When I dragged my eyes from the frozen frame of Master Jameson, I found Marcus watching me. "Are you ready?" he asked.
"Ready for what?"
He walked over to another table and returned with a small case. When he opened it, I saw a small vial of silver liquid and a syringe.
"What is - oh." Realization hit me. "That's the blood that'll break the tattoo."
He nodded. "Pulling the elements out creates a reaction that turns it silver. It takes a few years, but eventually, the gold in your skin will fade to silver too."
All of them were looking at me expectantly, and I took a step back. "I don't know if I'm ready for this."
"Why wait?" asked Marcus. He pointed at the laptop. "You've seen this. You know what they're capable of. Can you keep lying to yourself? Don't you want to go forward with your eyes open?"
"Well . . . yes, but I don't know if I'm ready to have some strange substance injected into me."
Marcus filled the syringe with the silver liquid. "I can demonstrate on my tattoo if it'll make you feel better. It won't hurt me, and you can see that there aren't any dire side effects."
"We don't know for sure that they've done anything to me," I protested. He had a logical argument, but I was still terrified of taking this step. I could feel my hands shaking. "This could be a waste. There may be no group loyalty compulsion in me."
"But you also don't know for sure," he countered. "And there's always a little loyalty put in the initial tattoo. I mean, not enough to make you some slave robot, but still. Wouldn't you feel better knowing everything's gone?"
I couldn't take my eyes off the needle. "Will I feel any different?"
"No. Although you could walk up to someone on the street and start telling them about vampires." I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. "Then you'd just get thrown into a psych ward."
Was I ready for this? Was I really going to take the next step into becoming part of Marcus's Merry Men? I'd passed his test - which he'd been right about. Clearly, this group wasn't useless. They had eyes on the Alchemists and the Warriors. They also seemingly had the Moroi's best interests at heart.
The Moroi - or, more specifically, Jill. I hadn't forgotten Sabrina's offhand remark about the Warriors being interested in a missing girl. Who else could it be but Jill? And did this Hawthorne guy have access to her location? Had he passed it on to Master Jameson? And would this information put those around her at risk, like Adrian?
They were questions I didn't have the answers to, but I had to uncover them.
"Okay," I said. "Do it."
Marcus didn't waste any time. I think he was afraid I'd change my mind - which, perhaps, was not an unfounded fear. I sat down in one of the chairs and tipped my head to the side so that he'd have access to my cheek. Wade gently held my head with his hands. "Just to make sure you stay still," he told me apologetically
Before Marcus started, I asked, "Where'd you learn to do this?"
His face had been solemn with the task ahead, but my question made him smile again. "I'm not technically tattooing you, if that's what you're worried about," he said. I was actually worried about a lot of things. "These are just some small injections, just like being re-inked."
"What about the process itself? How'd you find out about it?" It was probably a question I should have asked before I sat down in this chair. But I hadn't expected to be doing this so soon - or suddenly.
"A Moroi friend of mine theorized about it. I volunteered to be a guinea pig, and it worked." He switched to business mode again and held up the needle. "Ready?"
I took a deep breath, feeling like I was standing on the edge of a precipice.
Time to jump.
"Go ahead."
It hurt about as much as re-inking did, just a number of small pricks on my skin. Uncomfortable, but not really painful. In truth, it wasn't a long process, but it felt like it took forever. All the while, I kept asking myself, What are you doing? What are you doing? At last, Marcus stepped back and regarded me with shining eyes. Sabrina and Wade smiled too.
"There you go," Marcus said. "Welcome to the ranks, Sydney."
I took my compact out of my purse to check the tattoo. My skin was pink from the needle's piercing, but if this process continued to be like re-inking, that irritation would fade soon. Otherwise, the lily looked unchanged.
I also didn't feel that changed on the inside. I didn't want to storm the Alchemist facility and demand justice or anything like that. Taking him up on his dare to tell an outsider about vampires was probably my best bet to see if my tattoo had been altered, but I didn't really feel like doing that either.
"That's it?" I asked.
"That's it," Marcus said. "Once we get it sealed, you won't have to worry about - "
"I'm not getting it sealed."
All those smiles vanished.
Marcus looked confused, as though he might have misheard. "You have to. We're going to Mexico next weekend. Once that's done, the Alchemists won't ever be able to get to you again."
"I'm not getting it sealed," I repeated. "And I'm not going to Mexico." I gestured toward my laptop. "Look what I was able to pull off! If I stay where I'm at, I can keep finding out more. I can find out what else the Alchemists and Warriors are doing together." I can find out if Jill is in danger. "Getting permanently marked and becoming an outcast kills all those opportunities for me. There's no going back after that."
I think Marcus almost always got his way, and this new development totally threw him off. Wade took up the argument. "There's no going back now. You're leaving a trail of bread crumbs. Look at what you've done. You already made inquiries about Marcus. Even if you haven't gotten super-friendly with the Moroi, the Alchemists still know you spend a lot of time with them. And one day, someone may realize you were there when the data was stolen."
"No one knows it was stolen," I said promptly.
"You hope they don't," corrected Wade. "These little things are enough to raise red flags. Keep doing more, and you'll make it worse. They'll finally notice you, and that's when it'll be over."
Marcus had recovered from his initial shock. "Exactly. Look, if you want to stay where you're at until we go to Mexico, that's fine. Make your peace with it or whatever. After that, you need to escape. We'll keep working from the outside."
"You can do whatever you want." I began packing up my laptop. "I'm going to work from the inside."