Lily Chen's house was a small bungalow in the suburban outskirts of New Harbor, with a front porch that had needed painting for three years and a garden that she tended with the same quiet determination she'd applied to everything since her husband disappeared.
Leo hadn't visited in six weeks. He'd been busy - saving the city, fighting the Circle, nearly dying several times. But the real reason was simpler and more cowardly: he hadn't known what to say. How do you tell your mother that the husband she's been mourning for seventeen years is still alive, trapped in an underground prison, slowly dying to protect a city that doesn't know he exists?
Today, he was going to try.
She was in the garden when he arrived, kneeling in the dirt with a trowel in hand, planting autumn flowers that woul
