“It’s all I have.” He studied me with something that might have been pity. “But I know this—she’ll need anchors when she’s ready to return. Points of reference in linear time that she can use to navigate home.”
“What kind of anchors?”
“This realm. The people she loved. You.” Eltrien’s voice softened. “Most importantly, you. Your bond is the strongest connection she has to linear time. As long as you stay here, staypresent, you’re giving her a path home.”
I stared at him, at the scattered lights of freed blooms, at the chamber that had witnessed Elle’s sacrifice and couldn’t give me a single fucking answer about when I’d see her again.
Hold the line. Be her constant.
I would do that. Forever wasn’t long enough to stop me waiting.
But first, I had to survive the grief.
Around me, the survivors were beginning to move. Checking bodies. Tending wounds. Survival’s machinery clicked into place because that’s what living things do—they survive, even when they don’t want to.
Mora sat against a pillar, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Elle’s friend. One of the first people in this realm to show her kindness. I watched her grief and felt nothing. My own was too large, too consuming to leave room for anyone else’s.
Bryx had gone very still, his antennae drooping. Processing, probably. Trying to understand the scientific impossibility of what Elle had done while simultaneously mourning someone who’d become crew, become family.
Nimor was solid again, more solid than I’d ever seen him, but his face was carved with loss. Vashael stood beside him, one translucent hand on his shoulder, both of them grieving in their own way.
Even Thrak, who’d lost more comrades than he could probably count,looked shaken. He’d believed in Elle. They all had.
She’d left them. Left us. Scattered herself across infinity to break a pattern none of us had asked her to break.
I hated her for it almost as much as I loved her. I didn’t know which feeling was stronger.
“Kaelren.” Sarnyx’s voice again, gentle in a way I’d rarely heard from her. “There’s something you need to see.”
“I don’t—”
“Please.”
Something in her tone made me look up. She was standing near where Elle had been, where the last traces of her presence still shimmered in the air. And at her feet, half-buried in the debris and ash, something caught the light.
I moved without thinking, crossing the chamber on legs that felt like they belonged to someone else. Fell to my knees again beside the small silver object that Sarnyx was pointing to.
Elle’s locket.
The one her grandmother had given her. The one she’d been wearing since the day she fell into this realm. The one she’d touched whenever she was scared or sad or missing home.
My hands shook as I picked it up. The silver was impossibly warm, as if it hadn’t touched stone at all, as if she’d just—
I couldn’t finish the thought.
The locket pulsed in my palm—alive.
“What—” My voice broke.
“Open it,” Sarnyx said softly.
I did.
Inside, the tiny portrait of Elle’s mother smiled up at me. But something was wrong. The edges of the image shimmered, distorted, like I was seeing it through heat haze or water or time itself. And when I tilted it, the imagechanged. For just a moment, it wasn’t Elle’s mother looking back at me.
It was Elle.
Not as she’d been—as she was now: fractured, many. Existing inseventeen moments at once, her face overlapping with itself, her eyes looking at me from past and future and never-were simultaneously. She looked confused. Lost. But when her eyes—all seventeen versions of her eyes—met mine, I felt the bond flare.
