I hear her before I see her.
Not words. No questions hurled into the dark like last time. No pleas. Just sound—raw and jagged. A sob. Then another.
She’s not calling for me.
She’s not calling at all.
She’sbreaking.
The sound digs under my skin like bone slivers. Each inhale she takes is a stutter. Each exhale is a wound. It hurts. I don’t understand it—but ithurts.
I find her sitting on a flat slab of rock near the edge of the boundary lights, arms wound around her knees, shoulders trembling under the weight of everything she can’t say. The light behind her pulses blue, casting her in silhouette. Her hair is a mess of shadow and wind. Her face is hidden, but I don’t need to see it. I can feel it in the air around her—dense, wet,heavy.
She doesn’t move.
Neither do I.
I crouch behind a mineral crest less than ten paces away, every muscle screaming to retreat. To run. But I stay.
I watch.
And Ifeel.
Her sobs are quiet, but they ripple through the ground, and I feel them in my chest like echoes from a war drum. There’s a rhythm to her pain, a cadence of sorrow I’ve never learned to read, but tonight it writes itself into my marrow whether I understand the words or not.
She gasps. A harsh, keening sound that rakes out of her like it’s been waiting too long to be free. Then she folds tighter, as if she could make herself disappear into her own arms.
The wind stirs. Brings her scent to me again.
I inhale, slow and careful.
She smells of old fear and fresher determination. But beneath it—beneath the dirt and fabric and sweat—there’s something softer. Something...human.
I don’t understand her grief. I never learned how.
But I feel it. And it settles into me like a stone.
I remember the boy again. Carson.
The way he stared at something—someone—just before he died. That look wasn’t for me. It was for the thing that took him. And yet here I crouch, painted as the villain, carrying blame like a brand carved into flesh.
I wonder if she believes it too.
But then I look at her—shaking, silent, alone—and I know she doesn’t.
Because she’s not weeping for a monster. She’s weeping for a friend.
A soul lost to the void between duty and truth.
I shift slightly, my foot brushing loose gravel. Her head jerks up.
I freeze.
She doesn’t see me. Her gaze sweeps the dark but never finds my eyes.
Still... I hold my breath.
She sniffles. Rubs at her face. Her shoulders sag.
