Claudia took his arm. "We have to go out there now," she said quietly. "You have to lift your head up and be a prince. It won't be like you expect. But everything is acting here. A game, my father calls it. Are you ready?"
He felt the old fear wash over him. He felt he was walking into a great ambush that had been set for him. But he nodded.
Arm in arm, they walked out of the white room, and Claudia led him up through the cellars and the stairs. He passed through chambers of crowding, staring people. She opened a door and he cried out in delight, because the world was a garden and above it, brilliant and blazing, hung the stars, millions of them, higher and higher, above the pinnacles of the Palace, and the trees, and the sweet beds of flowers.
"I knew," he whispered. "I always knew."
LEFT ALONE, Jared gazed around at the ruins of the Portal. The Wardens sabotage looked only too thorough. He had
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spoken kindly to the boy, but in his heart he felt a deep dread, because to find a way back through this destruction would take time, and how much time did he have?
"You were too much for us, Warden," he murmured aloud.
He climbed up after them, weary now, his chest aching. Servants ran past him; talk echoed in every chamber and hall. He hurried, stepping out into the gardens, glad of the evening cool, the sweet scents.
Claudia and Finn stood on the steps of the building. The boy looked as if he was blind with the glory of the night, as if its purity was an agony to him.
Beside them, Jared slipped his hand into his pocket and brought out the watch. Claudia stared. "Isn't that...?"
"Yes. Your father's."
"He gave it to you?"
"You might say that." And he held it in his delicate fingers, and she noticed, as if for the first time, that there was a tiny silver cube hanging on its chain, a charm that twisted and glittered in the starlight.
"But where are they?" Finn asked, tormented. "Keiro and Attia and the Prison?"
Jared gazed at the cube thoughtfully. "Closer than you think, Finn," he said.
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