I step around Darlene.
She does not try to touch me.
“Kauss,” she says behind me.
I do not turn.
Halo blurs around me as I walk into the rain. Not because my vision fails. Because everything unnecessary falls away.
Pain in my back. Blood on my hands. The cold. The stink of sewage in my clothes. Darlene’s warning. Evie’s hurt. My own fear.
All of it narrows into one destination.
Savio Lenrog has answers.
If he does not give them freely, I will tear them out of his elegant world piece by polished piece.
CHAPTER 25
EVIE
The morning after I throw Kauss out, Halo floods beneath my feet.
I do not know that at first. At first, I wake to rain tapping the apartment windows and the bitter smell of burned tomato still clinging to the kitchen trash. My pillow is damp. My throat hurts from crying. The bed feels too large despite being too small for Kauss, and the sheets still smell faintly like him, rain, clean mineral warmth, and the trace of soap he borrowed because his own life apparently fit in one coat and a handful of tools.
For several seconds, I lie still and let myself pretend I can hear his breathing.
Then the silence reminds me I cannot.
Downstairs, the bakery creaks under the weather. Pipes tick. Wind presses at the repaired synthglass panel. The ovens are cold because I overslept, which I never do unless I am sick, heartbroken, or both. The city outside sounds muffled under heavy rain, the kind that turns gutters into rivers and makes the harbor smell crawl all the way inland.
My compad buzzes on the bedside table.
Darlene.
I almost do not answer because I am not ready for her morning lecture, but then I see the call has repeated four times.
My stomach drops.
I grab it. “What?”
Darlene’s face appears above the projection, pale and sharp and wet with rain. She is not in the bakery. She is outside somewhere, noise roaring behind her.
“Get dressed,” she says.
I sit up too fast. My head spins. “What happened?”
“The tunnels flooded.”
The words make no sense.
“What tunnels?”
Her eyes flick to someone off-screen. “Kauss’s tunnels.”
The room disappears.
Not physically. The bed remains beneath me. Rain still hits the windows. The old lamp sits on the crooked nightstand. But all of it pulls away as if I am falling backward through my own body.
