“You tell me something first,” I said, still not sure if Emma was part of some great sting operation that was going to get me in even worse trouble. “You’re pretty much the poster child for model Alchemist behavior. What did you do to get here?”

She hesitated before answering. “I sent away some guardians that had been assigned to help my Alchemist group in Kiev. There were some Moroi I knew that I thought needed the protection more than we did.”

“I can see where that would upset the powers-that-be,” I admitted. “But it seems like there are worse things, especially with how good you’ve been. Why are you still here?”

Her cocky smile shifted to something more bitter. “Because my sister isn’t. She went through all of this too, was discharged, and then went even more rogue than before. No one knows where she is, and now, no matter how many strides I make, they’re ensuring they don’t make the same mistake twice in letting me go too soon. Bad blood in our family, I guess.”

That would certainly explain things. She seemed sincere too, but she was also an Alchemist, and we were good at conning others. Another question popped into my head as my eyes darted across the room to where Duncan and a few others perused the sociology section. “Why has Duncan been here so long? He seems to be on good behavior. Bad blood in his family too?”

Emma followed my gaze. “My guess? Too good of behavior.”

“Is that even possible?” I asked, startled.

She shrugged. “He’s so docile, I think they’re worried he won’t be able to stand up to vampire influence, even if he wants to. So they’re afraid to let him out just yet. But they don’t want him to have too much of a spine because that kind of goes against the operating procedure here. I think he wants to be braver . . . but something holds him back—I mean, more than the usual stuff holding us all back.”

Chantal, I thought. That was what held him back. He’d had enough of a spine to befriend me, but Emma’s words explained why he was so cautious in even that. Losing Chantal had left its mark and made him too fearful to do anything else. Hoping I wasn’t making a terrible mistake, I took a deep breath and turned back to Emma.

“If the gas is off, I can get a message to the outside. That’s all I can tell you.”

Her eyebrows rose at that. “Are you certain? Tonight?”

“Absolutely,” I said. Adrian would be searching for me in dreams. He just needed a window of natural sleep.

“Hang on a minute,” Emma said after a little more thought.

She stood up and walked across the room, over to where Amelia was browsing. They conversed until the chimes rang, signaling it was time to return to our rooms. Emma hurried back to me. “Check out that book,” she said, nodding to the embellished diary. “I won’t say another word to you once we walk out that door. Go back to our room, count to sixty, and then go to town on whatever you need to do with the vent.”

“But what about the camera—”

“You’re on your own now,” she said, and walked off without another word.

I gaped for a few moments and then scurried to join the others who were signing out books with the librarian. As I filed out with them, I tried to look natural and not like my heart might pound out of my chest. Was Emma serious? Or was this the ultimate setup? What could she have possibly done in one conversation that would suddenly make it okay to tamper with the ventilation system? Because when we got back to our room, I could see the small black camera that watched us was pointing straight in the direction of the vent in question. Anyone opening it would be easily spotted.

It had to be a setup, but Emma made it clear from her body language that she was going to have no further interaction with me as we got ready for bed. I silently counted and knew she must have as well because when I reached sixty, she spared me one sharp, meaningful look.

There are easier ways to set me up, I thought. Easier ways with worse consequences.

With a gulp, I pushed my bed over to the wall and used it to stand on, so that I had easy access to the vent panel. I’d pulled off a metal page corner from the book, and Emma’s assessment had been correct. Its thickness was right on par with a flathead screwdriver. Of course, it was nowhere near as ergonomically easy to use as a screwdriver, but after a little fiddling, I finally got all four corners of the panel loosened enough to pull it off. My nerves and shaking hands weren’t helping speed along the process, and I had no clue how long I might have to do this—or if Emma would warn me when time was up.

Inside, I found an ordinary ventilation shaft. It was too small to crawl through, so there’d be no movie-worthy escapes that way. As she’d told me, a small pipe was attached to the vent’s side, opening just behind the panel’s grates to feed its fumes into our room when the lights went out. Now I needed to block the pipe. I reached down to the bed, where I’d put an old sock retrieved from our room’s laundry hamper earlier. I didn’t put it past the Alchemists to take inventory of our clothing regularly, but I also knew when this was picked up, it was promptly dumped into a larger bin of clothes. If they noticed a missing sock, they wouldn’t know whose room it had come from. And surely even Alchemist dryers ate socks sometimes.

I crammed the sock into the pipe as best I could, hoping it was enough to keep the worst of the gas out. Behind me, under her breath, I heard Emma mutter, “Hurry.” My hands slick with sweat, I screwed the panel back into place and just barely remembered to move my bed before flouncing onto it with my book. The whole endeavor had taken less than five minutes, but was that enough?

Emma was fixated on her book and never so much as looked my way, but I caught the glimmer of a smile on her lips. Was that one of triumph over helping me achieve my goal? Or was she gloating at having tricked me into committing serious insubordination on camera?

If I had been busted, no one came for me that night. Our reading-time hour wound down, and before long, the lights went out and I heard the familiar click of the doors automatically locking. I snuggled into my sparsely made bed and waited for something else that had become familiar this last week: the artificially induced drowsiness brought on by the gas. It didn’t come.

It didn’t come.

I could hardly believe it. We’d pulled it off! I’d stopped the gas from getting into my room. The ironic part was, I could have used a little help in getting to sleep because I was so excited to talk to Adrian that I couldn’t calm down. It was like Christmas Eve. I lay in the dark for what had to be two hours before natural exhaustion won out and put me to sleep. My body was in a perpetual state of fatigue around here, both from the mental stress and the fact that the sleep we were given was just barely adequate. I slept soundly until the morning wakeup chimes, and that was when I realized the awful truth.