Page 84 of Zenith Tower

The open line drew taut.

He disappeared around the bend.

A new lock turned somewhere beyond it.

Astra

The unfinished line told me Hale was alive. It could tell me nothing else.

Its warmth came and went beneath my sleeve, faint enough that I sometimes had to press two fingers to my wrist to find it. When it quieted, I did not know whether Hale was sleeping or whether Marrow had taken him somewhere the line could not easily reach. The burns on his arm might have been treated. He might have been questioned again. The thin warmth at my wrist told me none of it.

For the next several days, Hale’s room stood empty. His meal hatch stayed closed. Stewards appeared whenever Caspian, Kieran, or I entered the corridor and followed us as far as the washroom, the infirmary, or the review chamber.

The readers examined Kieran every morning.

They asked whether the pain had returned to his shoulder, whether his hand had failed, whether speech or balance had altered. He answered no. They traced the green-gold line with a glass probe and recorded its color. No one touched the Markitself. After what happened to Hale, even Marrow’s readers had become careful about where they put their hands.

Every examination took place with me in the room.

I did not understand why that mattered until the evening we saw Hale.

The infirmary round had begun below us. Boots crossed the lower passage, doors opened and shut, and the familiar medicinal smell rose through the junction: bitterleaf, spirits, damp linen boiled too many times.

Hale’s line heated beneath my sleeve.

I was out of my room before the nearest steward could straighten from the wall.

Caspian followed. Kieran reached the corridor behind him, still carrying the cup he had been drinking from.

“Astra,” Caspian said.

“He’s down there.”

The lower door opened.

Hale came through between two stewards.

His left sleeve had been rolled above the elbow. Clean linen covered the burns from the silver contacts, and a darker bruise circled his wrist where the restraint had held him. He looked tired, but he was walking without help.

He saw me at the junction.

The unfinished line went bright.

Copper light showed beneath his skin and mine, two open ends reaching across the lower passage. Hale stopped. One of the stewards caught his arm.

“Keep moving.”

Hale pulled free without striking him. “Are you hurt?”

“No. Are you?”

“Nothing new.”

The steward outside my room stepped across the junction and blocked the stair.

“Return to your quarters.”

I reached for Hale through the line.