Dr. Lorian's footsteps faded down the corridor, and the room closed around us like a wound.
Elara sat where I had left her, folded against the wall with her back to the stone. Her eyes were open, but they looked past the lamp, past the room, past everything I had done. The crushed Ice Shard glittered beneath my boot, a thousand blue pieces of the only thing that had kept her alive.
I knelt in front of her.
"Elara." My voice came out wrong, scraped low. "Elara, can you hear me?"
Her chest rose and fell in shallow, even pulls. She did not turn her head toward my voice. I had shouted at her from this distance and closer, and she had never once flinched, because she had not heard a word of it.
I reached for the bond under my ribs out of habit, the way a man reaches for a door handle in a
