She shakes her head slowly. “He stopped. Two days ago, maybe three. Just vanished.” Her voice drops. “I think he’s done with me. Used me up.”
The forest goes silent.
Even the daisies seem to dim.
Riley’s fingers tighten on my shirt.
“We could still be whole.”
Everyone stiffens.
“What?” I breathe.
Riley lifts her head, and for the first time since she appeared, there’s something other than despair in her eyes.
Hope.
Desperate, fragile hope.
“Your Ether,” she whispers. “It can do it. Even without the mirrors. I can feel it. You could… we could…”
“No.” Thane’s voice cuts through the moment like a blade.
Riley flinches but doesn’t look away from me. “Please. I don’t want to be alone in the dark anymore.”
The Ether between us swirls—two threads reaching for each other. Mine hesitates first, because it remembers what happens when I don’t.
“Bree, don’t.” Rhett’s hand lands on my shoulder. “We don’t know what she’s carrying.”
“That’s exactly how Ethos baited her,” Thane adds, moving closer. “Promises of wholeness. Of being enough.”
Theo staggers forward, eyes whitening with vision, breath caught mid-word. “If you merge with her, you merge with him.”
Gray’s voice is rough, half-growl. “She’s still tethered. I can smell it on her.”
“She’s the conduit,” Stellan says, his expression carefully blank but something sharp beneath it. “If you fuse, you finish his work.”
Riley’s breath hitches. “No. It’s not like that. I just—I don’t want to disappear. Please, Bree. You’re the only one who can—”
“Stop.” My voice cracks.
Everyone freezes.
I look down at Riley—at my own face hollowed out by betrayal and hunger and regret—and feel the Ether inside me reaching toward her.
It wants to heal. To make her whole.
That’s what it does. What it’s always done.
But it also taught me something in that chamber of ash and mirrors.
Creation through choice. Not compulsion.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
Riley’s face crumbles. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t know where you end and he begins.” The words tear out of me. “And I won’t risk losing myself to find out.”
