Fletcher didn’t blink. She must have been expecting the question of me. But of course. She knew me, she knew what I was, she knew I had no reason to dabble in Luna or Dragon or Jabberwock. That was half the reason Luna had ever been so willing to accept me as a courier—I was less reliable, less powerful, than the other nightmares, but at least there was no chance I’d have been tempted by my own product.

“Downstairs,” Fletcher said with a jerk of her head. In the monochromatic half-light of the warehouse, her eyes glittered like a cat’s. “It’s not a space we have cause to use often. Our clients are meant to be able to handle themselves.”

“Hang themselves with their own rope, you mean.”

“It’s no responsibility of ours what they do with it. But you, Robin…” She turned to her, and held out her hand with a two-fingered gesture that meant follow me. Robin glanced to me for reassurance, and seeing no immediate warning, began to tread after Fletcher. “You are a difficult target indeed. Jabberwock is not meant for your blood, for your mind, and even I do not know what kind of reaction you will have. Could be…violent,” she said.

“It might be?”

She shrugged. “Few have ever tried. And those that do haven’t written about it.”

They were barely stairs—almost as steep as a ladder, tucked beneath a trapdoor. I tucked the two vials of Jabberwock into my pocket and closed the crate I’d taken them from, shoving the lid back into place. No sense in giving the cabal any more hint that we were here. If we did everything right, they’d never know: Fletcher wouldn’t dare tell because it’d be endangering her own hide. I descended carefully, not trusting that I could find the stairs in the dark or that they’d support my weight, as elderly and rickety as they seemed to be.

Fletcher pulled a cord and a lightbulb, similarly on its last legs, coughed into existence. A metal table stood slanted against the wall, and there was a suspicious-looking velvet roll on its surface. Broken chair legs and backs were strewn across the ground, and any intact furniture was covered beneath a maroon sheet in the center of the room. Robin gave it a searching glare as we entered, but couldn’t make out more than I could. “Hand me one of those vials,” Fletcher said. “Hard to prepare without Jabberwock to work with.”

I pulled it from my pocket. The gold flakes were swirling around now, caught in an invisible whirlpool. “Hang on,” I said. “I don’t like having to trust you with this. I have no way to confirm anything you’re doing is correct.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. “I can give you no guarantee that would satisfy you, Hexel. But there is something you can take, on faith if nothing else.”

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“What’s that?”

She unrolled the velvet pouch on the table and pulled out a syringe, pushing experimentally on its plunger so that the needle extended into empty air. There were no signs of age, no spots of rust or blackened corrosion: the needle was shining and sharp and dangerous. “You know my nightmare. You know what I value.” She pointed the syringe at me like a sword poised to strike. “This is the part I enjoy most, Hexel. Why would I give it up for petty vengeance?”

“Oh, right. No nightmare I’ve met has ever been petty.”

“Sneer all you want. I have no reason to betray you here.”

Robin’s voice was tight, tense. “I don’t like doctors,” she said. “I don’t like needles. I don’t like that.”

Fletcher’s grin was ugly and mean. She couldn’t cut Robin’s throat, she couldn’t hurt her with me looking on. This was the next best thing. “Our clients can take it any way they like. Most drink it mixed in with their whisky. But you...it’ll be rough getting it to take a hold, and the longer it does the more it will hurt. You want it quick and easy and as painless as it’s going to get? You take the needle.”

“Needles. Hurt.”

“Steel yourself, then.”

I crossed to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll just be for a second. Nor have we a better option.”

Fletcher crossed to the center of the room. With a magician’s flourish, she pulled the dusty cover from the object sitting there. It wasn’t a pile of old furniture as I’d guessed—it was a single large chair, bolted to the ground with heavy screws. The light directly above it made it appear larger, more menacing, and threw into harsh relief the leather straps attached to the armrests and curled around the seat. She smiled at it. “Like I said. Under the effects of Jabberwock, you might become…restless, Robin. Violent and thrashing. You may be small but that’s still trouble.”

“And you want me to get in that? Stay there? Be-” She shook her head. “No.”

“That can’t be necessary,” I said. “I can handle her.”

“Really? You see her only as a child—you don’t know what she’ll become under Jabberwock. What will you do when she gouges your eye out with her bare hands? What will you do when she breaks her own arm to free herself from her mind’s restraints? Can you protect her from every brick in this building? Every nail? Every shard of glass and every shred of cloth on which to choke? Can you save her tongue from her teeth, biting it off?” Fletcher unlaced one of the straps. “Jabberwock makes monsters of nightmares and it will make one of her too.”

“But it will work?”

Fletcher hissed out a breath between her teeth. “It should. That’s all I know.”

She jabbed the syringe through the cap on the Jabberwock vial and drew out nearly half of it into the barrel. The measurements on the side were on a scale I didn’t recognize. “Even into the arm veins, it’ll take a few minutes to show effects. Time enough to…get comfortable.”

“You’d better be right-”

Robin pulled free of my grasp and backed towards the stairs. “No,” she repeated. “No, no, no. You can’t make me and I’m not—I’m not, I can’t, I don’t want to.” Her voice turned accusing. “I didn’t know it’d be like this.”

“Get back here. We don’t have a choice, Robin. You have to-”

She turned and ran.