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“You feel it too,” Selinne said without preamble.
Maia didn’t look up immediately. “Feel what?”
Selinne gave her a look. “Don’t do that.”
Maia set down her stylus. “Things are… different. Yes.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Selinne muttered. She leaned closer, lowering her voice. “They’re watching everything now. Not just the fragments. Us.” She glanced at the ceiling, as though the stone itself might be listening.
Maia looked toward the far end of the hall, where a pair of Umbralyn stood too still to be casual.
“They’ve always watched,” she said.
“Not like this.” Selinne shook her head. “The fragments aren’t reacting as they should. Their signals… they’re muddled. They don’t mean anything anymore. Have you noticed?”
Maia hesitated.
“Yes.”
Selinne exhaled, relieved. “I thought it was just me.”
“They’re… muted,” Maia said slowly. “Like something is forcing them to stay quiet.”
Selinne frowned. “Forcing?”
“I don’t know,” Maia admitted. “That’s how I see it. They’re not behaving naturally.”
A silence stretched between them.
“What do you think is happening with the Fracture?”
Maia’s gaze flicked toward the distant light beyond the city.
“Worse,” she said. “I thought I was imagining it, but I don’t think I am. Something’s happening.”
Selinne followed her gaze. “It’s brighter at night.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not normal.”
“No.”
Selinne folded her arms, unease settling into her posture. “Do you think they know?”
Maia’s attention shifted, not to Selinne, but to the presence behind them.
Know what exactly? She turned the question over before she answered it. About the fragments? About her and Caelith? About what she and Selinne had overheard in the courtyard, weeks ago now, that they’d sworn to carry between the two of them? Every version of the question led somewhere she wasn’t allowed to walk Selinne through, not without endangering her too.
“They know something,” she said carefully. It was true. It was also the least true thing she could have said.
Selinne stiffened slightly, then nodded once, as if she’d heard the gap in it and decided for now to let it stand. “Of course they do.”
Neither of them said anything more after that.
That night it rained: a real, relentless downpour like the night the wraith came. Maia couldn’t sleep. She went to the window to watch it.
She looked down at the courtyard below, mostly drowned in darkness. But then she saw him.
