“She’s here.” Locke’s already moving toward the stairs. “She’s sleeping. She’s—”
“No.” I step into his path. “I watched her walk out the door less than ten minutes ago.”
He stops. Stares at me.
“Why didn’t you fucking stop her?”
“It’s not my place.”
“The hell it isn’t.”
“Locke.” Vaelor’s voice cuts through, low and steady. “Calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down.” But he stops moving. His hands are fists at his sides, knuckles white. “She’s out there alone and he just watched her leave.”
“She might be ours.” The word scrapes coming out, but I say it anyway. “But she’s still her own person. I can’t force her to stay. None of us can.”
“So what, we just let her go?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The kitchen goes quiet. Vaelor’s stopped pretending to make coffee. Rane’s got one hand pressed flat against the counter like he needs it to stay upright. Kyron’s watching me with that sharp, assessing look he gets when he’s running calculations I can’t see.
“I couldn’t be sure,” I say. Slower now. “Can’t be. But my gut says she’s not coming back.”
Vaelor meets my eyes. “Your gut’s not usually wrong, is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
More silence. The kind that presses down.
Rane breaks first. “So what do we do? Are we just going to sit here talking about it?”
“We need to get her back.” Locke’s voice is rough. “Obviously we need to get her back.”
“Of course we do.” I look at Locke. He’s the one most likely to blow past me and out the door. “But we need to do it right.”
“Is there a right way here?” Rane asks.
“Yes.”
They wait.
“Because if we don’t do this right,” I say, “we may lose her before we ever had her in the first place.”
No one argues.
No one has anything to say to that.
Chapter 20
Nova
I step back fast, heart slamming.
“S-sorry.”
But I already know. I knew the second I hit him. The size, the stillness, the way the air went wrong.
