Briefly, she considered ordering her replicas to attack him all at once, but that wouldn’t stop him from dissipating into smoke again. So she thought about sending a decoy running in one direction to create a distraction, but that would only lead him away. If it even worked. She needed him close, like Pinfeathers had said. Luring him to point-blank range would be her only hope of landing a hit.
And she was tired of running. So tired of all those things Scrimshaw had mentioned.
Threading himself through a line of doubles, the Noc drifted to within mere feet of her. She stared forward, refusing to look at him, not even as his smile returned and he homed in on her. The real her.
He crept to stand directly in front of her, and Isobel forbade her hands from twitching into fists. She kept her body rigid and her face slate, as unflinching as any statue’s.
He was close enough now that she could strike at him outright. But would she have time to rear back, to prepare a punch strong enough to prevent him from shredding her as he had the others? She doubted it. As Scrimshaw tilted his head at her, eyeing her with increasing suspicion, she realized that their battle of wits was about to come to an end. And if she couldn’t win a contest of the mind, she knew she had no hope of surviving one of blows.
“Forget something?” he asked her.
Isobel blinked.
He had to be bluffing, trying to get her to give herself away. It had to be a coincidence he’d found his way to her. Any second now, he’d pass her by and go on to interrogate the next figure. Then she’d have her chance. She’d spring on him when his back was turned. As soon as his back was turned.
“I asked you,” the Noc repeated, “if you forgot something.”
He lifted a red claw, pointing to the hole in his cheek. In Pinfeather’s cheek.
Oh no, she thought, terror dissolving her insides as his meaning dawned on her.
The scar. She hadn’t thought to give the duplicates the marking.
Isobel wrenched away, but he proved too quick. “Checkmate!” Scrimshaw growled, his arm lashing out, fast as a whip. He caught her by the throat and she choked as he drew her forward, dragging her out from the lineup of doubles.
“Shhhhhh,” the Noc hushed, pressing a red claw to his lips.
Her troops began to erode and flake away, her shining checkered tiles fading to cloudy white again while her imagined cheer uniform transformed back into her ashen street clothes.
Her cover blown, Isobel tried to jerk free, fingernails scraping at the Noc’s porcelain hand.
“Oh, he’s really fighting me now,” Scrimshaw said. “I can feel him, fluttering about inside as if on fire. Tell me, should I let you two lovebirds bid each other a final farewell?”
Pinfeathers. He was talking about Pinfeathers.
“No, I think not,” said the Noc through a gritted grin. “Never been a fan of good-byes myself. Especially the kind that have been said once already.”
Isobel opened her mouth, wanting to call out to the other Noc, to beg him to push through. But Scrimshaw clenched her neck tighter, slowly crushing her windpipe.
“You should hear him implore me,” the Noc continued. “Pleading like a child. It’s almost painful to listen to. You really ruined him, you know. And now I have to wonder what it is—pardon, what it was about you that did it.” The Noc tilted his head at her while he continued to strangle her, as if he really wanted to know. “What type of poison are you, girl?”
Poison?
Because Pinfeathers cared for her, Scrimshaw saw her as poison? As Pinfeathers’s downfall? His ruin? But if she had become the biggest weakness of the leader of Varen’s Nocs—then, in regard to Scrimshaw, couldn’t the same be said for . . . ?
Light-headedness closed in on Isobel, stealing her ability to think. The room began to blur, and the bodies of the courtiers, still draping the balconies above, became fuzzy blobs. Scrimshaw’s dual face melted into a jagged smear, and sparks flashed in the corner of her vision. But one fading glance at the creature’s open collar, at the delicate, hazy image carved into his chest, and she was reminded of who the girl was. Who she had been to Poe.
Isobel tried to speak. A gasping sound escaped her, but the Noc must have read what she’d tried to say on her lips, because for an instant, his squeezing grip faltered.
“What was that?” he demanded.
She again attempted the one-word utterance—a single name. One she knew he knew. At least as well as Pinfeathers knew her name.
Scrimshaw let go of Isobel’s neck. He switched hands, snatching her by the shirt collar instead.
