The man following me thinks he's being subtle.

  He's not. I felt him the moment he started trailing me through the village—his pulse racing, sweat beading on his palms despite the autumn chill. The water in his body tells me everything: excitement, greed, that coiled readiness of someone planning violence.

  Eleven weeks since Mei started my training—eleven weeks of the three months I've spent in this hollow between the hills, the rest given over to healing, to learning how to sleep without screaming, to remembering how to be a person who eats and breathes and walks upright. This is my first real test.

  I turn down the narrow lane between the chandler's shop and the smithy, away from the market crowds. A stupid move, for a normal girl. The perfect move, for what I'm becoming.

  His footsteps quicken behind me. I count them. One, two, three, four—

  "That's a fine satchel you've got there, miss."

  I stop. Turn slowly. Bigger than I expected—broad shoulders, thick hands, the weathered face of a laborer. A knife glints at his belt. An opportunist who saw a young woman alone and sensed easy prey.

  He has no idea what he's found.

  "I don't want trouble," I say, keeping my voice small. Frightened. The voice of the girl I used to be. "Please, I'll give you what I have—"

  "Smart girl." He steps closer, reaching for my bag. "Just hand it over and we'll—"

  I move.

  The principles Mei taught me for killing work just as well for humiliation. Speed. Surprise. His momentum against him.

  My hand catches his wrist before his fingers touch the satchel. I twist, and suddenly he's off-balance, stumbling. My other hand finds the nerve cluster below his elbow—Mei showed me where the arm goes dead—and I press.

  He gasps. The knife clatters from fingers that can no longer grip.

  "Here's what's going to happen." My voice has changed. Flat. Cold. The voice of something that crawled out of black water and never quite warmed up again. "You're going to walk away. You're going to forget you ever saw me. And if I ever sense you following another woman down a dark lane—"

  I let the pause stretch. Let him feel the promise in it.

  "I'll find you."

  He runs. I feel his terror receding like a tide going out—his pulse wild, breath coming in gasps, sweat pouring down his back in rivers.

  I pick up his knife. Good steel. Mei will want to see it.

  When I reach the meeting point, she's already there, watching from the shadow of an oak. Her expression gives nothing away, but I catch the slight incline of her head.

  "You felt him early."

  "Before he started following. His intent was... loud."

  "And you didn't kill him."

  "He wasn't cult. A thief, nothing more." I hand her the knife. "Killing should mean something."

  She turns the blade over in her hands, examining the edge. "Many hunters forget that. They start seeing threats everywhere. Everyone becomes a target." She looks up at me. "The fact that you can still distinguish—that matters."

  Something eases in my chest. A loosening.

  "You're ready," she says. "Or close enough."

  Three months. Ninety days of bruises, calluses, and slow transformation. A scholar's daughter becoming something else entirely. My muscles remember violence now, trained through repetition until the movements live in my bones. My hands are calloused from blade work and climbing, from a thousand small brutalities that have become natural as breathing.

  The training has changed me in ways I'm still discovering. Rain coming hours before it arrives—an awareness I have now. The moisture in the air shifts, and I know. A heartbeat readable from across a room. Fire against my hand for thirty seconds while reciting Greek poetry, and the pain is information. A fact about the world.

  On the last night, Mei asks a question.

  We're sitting by the fire, the cottage warm and filled with the smell of burning applewood. That particular silence after a hard day's work. Outside, wind moves through the grass, and the sea is invisible in the darkness, but I register it—always, now—while the marks beat in rhythm with the tide.

  "What do dead girls do?"

  The question comes out of nowhere. I look at her across the flames, her face shadowed, carved into planes of light and darkness by the flickering fire. She looks older than she did three months ago. Or maybe I'm seeing her more clearly now.

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  "Nothing," I answer.

  "Nothing." She nods. "So if you want to do anything, save anyone, kill a single one of them, change any of it at all, you have to be alive. At any cost. Even if it means sacrificing pieces of yourself."

  "Survival first."

  "Yes." She holds my gaze across the fire. "The rage is good. It'll keep you moving when everything else fails. But rage will get you killed if you let it drive. These are not amateurs, Eleanor. They've been doing this for decades. Centuries, some of them. They know the tricks, the tactics, all the ways a hunter can fail."

  "I understand."

  "Do you?" She leans forward. "When you find Marsh, the man who carved you, who watched you drown, who has been doing this to children for sixty years—what will you do?"

  "Kill him."

  "How?"

  "Quickly. Efficiently. Without giving him time to—"

  "Wrong." She shakes her head. "When you find Marsh, you will run. You will gather intelligence, identify his weaknesses, learn his routines. You will spend weeks, maybe months, preparing. And when you're certain, when every variable is accounted for, when the moment is perfect—then you strike."

  "But he's just an old man. Sixty years. He must be—"

  "Marsh has survived for sixty years because he's dangerous. He's killed dozens of hunters. People like me, people who trained their entire lives for this work. People better than you'll be for years. He knows all the tricks. All the traps. All the ways a young hunter can fail." She leans forward, firelight catching the scars on her hands.

