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“Past at least nine doors that were not shut.”

She had not counted them. “I suppose so.”

Something in his face changed but she could not read it.

“You shouldn’t walk these halls at night,” he said quietly. “The doors down here don’t lock from the inside, and not everyone behind them sleeps.”

Maia frowned. “Then why do you sound surprised rather than angry?”

He didn’t answer.

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” she said quickly, filling in the silence. “I heard something, it—”

“I know.” He looked back at the fragment. “It called to you, didn’t it?”

His eyes lingered on her, studying her as though he were listening for something she could not hear.

Maia hesitated, then nodded. “What is it?”

“A memory stone,” he said. “Some of them remember things the rest of us were made to forget.”

The way he spoke made her skin prickle. “What memory does this one hold?”

He almost smiled. “An ancient one. It wouldn’t be for a human to understand.”

“Why did it call to me, then?” She stared at him intently, unwilling to pretend she hadn’t heard the implication.

He looked at her as though she were part of the question itself. “That’s what I’m trying to work out,” he said slowly, the slight smile holding.

The rarity of it caught her off guard. She looked away first.

“Is that why it’s here and not in the Archive?” She took one step away and then turned back to him.

“The others would destroy it,” he replied. “I’ve seen the way some of your kind handle the shards. This one… well, let’s just say that some things should not be lost, even when they’re dangerous.”

Maia glanced around the small, dust-thick room: the stripped cot, the absence of anything that might make it a home. “Is this yours? This room?”

“It was assigned to me. Whether it is mine is a different question.”

“You don’t sound as though you think it is.”

“I have had it eight years,” he said. “I could not tell you what colour the walls were meant to be under all this dust. I have never had reason to find out.”

There was nothing bitter in the way he said it. Only a plain, exhausted honesty.

“You went to a city that didn’t want you,” she said quietly. “You saved a man who wouldn’t have thanked you for it. And you came back to… this.” She glanced at the bare cot, the dust. “I don’t understand how you keep doing that. Giving, when nothing’s given back.”

“It is the Vow, Maia.”

“I know,” she said. “But you are more than the Vow. All of the Umbralyn are. You hurt, too.” She looked at his eyes, unnaturally gleaming in the low light. “At least I think you do.”

He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice had lost some of its usual containment. “Most people choose to forget that.”

“Well, I’m not most people.”

“No,” he said, something shifting in his voice. “You are not.”

His hand rested briefly on the edge of the table, close to the shard but not touching it, as though he were keeping it company. Its silver light caught more in his eyes, turning them to mirrors.