Page 158 of Zenith Court

I looked for him across the ring. He was still crouched beside the broken anchor plate, breathing hard, his shirt dark with water. Nothing had happened to his body. The missing place belonged entirely to me.

Apple followed. Kieran’s warmth flared once and went out.

He was pushing himself upright with his uninjured arm. His mouth formed my name, but the draining water swallowed the sound. I knew the shape well enough to recognize it without the line.

Leather held longest. Jonah remained a low heat under my pulse while the other two places stood empty. Then that line faded too.

Jonah turned at the instant it happened and abandoned the doorway without checking who might follow him through it.

I pressed my thumb into my wrist. My own pulse beat against it. Nothing else did.

Kieran was moving before I could lift my head. His blade hit the floor. He said my name as he crossed the ring, and nothing inside me rose to meet him.

Caspian reached me next, hands closing around my shoulders. Jonah came from the other side and covered my bare wrist with his palm. I felt skin, pressure, heat. Nothing beneath it.

I had known suppression. On Marrow’s floor, the lines had remained beyond a locked door; I could feel the shape of what kept me from them. This had no boundary. I reached once and found no resistance, only absence.

I reached again because the first attempt could have been panic. I tried Caspian’s line by the memory of marble, Kieran’s by green apple, Jonah’s by worn leather warmed in a hand. The memories remained. The lines did not.

“Say something,” Kieran said. His hands framed my face. “Anything.”

I opened my mouth. No sound came.

“Her pulse is strong,” Jonah said. His voice held, but his palm tightened over my wrist. “Breathing steady. No visible injury beyond the hands.”

Caspian said my name once and tightened his grip when my knees failed.

The three of them lowered me to the wet stone without letting go.

Delphine joined us when the corridor emptied. She checked each face, then the blood on my hands and Caspian’s. “You’re all breathing,” she said. “That is enough for now.”

Tormund stood across the basin, staring at her empty hands. No guards remained beside her. When she finally looked at me, I could not read what she saw.

Water moved quietly beneath the floor, settling into the paths we had opened. Kieran’s thumb rested against my cheek. Caspian supported my weight. Jonah’s palm stayed over my wrist.

I turned my face into Kieran’s hand. No line answered. His hand stayed.

45

Kieran

The founding basin went quiet.

Astra sat on the wet stone with Caspian’s arm behind her shoulders and Hale’s hand over her wrist. My palm still cupped her cheek. No green-gold warmth climbed my arm to meet her. There was only damp skin, her breath against my thumb, and the pulse beating hard beneath Hale’s fingers.

I had spent three years waking to a number in my shoulder. That silence lived in the joint, in the careful way I put on a coat, in every door I entered shoulder-first because some part of me expected not to leave through it. This quiet frightened me, but it held none of the old pain. It did not feel like death.

“Pulse is steady,” Hale said. “Breathing is even.”

“She heard the guard move before I did,” Caspian said. His hands were bleeding from the lead plates, but he held her steady. “She is tracking the room.”

Astra looked at each of us in turn. That helped. The blankness at my wrist did not.

“Do you know we’re here?” I asked.

Her brows drew together. “I can see you.”

“Not what I asked.”