Sleep takes me sideways.
Not the clean fall into darkness, but the drifting kind—edges blurred, thoughts loosening their grip just enough to slip. Heat hums beneath my skin. The stone at my back is warm now, the day’s memory settling. Somewhere nearby, fabric shifts. A measured step. The soft scrape of movement that tells me the watch hasn’t changed.
I don’t open my eyes.
The sound becomes another sound.
A door sealing. The faint vibration of something too large to be gentle.
“You don’t understand,” he says, and the words carry the same weight they always did—final, already decided.
I’m sitting at a narrow table that smells like antiseptic and recycled air. My hands are folded too tightly in my lap. I can feel the pressure of it in my wrists even now.
“I do,” I tell him. My voice is calm. Too calm. I practiced that tone. “I do understand.”
He shakes his head. I don’t need to see it to know. He always shook his head when he didn’t want the truth anymore.
“No,” he says. “You understand the words. That’s not the same thing.”
I open my mouth to argue, then stop. There’s a familiar hollow feeling in my chest, like something has already been removed and my body hasn’t caught up yet.
“They said there are other options,” I say instead. “We could?—”
He cuts me off, sharp and sudden. “I can’t live like that.”
Likethat.
The word lands between us, heavy and undefined. It slices into me now, even in the half-light of sleep.
“I won’t ask you to,” I say quietly. “But this doesn’t have to be the end.”
He laughs then. Once, not cruel, just tired.
“It does,” he says. “Because I can’t live without it. And you—” He stops. Rubs a hand over his face. “You don’t even miss it yet.”
I want to tell him that I do. That I already feel the absence like a phantom ache. That I would have mourned it with him if he’d stayed long enough to let me. But he’s reaching for his bag. Already turning away.
“I didn’t choose this,” I say, and there’s something raw in my voice now, something I didn’t plan to let out.
He pauses at the door. Just long enough for hope to flicker.
“I know,” he says. “That’s… that’s why I can’t stay.”
The door seals with a sound too clean to be kind.
The memory slips, fragments dissolving back into heat and sand and breath. The ache remains, dull and familiar, like an old scar that never quite fades. I shift in my half-sleep, my fingers curling into the fabric beneath them.
I snap awake, sitting straight up with a gasp.
Korr whirls, half drawing his blade, nostrils flaring, eyes already searching the dark for a threat that isn’t there. The desert gives nothing. No movement or sound beyond the soft rasp of the children breathing.
He stills.
I see the moment he understands. His posture shifts from attack to assessment and the blade slides into its sheath without ceremony.
“A dream,” he says quietly.
I don’t answer. My hands are shaking. I curl them into fists and press them against my thighs, grounding myself in sensation. Fabric. Heat. The grit of sand beneath my fingers. Now. I am here. Not there.
