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Julen frowned. “That’s a strange way to phrase it.”
“I mean,” she continued, carefully, “that no matter what you say, something hears the shape of it. And decides what to do with it.”
He studied her face. “You’re being careful.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Maia exhaled. “Because I don’t trust anything,” she said. “Not right now.”
Julen was quiet for a beat. Then, gently, “Is this about him?”
She didn’t pretend not to understand.
“Yes,” she said, softer than she intended.
Julen nodded once. “I thought so.”
She hesitated, then spoke as if choosing words from a limited supply.
“He feels like standing too close to the Fracture,” she said. “Not dangerous in the way people expect. Dangerous because… everything around him… shifts. It trembles, as if the air itself responds to him.”
Julen’s gaze never left her.
“And me. He watches me like he’s bracing for impact,” she went on. “Like I’m something that might knock him off balance if he doesn’t step back in time.” A faint smile touched her mouth, brittle. “And sometimes he does step back. Hard. As if he’s afraid of what would happen if he didn’t.”
“That sounds exhausting,” Julen said carefully.
“It is,” she admitted. “Because I don’t think it’s indifference. I think he’s holding something back from us.”
She finally looked at him then. “And I think there’s something honest in a person that holds back that hard.”
She paused before she spoke again.
“And there’s something else,” she said, quieter now. “Something happened with the fragments. When he’s near me - when we touch the same shard together - they react differently. Stronger. Like they have some kind of power. He didn’t want anyone else to know. Not Orell, not the other scribes.” She hesitated. “Not even you, probably, if he had his way.”
“But you’re telling me anyway.”
“You’re the only person left I trust not to make it worse.”
She had promised Caelith. She knew that, even as she said it.
Julen was quiet for a moment. “Do you trust him?”
Maia didn’t answer right away.
“I don’t know if trust is the right word,” she said at last. “But when he’s near, things make a different kind of sense. And when he’s gone, I feel the absence of it. Like a sound you didn’t know you were listening to until it stopped.”
Julen’s expression softened. He sighed deeply, as if he was voicing something he had known for a while. “That sounds like someone who matters to you.”
She swallowed. “That’s the problem.”
He reached out and covered her hand with his own, warm and steady. “Maia,” he said, “you don’t have to solve this now. You don’t even have to name it. Sometimes knowing where you stand is enough.”
She squeezed his fingers, grateful for the grounding weight of them.
“Where do you think we fit in all of this, Julen? The lowly scribes.” She chuckled. “Whose side do you think we should be on, if any at all?”
