“Do them all feel like cages to you?” I say.
“Depends on which side of the bars you stand,” she answers. For the first time, something like pity – or calculation dressed as pity – flashes across her face. “We’ll get you through the Registry. We’ll restore your name. But names require evidence. Do you have kin? A clan? A marker? Anything to anchor a claim?”
“Only a bond, and a boy I may have never seen,” I say. I taste fear.
“What’s the boy’s name?” she asks.
“Vex.” My chest tightens. Saying his name is like opening a wound.
She taps her fingers on the rail. “Sweep the registers. Find any mention of Corleone near your crash coordinates. Interview locals. I’ll pull strings so you’re not ignored. But you’ll need to do more than sit in a courtyard and glare. You will have to show up. You will appear for the ceremonies I arrange. You will be visible.”
“You’ll make me a show,” I say.
“A show to protect you,” she corrects. “Visibility secures safety in this fractured polity. They cannot quietly erase what is watched. And you, Takhiss, will be watched.”
They parade me through the Registry like I’m a relic being appraised. Paperwork slides under my claws; signatures taste like bleach. Autrua smiles and signs, a sigil that sends men scrambling to file orders and change lists. My name disappears from certain Alliance ledgers and reappears under Coalition ink. They make a ceremony — pseudopageantry — and set a seal in wax that smells deeply of flame oil.
“Restoration of citizen: Takhiss, son of Vorga” the clerk reads. I don’t listen to the whole string. The syllables are thin and brittle compared to what I held in the dark. But the paper is a key: a weapon, too. Titles are more than names. They open doors and close mouths.
When they give me the land deed, a small patch of rocky ground in a border cluster near the Flame Spires, the officials clap like we birthed a new myth. I hold the paper in my hands and feel nothing.
“You should take pleasure,” Autrua says. She’s standing near the dais, watching me like a hunter watching a fox. “This is leverage. Use it.”
“I don’t want land,” I say, the words flat and hard. “I want Ella.”
“And you’ll get her if you prove you can hold what we give you,” she says. “We willplaceyou, and from that place you will call for your mate. Legitimacy matters when the Alliance tries to argue kidnapping is custody.” She says custody with a small sneer. “You’ll have rights. We’ll fight on paper.”
“You mean you’ll put me on your leash and call it freedom.”
She smiles, and in the smile is a blade. “Freedom is relative. Right now, we give you enough rope to pull your treasure out of the wreckage. Don’t pretend you wouldn’t take it.”
I grind my jaw. “And if I refuse?”
She leans in, close enough that her breath tastes of sweet spice. “Then you remain a footnote in Alliance jails,” shewhispers. “Old men in white coats will try to map you again. We may act kindly now, but we are not blinded by sentiment. We are strategic.”
I imagine them—cold rooms, reconditioning matrices that wash memory like paint. The thought is a hammer across my skull. I swallow. I remember Ella’s mouth, the way she laughed when a hatch caught her hair. I remember the small fists of a baby who doesn’t cry.
“You’ll help me find them,” I say finally. The words are small. The need behind them is a roar.
“Of course,” she says, with the kind of certainty that should be comforting. “But you’ll need to let me use you, Takhiss. You will do things that bind you to my cause. You will accept the ceremony. You will not be clandestine.”
I look at the paper in my hand. The deed. The seal. It stings like a brand.
“All right,” I say. “I’ll play your game.”
She inclines her head once, as if she’s accepting a bargain struck. “Good. We’ll remind her who she belongs to.”
The words make something in my chest twist into a knot of rage and hope and fear. I don’t trust her. I don’t want to. But the end I want is a woman’s arms and a child’s warmth — not a title or a plot.
Autrua reaches out, lightly, and for the first time she touches my hand. The contact is cool and certain. “Remember,” she says softly, like a warning and a promise both. “Everything is a story we tell the world. Let us write the opening lines.”
I close my fingers around the deed until the paper creases. I let the edges of my old life and this new paper life rub together. They don’t fit. They never will. But the one name I care about still sits behind my thoughts like a star: Ella Corleone.
“Then write,” I say. “But don’t write the end of me.”
Autrua’s smile is thin. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
We step out into a courtyard that smells of burnt citrus and metal, under a sky that looks too bright for the kinds of games men play. I breathe the air, and it tastes like everything I have left: fury, hunger, and an unshakable promise.
