She takes a few steps back, raises her eyes to mine, and starts running. Seconds later, she lands lightly in front of me. I grab her arms to steady her, but she’s already found her balance. She grins.

“That was fun.”

“I’m glad you think so, because we’re going to do that all night long.”

It takes us seven leaps to get to the first building with a beacon attached to its eaves. I can’t reach the tech by crouching down and leaning out, so Jodi lies on her stomach and eases over the edge of the roof while I hold on to her ankles. There’s a sharp, metallic pop, and then she says, “Pull me up.”

I help her wiggle her way back onto the roof, and she hands me the beacon. Quickly, I detach the back of the metal casing and use the soft glow of the moon to examine the transmitter inside. It’s the same as the beacon I disabled in Lankenshire—ultrasonic frequency on the right, infrasonic on the left. I figured they’d be the same, but still . . . knowing that I gave Willow the correct instructions eases the knot in my stomach.

I carefully pull the wires on the left free from the transmitter and then snap the silver mechanisms that were set to the correct infrasonic frequency used to call the tanniyn. The beacon is now useful only to keep the monsters at bay.

My fingers slide gently over the powerful transmitter as I call up my memory of the map Amarynda drew for us. There are beacons approximately every seventy-five yards. A transmitter of this size is capable of sending out a signal for at least five hundred yards. Rowansmark must have put so many beacons in place to compensate for the possibility that a battery might die or a frequency might get corrupted. Or because they needed something strong enough to drown out the signal the leaders wear on a chain around their necks.

The bottom line is that Hodenswald doesn’t need all of the transmitters they currently have in order to repel the tanniyn. My best estimate, calculating the size of the city and leaving room for some transmitters and batteries to fail, is that the city needs no more than twenty-eight beacons up and running on the western half. They currently have thirty-five. That leaves seven extra transmitters.

Seven might be just enough to help me build the circle of destruction I need to take down the Commander.

I slip the casing back into place and lower Jodi again until she can snap the beacon back onto its mooring. While she works, I run through the map of the city in my head, looking for places where I can remove a transmitter without creating a weakness in the blanket of anti-tanniyn ultrasonic frequency.

By the time Jodi’s finished, I’ve picked the locations and am ready to move. We creep to the southern edge of the roof and assess the next jump, scanning the buildings laid out before us. Twelve jumps south, two jumps west, and another four jumps south will bring us to the next beacon. That’s if the roofs remain equal in height. Those that are too high or too low will need to be circumvented, which will cost us valuable time. Already the moon is in the midpoint of its journey through the sky.

My legs tense, ready to leap forward, when Jodi snatches my arm and pulls me into a crouch.

“Look down,” she breathes.

Carefully, I lean forward until I can see over the bricks and down to the street below. A dark shadow huddles on the street corner, just outside the glow of light from one of the hanging gas lanterns. I squint and try to figure out what I’m seeing. For a moment, I’m almost convinced that the shadow is nothing—a crate of trash, perhaps. A barrel of spare rainwater. But then the shadow shifts, and a sliver of moonlight illuminates a pale face before the shadow eases farther back against the wall behind it.

That brief glimpse is enough to make my breath come faster as I push back from the edge and look at Jodi. “It’s Sharpe. The tracker who was with Lyle when he first received us.”

“Maybe that’s his regular post?”

I study the buildings, but they’re so uniform, it’s impossible to tell what they are. Maybe he’s standing guard outside an important government building, but why would he? Unless he’s worried we’ll try to break in for some reason, but if that’s the case, why wouldn’t he just wait inside where it’s comfortable? Maybe he’s watching the streets to make sure the citizens of Hodenswald aren’t trying to mess with the beacons.

But if that’s true, then why didn’t he say something when Jodi hung over the edge of the building and removed the tech?

“I don’t think so. Something else is going on. Good catch.”

She shrugs. “Rachel taught me to always treat my surroundings as if everything wants to kill me.”

“Good advice,” I say, and swallow the ache at the base of my throat. I hope Rachel is taking her own advice.

We watch Sharpe in silence for several moments. It’s hard to keep my eyes on him because he sits so still, he’s nothing more than an absence of starlight on a street that is already dark. When he shows no sign of leaving, I signal Jodi to move to the opposite side of the roof with me.

“We’re going to have to go around him.” I examine the rooftops around us. “It’s going to add a few extra jumps, and we’re already running short on time.”

“We can hurry.”

“We aren’t going to hurry the jumps. I don’t want us taking any chances there. We’ll just have to disable the beacons faster.” I take a moment to think through the map. “We’re going to do three jumps north, cut to the east four jumps, and then head south to the next beacon. We’ll have to cut back west at some point, but this way we can go around Sharpe.”