"Go back," I say.
The woman looks up.
"Tell them I'm not a vessel. None of us are assets. If you come back with stolen souls in your hands, I'll open every chain I can find."
She calculates. I see it happen behind her eyes: the broken crosses, the freed spirits, the agents no longer sure whether the power in their hands will serve them or turn around and remember its name. She retreats because this part of her machine has failed.
"Withdraw," she says.
The agents obey because they still know how. The priests follow with pale faces and empty crosses. Ezra is already gone. The dead remain in the street and inside the shop, some fading toward whatever waits beyond, some lingering near me with the stunned quiet of people released from pain too old to set down quickly.
The first daylight touches the shattered glass.
No one cheers. That would be obscene. Ira lowers his burned arm, which is insulting to everyone with eyes. Soren slides down behind the counter, and the biting plant curls protectively over his shoulder while trying to chew on a discarded clerical glove. Cain reaches for me, then stops until I lean back into him.
Only then do his arms come around me.
I'm shaking hard enough that my teeth hurt. My knees feel like they're made of water and bad decisions. The dead are quieter now, but not gone, and the Church still exists beyond the ruined street, beyond the retreating cars, beyond this one broken arm of a much larger body.
Cain and Ira crowd around me as Soren laughs weakly from the floor and says something about charging the Church for property damage, but the words blur under the sound of rain beginning again outside.
I stay standing until I know it’s a choice. Then I let them hold me.
45
Aven
Morninglightfindseverybroken shelf, every scorch mark, every glittering tooth of glass still scattered across Soren's shop. The front window is cracked from corner to corner. The register hangs open with one drawer bent sideways. Vera's library is worse: books everywhere, pages bent, charms burned thin, one lamp hanging crooked above the couch.
I stand in the middle of it with blood dried under my nails, a headache behind my eyes, and a crowd of dead people waiting quietly around the walls. Quietly is the part that keeps catching me. They're not screaming. They're not shoving grief into my mouth until I choke on it. They're watching me the way people watch a door they're not sure they're allowed to use.
"Everyone alive?" I ask, because starting with the impossible seems efficient.
Soren answers from the floor behind the counter, wrapped in a blanket and offended by the concept of standing. "I'm acceptingalive as a temporary classification," he says, rough-voiced but present. "Subject to revision if anyone asks me to move."
Cain stands near the broken doorway. His eyes flick once toward the street, once toward the back hall, and then he stops himself before the check can become a ritual. He looks at me because he knows I saw it, and I don't make him explain.
The biting plant snaps at his boot.
"Traitor," Ira mutters.
"It has medical instincts," Soren says, then points one shaky finger at the floor beside him. "Sit down before it escalates to amputation."
Ira looks at Cain, which is a mistake. Cain is near the broken doorway, still pale from everything Adaro left in him, his dark hair loose around his face and one hand resting against the frame. His eyes flick once toward the street, once toward the back hall, and then he catches himself before the second check becomes a third. He looks at me because he knows I saw it.
I don't say anything.
Cain leaves the doorframe and crosses to Ira with the calm of a man who's decided that if everyone must be handled, he'll at least make it elegant. "Sit," he says, and then pauses because the word still has edges in this house. His expression tightens for half a second before he adds, softer, "Please. Before Soren makes good on the plant."
That does what my glaring and Soren's threats fail to do. Ira lowers himself to the floor with a controlled breath that turns into a wince at the very end. Soren immediately shifts closer, which is a mistake because he sways, and Cain catches his shoulder before he can tip sideways into a pile of shattered spell jars.
"Fantastic," I say. "The injured are tending the injured. Very sustainable. Very professional."
"You're also injured," Ira says. Soren's mouth twitches. Cain gives me the kind of look that says he's both grateful I'm speaking and deeply unimpressed by the words I've chosen.
I turn back to them to see the living are bandaged badly, breathing stubbornly, and likely to bite me if I hover too much. The dead have no blood left to lose, but some of them still carry the Church on their skin, grey-gold residue clinging to throats, wrists, ribs, places where crosses and wards used them until personhood became fuel.
I pick up a notebook from behind the counter. The cover is cracked, and half the pages smell like smoke, but it opens when I ask it to and doesn't immediately burst into flame, which makes it one of the more cooperative things in the shop. I find a pen under a broken jar of protection salt and walk to the first spirit waiting near the damaged register.
