Page 34 of The Immortal’s Mark

But he does not answer. His eyes close. His breathing slows to that vast, patient rhythm that means he is retreating into himself, into thoughts I cannot follow.

I am dismissed.

She is waiting by the passage, arms crossed, face composed. The cracks have been sealed. Her armor is back in place.

But I saw them. That matters.

“Finished with your mysterious dragon conference?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Anything you want to share with the class?”

I consider lying. It would be easier. Safer. The strategic choice.

I do not make the strategic choice.

“He said you are significant.”

She blinks. A small thing, but I have learned to read her small things. “Significant to what? The investigation?”

“He did not specify.”

The silence between us is different now. Charged with something neither of us is ready to name.

“Significant,” she repeats, and I watch her turn the word over like I turn my mother’s comb. “That’s not ominous at all.”

“No.”

“You’re not going to explain what he meant.”

“I cannot. I do not know.”

She looks at me. Really looks, the way she did in the dungeon three days ago, when she saw something beneath the mask I wear. I do not look away.

“You’re not lying,” she says finally.

“No.”

“That’s somehow worse.”

I almost smile again. I do not stop it this time. The corner of my mouth lifts, just slightly, and her eyes track the movement.

“Come,” I say. “There is something I want to show you.”

We do not return by the same route.

I lead her through passages she has not seen, up stairs that emerge into a part of the palace she has not mapped. I know this because I have been watching her map everything, and this route has not been in her paths.

The garden appears without warning—a walled space, small and secret, hidden between buildings that have forgotten it exists.

Night-blooming jasmine clusters along worn stone paths, its flowers closed now against the daylight, pale buds waiting for moonrise to release their sweetness. The scent is fainter in the day, a ghost of what it will become when darkness falls. A stone bench sits beneath a winter-bare plum tree, worn smooth by centuries of sitting—the marble has been polished by countless hands, countless hours of waiting for someone who never came.

The walls are old, older than the surrounding buildings. The stones have a quality I have never been able to name—something that makes the air feel different here. Cleaner. Quieter. As if this small garden exists in a pocket of the world that the ages have forgotten to touch.

I stop.

“The Moon Garden.” My voice sounds strange to my own ears. I have never spoken these words aloud to anyone. “Built by Emperor Huizong for his consort. She died young. In childbirth, the records say, though other accounts suggest poison. He never entered it again. Had the paths planted with jasmine because she loved the scent, then sealed himself away from it forever.”