It was horrible. It was also, somehow, the most quietly beautiful thing I'd seen since the rooftop stars.
Vane's eyes moved across the skyline in the continuous sweep I'd learned to recognize. Threat assessment. Exit mapping. The soldier never clocked out, not even when the view was worth stopping for. His jaw was set, his hands loose on the raft's edge, and I watched the amber at his collar pulse in time with the water and thought about the thing I kept not saying.
He was going back. Pack. Throne. A world with knives in every corner and no room for a human girl who used to count bottles in a closet. And one of these mornings he'd walk through a gate I couldn't follow him through, and the raft I was sitting on would just keep going without him.
The city drifted past us, half-sunk and si
