I nod. The Verdance is faster than I am. A vine near the garden entrance extends outward, and I hear Peeble's indignant voice from down the corridor before they even appear.
"I am being summoned by a plant. I want that on the record. A vine physically tapped me on the shell and pointed. I have been fetched like a dog."
They trundle into the alcove, antennae twitching, clearly annoyed. Then they see Elle's face. They see Kaelren's. They see mine.
Peeble goes very still.
"Oh," they say. Quiet. No performance, no bluster. Just a single syllable that carries the weight of an ancient soul recognizing what just happened.
"Peeble," I say. "They know."
Peeble looks at me for a long moment. Their antennae lower slowly, the way they do when something genuine lands beneath the performance.
"Well," they say, and their voice is gentler than I've ever heard it. "About damn time." They hop from the path onto the bench beside Elle and press their small body against her arm. "I've been keeping this secret for you across more cycles than my poor exoskeleton can handle, and I want you both to know that the restraint nearly killed me. Me. The most communicative being in any timeline. Forced into silence. It was torture."
"You knew?" Elle asks, looking down at the beetle.
"Darling, I am a celestial entity who once contained the consciousness of the first marked being in existence. Recognizing a family resemblance is not exactly beyond my skill set." They pause. "Also, she has his jaw, your freckles, and both of your absolutely infuriating refusal to ask for help. It wasn't subtle."
Kaelren reaches over and rests one finger on top of Peeble's shell. Peeble freezes.
"Thank you," Kaelren says. "For keeping her secret."
"Well," Peeble's voice goes suspiciously thick. "Someone had to. You two were busy being tragically in love across the multiverse. The beetle picks up the slack. As usual."
Elle puts her arm around my shoulders. The weight of it is familiar and new, a gesture I remember from a life that no longer exists and am feeling again for the first time in decades.
"Four days," she says.
"Four days," I confirm.
"Then let's make sure we're all still here on day five."
Kaelren takes my hand again. His grip is steady, and when I look at him, the grief has settled into something harder. Something with edges. The look of a man who has just acquired a new reason to win and a new thing he refuses to lose.
"We will be," he says.
I close my eyes.
This is what I've been fighting for.
Idon't sleep.
Elle does. She's curled against my side, her breathing slow and even, one hand resting flat against my chest the way she does when she's fully asleep. The room is dark except for the low pulse of the moss and the faint glow of her marks, which never quite dim all the way. She looks peaceful and young. She looks like a woman who found out six hours ago that she has a daughter and somehow fell asleep anyway, because that's what Elle does. She processes, she absorbs, she adapts, and then she rests so she can get up and fight the next day.
I don't have that gift. I process by overthinking every scenario.
I have a daughter.
The thought lands differently each time I think it. I have a daughter who is physically twenty-two and experientially older than me. A daughter who watched me die when she was nineteen and has been fighting alone ever since.
That one lands hardest.
I think about Thalia's face in the garden. The control she held while she showed us those memories. The practiced steadiness of a woman who has done this before, who has rehearsed the words and measured the timing and calculated the risks, and who still, underneath all of it, was a girl telling her parents who she was and hoping they wouldn't leave.
I think about cycle forty-one. A version of me who heard the truth and couldn't carry it. Who broke away, went after the Cathedral alone, and got thirty-seven people killed because the guilt of having a daughter he'd failed was heavier than discipline.
I understand him. That's the part I can't stop turning over. I understand exactly why he did it, because the impulse to fix this, to end the Cathedral now, to spare Thalia another cycle of fighting alone, is sitting in my chest like a second heartbeat.
