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The cut goes from one side to the other, and the inside is a color nobody is supposed to see, and his eyes are open but they aren’t looking at anything.

They are amber and gold and empty, so empty, so still and unblinking.

A dead man’s eyes.

A wail rips out of me. I can’t breathe, the air won’t come in, my chest has gone small and tight and the room is going grey at the edges and I’m going to faint onto him.

I straighten up the best I can, my hand pressed to my mouth, and look away, trying to get in air.

I’m so scared.

I am so fucking scared.

This can’t be real.

This can’t be happening.

“No,” I say out loud, to him, to the room. “No. No, Baz, no⁠—”

I glance back at him, expecting for him to have moved, for his eyes to be focused on mine. But he’s still there, lifeless, staring up at nothing.

I take his hand because I don’t know what else to do with my hands. There’s no pulse in the hand of a man whose throat is open, but I take it anyway because I have to touch something of him that isn’t the ruin, because this hand is the hand that was on me the other night, because I’m a stupid girl who can’t believe what she’s looking at.

And in the touch, in the moment my skin meets his, a vision takes me.

I see a room bathed in firelight, and it takes me a moment to realize I’m sitting in a chair and seeing things through Baz’s eyes. There’s another chair across from him, a tall, straight-backed figure with a long hand on the chair-arm.

Headmaster Lair Caranthis.

His silhouette is unmistakable even in fragment, and though no sound comes with it, there is this pressure of a conversation I can’t hear, as if they were discussing something heavy and serious.

Then the vision moves to my own face in the crypt and my own voice reaching him and saying “then that’s all you’ll get.” But the sound is more than a sound, it’s a weight in his chest, a thing he said and couldn’t take back, and I watch my face crumpling before I turn and slam the door.

Then it’s his hand on paper, his own handwriting across the page in candlelight, writing something I can’t read and then there’s pain, overwhelming pain down his back, sharp stabbing pain on either side of his spine, the sickening thwack of a blade through sinew and skin and the shock of it all before it fades.

He falls to the ground. There’s a hand in his hair, pulling his head back. He’s staring at the ceiling. A voice is whispering at his ear, hoarse and throaty and it seems familiar but I can’t recognize it, can’t make out what it’s saying.

Then a coldness across his throat before warmth spills out, mingling with the scent of iron, and his last thought, that I feel more than anything is:

Saturna. I must warn her.

And then nothing.

I come out of it on my hands and knees beside him, breathing in short ragged breaths with my hand still around his, and inside the hollowing grief I realize…

My gift worked.

My gift worked on him like it had the first time. The gift that never showed up again after that.

So why now?

Because my gift reaches for the dead.

That’s what it does, that’s what it’s always done. He was carrying Roen the first time, carrying him close and open on the slab with the splinter in his hand, and that’s why Roen’s shadow came through to me…and he hasn’t been carrying anyone that close since.

He’s carrying himself now.

He is the dead he’s carrying, and the rule holding is how I know he’s gone.