Séverin rolled his eyes. “Then I’ll guard the back. The siren bust should be no more than a half kilometer away according to our map.”
He thought Laila would walk to the front, but she didn’t. She remained a couple of paces ahead of him, just out of reach. Every now and then, she’d pause and stare around at the dull greenery. She must have been feeling restless. Worried. He wished he could comfort her, but what if everything he said came across as an unwanted demand of her time? She would think him insensitive or worse, unchanged and selfish.
As he moved, he felt the edges of the glass Forged fire lily in his front pocket. He should never have gotten it. How would he give it to her anyway?Here, take this extremely fragile thing and please do not perceive it as a metaphor for our relations.
He should smash it on the ground.
He was turning the idea over in his head when Laila suddenly spoke. “I wish it were spring,” she said.
Séverin’s head snapped up. Cautiously, he took a few strides faster until he fell into step beside her.
“Why?” he asked.
“For wildflowers,” said Laila, laughing a little. “I should’ve looked more closely at them last spring.”
She wanted flowers. How strange that of all the things he couldn’t give her, he could at least do that. Slowly, he reached into his jacket, pulling out the lily. He held it out to her.
Laila stopped in her tracks, staring between him and the glass flower in his hand.
“I picked it up earlier. In the markets. I thought—well, hoped really—that you would like it.”
Laila raised an eyebrow. Slowly, she took the lily. She twirled it between her fingers. The sunshine flowed through the crystal, painting the ground scarlet and orange.
“Do you like it?” he asked, before quickly adding: “It is perfectly acceptable if you don’t, of course. I merely thought it was… nice. I suppose. And a far better alternative than—”
He stopped himself right before he referenced Hypnos’s Naked Man Method. A look of disbelief crossed over Laila’s face.
“Séverin. Are you… nervous?”
“I—” He paused, gathering himself. “What answer would please you best?”
Laila didn’t respond. But for a moment she looked—or perhaps he was deluding himself—as if she were on the verge of laughter. With a small smile, she tucked the flower into her sleeve and kept moving forward.
THE MIND FORGEDmap led them to the outskirts of an abandoned quarantine station. Some distance away stood the ruins of a church. Behind it, a lonely belfry tower with bricks the color of old blood loomed against the winter clouds. The air tasted of salt and rust.
On the ground, Séverin saw nothing but piles of bricks, rags trampled into the ground, and the eerie remains of hastily thrown down shovels. He did not wish to think how many souls were buried beneath the ground he stood on.
“Where’s the siren statue?” asked Enrique, turning around. “It… it should be here.”
Laila drew her shawl tighter. “What was this place?”
Séverin glanced down. They were standing in the remains of a former room. Or perhaps a courtyard, judging by the bleached rubble of a fountain. Thin, metal beds lay in various stages of ruin. Along the broken semicircle of the wall, black ivy clambered around the stone, slowly choking the pillars that might have once adorned the circumference.
“I think it was a convalescence room…” said Séverin, toeing a piece of broken glass. It was uncommonly large, more like a panel that would have belonged in a skylight rather than a window. “Whoever hid the entrance in ancient times would not have used something that could be easily removed… so what happened when it was found again once people started building stations here? Did they find the statue bust and try to hide it? Or celebrate it?”
Séverin picked his way toward the wall. The more he spoke, the more he imagined the room as it had once been. The early sunlight streaming through the glass, the gurgling fountain, and the rasping breaths of a patient fighting to see the light.
He stretched out his hand, his fingers sinking into the wall of ivy. He kept his eyes on the ground. He remembered a detail about the statue… something about the shape of the pillar’s base.
“Perhaps the builder would’ve found it strange that he could not move the statue,” said Séverin. “Maybe he even tried to cover it up with plaster or paint that has worn away by now.”
As he walked, he brushed back the dirt with his shoes until an odd shape caught his eye: a pair of clawed talons.
At the same time, his fingers hit something cold and rough.
“Zofia?” he said quietly.
Zofia appeared at his side. She snapped a small pendant off her necklace and held it to the leaves. Tendrils of smoke curled into the air as the ivy smoldered and fell to the ground. As the blackened leaves cleared, a scorched face appeared in the leaves. The siren.
