Of course he sees it.
The war in me must be written all over my face.
He doesn’t say don’t go. He doesn’t say stay. He just looks at me with this terrible, human understanding that almost undoes me more than anything else could.
Jamie makes another broken sound, and Jack, God help him, does what loving adults have done to children ever since the start of time when there is no good answer left.
He lies.
Not badly. Not cruelly.
With love.
“You’ll come back to me,” he says.
Jamie stares at him, desperate for the certainty.
Jack gives it to him. “You’ll come back,” he repeats.
Maybe he believes it. Maybe he needs to. Maybe that is how this all works in the end—not by certainty, but by faith spoken aloud in the moments where terror would otherwise win.
Jamie nods once. A tiny, wrecked movement.
Caly steps back. So does Solan.
Jack cups the back of Jamie’s neck, kisses his forehead, and then with his face in absolute ruins, he turns the boy towards the rift.
The sky shrieks.
Not with sound, exactly. With pressure. With wrongness. With the feeling of a thing collapsing under the effort of existing.
The blue beyond it wavers.
Narrows.
Waits.
And I stand here with my whole life balanced on the edge of a single step, knowing with awful, perfect clarity that whatever I do next will be the shape of the rest of my days.
Then Jamie looks back.
Not at Jack.
At me.
I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m the only other human standing here. Maybe because he sees the same thing on my face that’s in his own chest. Maybe because some part of himrecognises that I’m standing at the mouth of the same decision, only with different consequences waiting on either side.
His eyes are huge and red-rimmed and full of a question he doesn’t ask.
Are you coming too?
The rift contracts.
The bond screams.
And before I know what the hell I’m doing, I move.
VAREK
