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Avelene is still in her clothes, her face marked with the book she fell asleep on, her cane in her hand and her hair in a dark cloud down her back. She looks at my face and her eyes go wide.

“Saturna. What on earth?” Then she scrunches up her nose. “What stinks?”

“I just saw something. I-I saw one,” I say, my words tripping over themselves.

“A what?”

“A Hollow. I saw a Hollow Person.”

“Well, shit.” The last of the sleep goes out of her face as she swears. “Are you sure? You saw a Hollow here in Mortis?”

“Lower passage. By the second staircase. Three corridors down.”

She shakes her head. “What did it look like. How close was it?”

“I was six paces from it.” I inhale, trying to catch my breath. “It looked like death, Avelene. Pure death. Living death.”

She stares at me. “Saturna…”

“I know. I know. It sounds crazy but I know what I saw. It was there. Maybe someone raised one by accident and forgot to put it back, but it was there!”

She reaches back and pulls her shawl off the hook on the back of the door and wraps it around her shoulders. “Harken’s at the end of the hall. He’ll be up, or should be. We’ll⁠—”

“No, not Harken, don’t involve him, don’t involve anyone.”

“Saturna, we are not going down there with just the two of us…”

“Not Harken. He’ll want to tell someone. We can’t tell anyone.”

She looks at me a long moment, and I can see the question gathering behind her eyes, the why can’t we tell anyone? But I’m not even sure I can explain it to her. The fact is, the Hollow moved on and if I report seeing it, I’m going to come under scrutiny and I can’t afford that right now, not when Baz knows I’m a witch. While I have no reason to believe he might out me, I also don’t know him well enough to trust that he won’t. I mean, I want to believe that he won’t, and he’s said as much. But still. The less attention on me the better.

“I just don’t want anyone to think I’m crazy,” I manage to say.

Avelene considers this for a moment, seeming to buy it. I mean, it’s not not true.

“Fine,” she says reluctantly. “Fine. Just us, then.”

She lifts the candle from the dish by her door. I take one from the bracket in the corridor and we go back the way we came.

As I predicted though, the lower passage is empty when we reach it.

The candles in the brackets are burning low, but still burning, illuminating nothing at all, not even a stain on the ground from whatever gross greasy fluids might have been dripping from the undead.

We walk the whole length of the passage with the sound of Avelene’s cane striking stone and echoing off the walls, and the candles making the shadows jump, and we’re both a bundle of nerves, flinching at everything.

But there’s nothing, not even where the Hollow went down the staircase.

The steps disappear into the dark and there’s only silence and stillness below.

Avelene lifts her candle higher and scrunches up her face. “Well, I don’t know about you but I’m not about to go down there.”

“She was here, though. Believe me.”

“I believe you.” She puts her hand on my arm. Her fingers are small and her grip is harder than I’d expect. “I believe you. It’s just there is no chance I’ll be heading down that staircase tonight in order to find proof, and neither are you. Come on. Let’s go back.”

We walk to her room with the candles close and the shadows jumping and neither of us speaking. At her door she hesitates. Then she turns.

“You know what Renata says you’re supposed to do if you see one. You go to her. You tell her, specifically.”