THE LUNA HE THREW AWAY

What Comes After Fire 2

Fen had been silent through all of this. Now he made a short sound... not agreement, exactly. Acknowledgment. "He's right," he said, as if it cost him something. "The timeline's accelerating. Whatever's waking up in the dark, it's going to come for you in a place where you have the least support if we let Aldric rebuild that support first."

I looked at the ash on my palm. At the broken window and the ordinary sky through it.

"Okay," I said. "We go to Thornridge."

"Tonight?" Jax asked.

"Tomorrow. We sleep first." I looked at Cass. "You especially."

She opened her mouth.

"Not a debate," I said.

She closed it. The compliance was its own indicator of how tired she was.

We found a room in the lower levels of the hall that was mostly intact, old stone, thick walls, no broken glass. Someone, at some point, had used it for storage; there were blankets in a cedar chest that smelled of time but were dry and clean. Jax found food in a pack one of the fallen Enforcers had dropped. He didn't comment on that. He just made it into something edible over a small fire, and we ate in the kind of silence that isn't empty but full.... full of everything that had happened in the last seventy-two hours, compressed into the space between people who are too tired to say it out loud.

Cass was asleep before she finished eating. I put her blanket over her without making a thing of it.

Fen disappeared to the corridor, which meant he was taking watch. He did that.... moved without announcement, stationed himself where he was needed, expected nothing for it. I had stopped thanking him for it. He didn't want thanks. He wanted me to notice and build it into my understanding of him.

I had built it in.

Jax fell asleep sitting up, which was a talent I had always found both impressive and deeply unsettling. I watched his breathing even out, and for a moment I let myself feel the full weight of how close I'd come to losing him. Not the abstract version I'd been carrying since he was taken. The real version, Jax, locked in a cell, the silver working on him in the quiet, alone and pretending he wasn't afraid.

He was pretending now, too. The jokes were slightly faster than usual. The pauses between them slightly shorter. Something in the Silver Cells had touched something in him that hadn't come back yet, and I didn't know if it would, and I didn't know how to ask.

I would ask. When there was time. When there was a version of the next twelve hours that didn't require everything from all of us.

"You should sleep," Kael said.

He was sitting against the wall to my left, close enough to speak quietly, far enough to give me space I hadn't asked for. He had not stopped doing that, calibrating the distance. Not with the old Alpha instinct, the management of territory. With something more careful. More aware.

"So should you," I said.

"I'll take second watch."

"Fen doesn't need help."

"I know."

He wasn't going to sleep. I knew that too. Not while I was awake, not with the walls still carrying the residue of what had happened in the hall. He was positioned so that he could see the door and see me simultaneously, and he would stay that way until I closed my eyes, and then he would stay awake anyway.

I lay down. The blanket smelled like cedar and old summers. The floor was hard.

"Kael," I said.

"Yes."

I looked at the ceiling. "The memory you were holding. In the Dead Oak. The Anchor Trial." I paused. "The one I saw."

He went very still.

I had not brought it up since. There hadn't been time, or I had made sure there wasn't time, which was not exactly the same thing.

"You told him you'd let me hate you," I said. "If it kept me alive."

A long silence.

"Yes," he said.

"Did you think I would? Hate you?"

Another pause. Longer. "I thought you'd have every right to."

I let that sit. It was honest. He had stopped managing his answers for optimal outcome and started just answering. That was new too. That was the thing underneath the thing, the change that was slower and harder to name than the visible ones.

"I did," I said. "For a while."

"I know."

"I don't, anymore." I closed my eyes. "I don't know what I do instead. But it's not that."

The fire was low. The room was quiet. Somewhere outside, the night was doing whatever nights did after the world changed — carrying on, ordinary, not caring.

"That's enough," he said softly. "For now, that's enough."

I slept.

I don't know when he moved closer. I only know that when I woke in the early gray hours, his shoulder was under my head and his hand was loose and still near mine on the floor, not holding, just — present. And I didn't move away. I lay there in the almost-dark and listened to him breathe and let myself have the thing I hadn't let myself have in a long time.

The simple animal comfort of not being alone.

An hour before dawn, I sat up. He was awake.... had probably been awake for hours.

"Thornridge," I said.

"Thornridge," he agreed.

I stood. I shook Jax's shoulder. He came awake with a sharp breath and a curse that he swallowed when he saw my face.

"Time to go be terrifying?" he asked.

"Time to go be a Sovereign," I said.

He considered this. "Same thing, probably."

I almost smiled.

Outside, Fen was waiting, tattoos still, eyes already on the road north. He looked at me, one look, quick and complete and whatever he saw in my face seemed to satisfy him. He turned without speaking.

Cass fell in beside me, her eye dark with bruising but her stride steady.

Behind me, Kael walked.

The Hollow was quiet when we passed its edge. The pool caught the pre-dawn sky and held it, still and black and patient. I didn't look into it. I didn't need to. I knew what it would show me: my own face, silver-eyed, looking back.

I knew what that face looked like now.

We walked north, toward Thornridge, toward Aldric, toward whatever was waking up in the dark and had chosen to introduce itself with my name.

The world was waiting to see what I would do next.

For the first time, I was not afraid of what it would see.