Page 132 of Zenith Tower

He pulled the door nearly closed behind him but left a narrow gap.

The administrator crossed the room and pushed it shut with two fingers. The latch settled quietly into place.

For a moment, we heard only Delphine breathing.

I went to her bed but stopped before touching her. Up close, the damage was worse. The Mark’s lines had split the skin in a pattern too exact to be mistaken for an ordinary wound. They pulsed with each beat of her heart.

“Delphine.”

Her gaze shifted to me.

“I can touch your Mark and try to understand what ishappening. I won’t change anything unless you ask me afterward.”

Her lips parted. No sound came out.

I poured water from the pitcher into the bowl and held it to her mouth. The rim clicked against her teeth before I steadied it. She swallowed once and turned her face away.

“Touch it,” she whispered.

“The statement you signed says I may examine it. I still need to hear what you want now.”

Her eyes narrowed with a flash of the girl I had known at the Hall, the one who had smiled at my filthy uniform and told me there were easier ways to insult the laundry mistress.

“Examine it,” Delphine said. “Nothing else yet.”

The administrator moved to the other side of the bed and took Delphine’s uninjured hand. “I will witness it.”

I slid one palm beneath Delphine’s wrist. Her skin was cold and wet with blood. I placed two fingers against the unbroken edge of her Mark.

Nothing happened.

For one startled second, I thought the records were wrong.

Then all three completed lines flared. Heat ran past Hale’s line and into my fingertips.

The room disappeared.

I knew each bond by where it touched me: Caspian’s heat beneath my ribs, Kieran’s pull at the base of my throat, Hale’s weight between my shoulders. Delphine’s Mark offered none of them.

Her power met me as featureless resistance. There was no bond to admit me and no shared current to follow.

I almost pulled away.

Then Delphine’s fingers closed around my wrist.

Her grip was frightened but firm.

I pressed deeper.

The Mark opened beneath my touch by fractions. The pain tearing up my arm carried more than her present injury. Thehistory of it had been driven into every line: suppression applied until the channels narrowed, forced activation after they could no longer bear it, readings taken again and again while the pattern failed. Someone had treated her Mark like wire, bending it back and forth to learn how long it took to break.

I tasted copper. Warm blood slipped over my lip.

“Astra,” the administrator said.

“I’m still examining.”

Delphine’s Mark shuddered around me. A flash of white corridor. A hand signing a paper. The west door standing open with cold air spilling through it. Then absence, broad and smooth where memory should have caught.