I take us outside. The sun warms the back of my neck. The courtyard is a bowl of light. A small group paints at a long table: two kids and a woman in her thirties with hair cut brutally short like she did it herself in a bathroom with bad scissors. The boy from inside has drifted out and flopped into a chair with the bonelessness of the young and tired and safe for ten minutes. Aurora moves like she’s been here a month, not five minutes. She crouches beside the smaller child who looks seven? eight? and asks if she can borrow the red. The child nods. Aurora draws a rectangle and then another rectangle inside it. The child copies her and adds a stick figure in the middle. Aurora pauses and then draws the figure a hat. The child laughs, a small sound that makes the woman with the hair look up and breathe out.
I stand a few feet away and let something soft break in my chest. It doesn’t break with pain. It breaks like a shell given up by something that needed light. The calculation I’ve been doing for weeks goes quiet. The column I don’t let myself keep does the math for me: she belongs here. Not on paper. In the way the air feels around her. In the way the girl with the cello watches her walk past and relaxes her jaw and lets sound out of wood.
Behind me, Reid’s phone murmurs in his pocket. He steps away to take the call, turning his back like a courtesy.
Aurora has shifted onto her knees. The sun turns the top of her hair copper. She’s drawing the child’s fingers. The child is watching her own hands like she’s never seen them be hands before, only instruments that carried meals and bruises and the weight of rooms she didn’t pick. Aurora’s pencil moves. The child’s mouth opens. A laugh, smaller than the first, but not careful.
The hope that rises in me is sharp. I’m not comfortable with it. It makes the inside of my ribs feel fragile. But I take it. I let it bruise me. Maybe this will work. Maybe this is the day she believes what I say when I tell her what I built, not just what I did to her in the dark when I needed to teach her a different kind of safety. Maybe I don’t have to choose between builder and beast. Maybe she can see both and still step closer.
My phone buzzes. I check it. A system push from the network—“Connection lost — South Annex Gate 2”—and then immediately “Connection restored.” It’s the kind of flicker that happens when a squirrel runs along the line and the camera hiccups. Or when someone unplugs and plugs. The log shows a nine-second gap. I stare at it for one heartbeat longer than I should, then slide the phone back into my jacket.
Aurora looks up and finds me. Our eyes catch. There’s paint on her cuticle and a smile on her mouth she didn’t censor in time. The look lands in me like truth. The sharp hope digs deeper and chooses to live.
Maybe this day is a hinge. Maybe I finally showed her the part of me that isn’t a threat. Maybe Caldwell can burn his stage and I’ll still have this—this place, this work, this woman kneeling in sunlight with a child trusting the shape of her own hands.
I tip my face to the sun and decide, for the first time in too long, that I might not lose it all. I look at the woman I’ve been trying to convince and think:maybe she’ll finally see me.
Chapter 58 – Aurora
The child laughs as if the sound alone can keep the bad parts of the world outside the glass. I kneel in the courtyard, knees dusty, sketchbook propped against my thigh while I try to catch the way her teeth flash when she grins. She wears a paint-smeared apron two sizes too big. The afternoon sun throws long stripes across the paving stones, the kind of light that turns every edge sharp. The air smells like damp soil and something green and peppery from the herb beds. If I glance up, I can see the reflection of the sky running down the south wall like a pale river.
“Can I borrow the red?” I ask, and she hands me the fat crayon without looking away from her paper. Her focus is pure. Kids are the best in rooms like this; they haven’t learned how to fake it. She presses the tip so hard it squeaks.
I draw fast—there’s no point trying to build a masterpiece when your model wants to sprint back to the rosemary bush in thirty seconds. I keep my lines honest. No embellishment, or flourishes. I make her look how she looks: a small person whose hair refuses to be tamed and whose joy is not something you can stage-manage.
Maybe I was wrong.
The thought drops into my skull and knocks against the older ones that say cage, contract, and control. I look around. For the first time since I drove up the estate driveway, I can imagine that this place might be what Cassian claims: a refuge, not a trap.
My phone vibrates in my pocket. It’s a small, ordinary buzz, but inside me the string I’ve been pulling for days tightens. I fish the phone out and tilt it behind my sketchbook, so the child won’t see I’ve stopped drawing. The number is still blocked. The message is two lines.
We’re here.
By the north service wing. Come now.
Not even their usual performance of concern. Not “Are you safe?” Not “Yes or no?” Just coordinates and command. The exact wing Cassian mentioned earlier when he told Sera to have the compost hauled and to swap the motion lights to warm spectrum.
My heart skips and then hammers so hard I can feel it in my fingers. I look up without moving my head, as if the words themselves can be seen. The north wing looks like the rest of the compound from here: long and low, wood and glass, backed by trees. A service door sits flush with the wall near the loading bay. It’s closed. Nothing looks wrong.
How do they know where I am?
“Everything okay?” the child asks.
“Yeah,” I say too fast, then softer, “Yes.” I put the phone face down on the bench behind me and finish the line for the child’s jaw. She’s still laughing. She doesn’t know what texts from blocked numbers do to your blood.
I want to walk over to Cassian in the sun and hold the screen up to him and say:answer me straight. How do they know? Did Reid leak the route? Did you? Did you build glass walls to keep people safe or to make them easier to track?
I don’t because a younger version of me has learned that some questions are grenades. Toss them and everyone in the room will be ringing and bleeding before you get your answer.
Across the courtyard, the doctor touches Cassian’s elbow urgently. Cassian’s gaze flicks to me again. He looks like he wants to cut the conversation and cross the courtyard. The doctor says something else. Cassian nods, the tight kind of nod that meansI’ll fix it,signs a form on a clipboard, and pulls his phone out. His attention splits. He’s here and he’s not. Iknow that version of him: the operator trying to be human for a minute while the machine tugs at his sleeve.
“Do you want me to draw you a crown?” I ask the child because my voice needs an excuse to exist.
“Yes,” she says, instantly. “A big one.”
I draw three triangles and then a fourth to make it lopsided. She shrieks like I’d given her an actual diamond. I smile, real, and I feel the smile touch something soft in me I didn’t bring on this trip because I didn’t think I could afford it.
“Ms. Hale?” a man says behind me.
