled at him. “I am a cryptid of this city, remember? And I have a duty to my family. We can’t call them and tell them that she’s been—” I paused. Duty. Family. “Wait a second. I think I have an idea.”

“What?”

“The dragons. Females are basically indistinguishable from human women. We know Dominic didn’t tell the Covenant about the dragons—if he had, they’d have come long before this, and they’d definitely have sent more than three operatives—so that means the Covenant won’t be treating every blonde woman they see as a potential threat.”

“So you want to what, use the dragons as spies? Sarah, they’re not going to go for that. Dragons are only interested in personal gain.”

“That was before they had a male, and before they owed Verity for making sure they were there when he woke up.” I smiled thinly. “They’re going to pay what they owe, and they’re going to pay it now.”

“Oh, good,” said Istas, letting go of the rope. “This will almost certainly afford opportunity for carnage.”