  "And know your enemies. The congregation uses three kinds of fighters. Hired guards—mercenaries who work for coin. Competent but not fanatical. When the battle turns, they'll run. True believers are different. They'll die before surrendering. Fight until you put them down. And then there are the Hounds. Trained hunters like me. Those you avoid until you're ready to kill them."

  She lets that sink in. "If you go after him angry, sloppy, wanting revenge more than victory—"

  "I'll die."

  "You'll die. Slowly, probably. He likes to take his time with hunters. Likes to show them that their vengeance was meaningless. Their training worthless. Their entire quest nothing but entertainment for him." She reaches across and takes my hands. Holds them tight. Her grip is strong, her missing fingers pressing against my wrists. "And then he'll keep doing what he does. More children in cellars. More rituals. More offerings that don't survive. Your death won't stop him. It'll just make him smile."

  I look at her. Really look. And I see it.

  The void I carry. She has it too. An empty space where a softer self used to live. Cold calculation that has become the only way to survive.

  "The emptiness you feel," she continues. "The one where the kindness used to be? It won't fill with their deaths. I know. I've killed seventeen of them, and my sister is gone forever. A memory I can barely hold onto. A wound that won't heal."

  "Then why do you do this?"

  "Because if I don't, they keep doing it. And somewhere, right now, there's another girl in another cellar. Another child being carved open. Another offering pushed into black water while an ancient thing watches from below." She releases my hands. "Every cultist I put in the ground is one less person making that happen. The void doesn't fill. The grief doesn't ease. But the list gets shorter. The world gets a little bit safer. And that has to be enough."

  She pauses. The fire crackles between us. For a moment her expression shifts. A crack in the careful control she maintains.

  "Her name was Lian," Mei says quietly. "My sister. She was thirteen when they took her. I was fifteen."

  I don't speak. Don't move. This is more than she's ever shared.

  "She loved to paint. Watercolors, mostly. Birds and flowers and the mountains behind our village. She used to wake before dawn to catch the light." Mei's voice is distant. Remembering. "She had this laugh. High and bright, like bells. Everyone in the village knew that laugh. You could hear it from three streets away when joy found her."

  Her hands, usually so steady, tremble slightly against her knees.

  "The congregation came for her on a market day. I was supposed to be watching her, but I got distracted. A boy, can you believe it? A stupid boy with a nice smile, and I let my sister wander off to look at the silk merchant's stall." She closes her eyes. "When I found where they'd taken her, it was already too late. I could hear her screaming from outside the building. That bright voice, begging for help. Begging for me."

  "Mei—"

  "I tried to get in. Broke my hands on the door, broke three fingers trying to climb through a window. By the time I found another way inside, she was already in the water. Already changed." Her eyes open, hard as stone. "She looked at me, Eleanor. Looked right at me with eyes that weren't hers anymore. And she smiled. This empty, terrible smile, like everything that made her Lian had been scraped out and replaced with cold."

  My own emergence from the water. The way Mei found me. The way she's been watching me for signs of that same emptiness.

  "What happened to her?"

  "The congregation took her. Used her for three years as one of their... vessels. And then she stopped being useful, and they disposed of her like broken furniture." Mei's voice is flat. "Aldric Voss. He was the one who selected her. Who decided she was suitable. Who watched them carve the marks into her skin and push her into the water. He's the last name on my list. The one I've been hunting for twenty-two years."

  "You'll find him."

  "Maybe. Maybe not." She looks at me across the fire. "But you. You're different. You came out of the water with your mind intact. You remember who you were. You count things when you're scared, reach for kindness even when it hurts. Whatever they tried to do to you, it didn't work completely."

  "Is that why you saved me?"

  "I saved you because I saw a girl drowning and I couldn't let it happen again. I trained you because I saw something in your eyes. The same thing I used to see in Lian's. That brightness. That stubborn refusal to let the world make you cruel." Her hand reaches across to touch mine. "Don't lose it, Eleanor. Whatever else happens, don't let them take that from you."

  The fire burns low between us. Outside, the sea whispers against the distant shore.

  I think about Lian. About a girl who painted birds and laughed like bells and was taken because her sister looked away for one moment. About the counting girl in the cellar. About all the other children who never got a chance to become anything at all.

  Vengeance versus prevention. Healing yourself or protecting others. The difference matters.

  "So remember," her voice drops. "What do dead girls do?"

  "Nothing."

  "And you?"

  I meet her gaze. The marks burn inside my torso while the weight of everything I've learned presses down. The rage, banked like coals, waits for fuel.

  "I come back," I say. "I always come back."

  Mei nods. That slow, deliberate motion.

  "Good." She stands and crosses to the window, where the night is dark outside—no moon, no stars, just the distant rhythm of the sea. "Tomorrow, we find your first name."

  "Who?"

  She pulls a folded paper from her pocket. Hands it to me. A sketch of a man's face, soft and forgettable, the kind of face that disappears in crowds. Beneath it, a name and address in Mei's careful handwriting.

  "Marcus Webb," she says. "London. He keeps the books. Processes the payments." Her eyes meet mine. "He was there when they drowned you. Fourth row. Holding a candle."

  The paper crumples in my fist.

  I remember him now.