Aven repeats the words softly as Soren presses his forehead back to my shoulder and Ira's hand remains at my neck.
When Aven looks at me again, tears have spilled silently down his face. "He says he knows."
Something in my chest gives, just enough to make room for the shape of what comes next. I look toward the corner where Aven sees him and close my blood-marked hand around Aven's.
"We'll free Ellis," I say.
The candle burns cleanly between us and the dark.
34
Cain
Avenhasbeenasleepfor forty-three minutes when I find the empty gauze drawer, a shallow wooden drawer behind Soren's counter, crowded with old receipts, half-labeled tincture bottles, two bent silver clips, and a cracked tin of burn salve that smells strongly enough of rosemary to sting the back of my throat. The gauze should be there because Ira used the last roll on Aven's hand after I finally convinced him to stop bleeding on Vera's notes. Instead, there's only the flattened paper sleeve, a few stray threads, and the faint brown smear of dried blood along the drawer's inner edge where someone put suppliei s away in haste and never came back to clean up.
I hold the empty sleeve between two fingers and look toward the breakroom.
Aven is curled on the narrow sofa beneath my coat, sleeping too deeply to notice the bandage around his knuckles has stained through again. Soren is awake in the library, though he has ordered all of us to pretend otherwise, surrounded by openjournals and a cup of tea gone cold beside his elbow. Ira has been at the back door since sunrise, filing sigils into iron with the grim rhythm of a man who has not said he is worried because his body is already doing it loudly enough.
The house needs food, tea, gauze, salt, replacement chalk, and synthetic blood. Still, the list settles in my mind with a strange, necessary weight. Apples because Aven will forget to eat unless fruit appears in his hand already washed and cut. Bitter tea because Soren drinks it when his stomach turns from spellwork, even while claiming it tastes like boiled weeds and spite. Bandages because Ira uses supplies as if replenishment is a luxury only other people deserve. Synthetic blood because I refuse to let hunger make me careless when every instinct in me is already sharpened toward violence.
I fold the empty gauze sleeve and set it on the counter.
"I'm going to the market," I say.
The file stops against the iron.
Soren doesn't look up from his journal, but the page in front of him blackens slightly at one corner. "Terrible idea."
"You're supposed to be resting," I remind him.
"I'm resting aggressively." He dips his pen again with too much force, splattering ink near the margin. "It's different."
Ira turns from the door. His gaze moves from my face to the canvas bag in my hand, then to the front windows, where the wards tremble faintly in the morning light. "The perimeter isn't finished."
"It won't finish faster because I stare at it."
"It'll finish safer if no one opens the door while I'm reinforcing it."
His voice is level. That's how I know he's closer to anger than argument. I cross to the shelf near the counter and take the list Soren abandoned beneath a jar of dried chamomile, adding gauze in the blank space at the bottom. The ordinary motionkeeps my hands from curling. It would be easy to accept Ira's refusal. It would be easy to sit in the library until grief becomes another room I'm kept inside. I've had enough rooms.
"We're out of half the things needed to make the next emergency survivable," I say, keeping my voice quiet enough not to reach Aven. "Aven needs food he won't argue with while unconscious. Soren needs tea and something with sugar before his essence burns through what remains of his temper. You need gauze, whether you admit it or not, and I need blood that doesn't come from a living vein."
Ira's jaw flexes.
"I know how to move unseen," I add. "And I know the difference between useful caution and hiding."
Soren's pen stills. He looks up then, eyes red-rimmed and narrowed, his mouth already forming something sharp. The words don't come. His gaze shifts past me to the breakroom doorway, to the dark spill of my coat over Aven's sleeping body, and whatever he sees there changes the shape of his objection.
"Get the bitter blend," he says at last, rough with exhaustion. "The one with the ugly blue tin. Not the green one. The green one tastes like grass that died angry."
"I wouldn't dream of insulting your refined suffering with the wrong tea."
His glare lacks its usual heat, but he manages the shape of it.
Ira doesn't move from the back door. "Fast. No detours. No conversations you don't need. If the bond spikes, I'm coming through whatever wall is closest, and I won't stop to explain the damage to civilians."
"I'd be disappointed by anything less." I take my coat from the hook near the door, leaving the heavier one over Aven. The canvas bag folds against my side, printed with the faded black cat Soren claims once belonged to Vera and hated every man who entered the shop on principle. Its handles are fraying.Someone stitched them twice and badly. I slide them over my wrist with a care that feels absurd until I realize I'm proud to carry it.
