Light let them go the way a tide lets go of shore—reluctant, then all at once.
They landed in grass.
Not the pale, whispering blades of the draft-world, but honest green that bent and sprang back, wet with a dew that smelled like mornings they remembered without needing to prove they’d happened. The sky above was a blue that hadn’t been mixed from ink. When Kael swore softly, the sound didn’t echo off machinery or bone; it just drifted away, uncollected by any god.
Lena’s palm found Dominic’s, as if her hand had been waiting its whole life for nothing to pull them apart. The ampersand between their wrists was there—faded, healed, no longer burning. A scar, not an engine. She brushed it with her thumb and felt the simplest miracle: warmth, alive because it was.
“Still us?” she asked.
H
