Jealousy.
After the brutal morning with Kat, Audrey was dumped outside to wait for Maren with Felix, her favorite guard. They chain-smoked in silence beneath the colorless sky. Felix didn’t speak English; Audrey didn’t feel like performing.
When Maren finally stepped outside, her presence was coiled violence.
Thekínisiyard sat lower than thefotiáyard, boxed in by retaining walls of cracked stone and old metal sheeting. Wind collected there instead of passing through, circling dust in mean little eddies that never fully settled. Someone had driven iron poles into the ground at measured intervals. Chains hung from a beam overhead. Buckets of bolts, rusted tools, broken ceramics, stripped wiring, and smooth throwing stones were arranged in ugly little piles, each one clearly chosen for a different drill.
The place looked less like a school and more like a workshop for controlled damage. Every object had weight and a trajectory. Audrey had spent days staring at those piles until she hated them. The women who could move things worked here in near silence, sending shards across marked distances, stopping falling weights inches above the ground, or holding metal rods suspended until their arms shook. When they failed,Maren made them start over. When they succeeded, she acted as if success were the bare minimum for being allowed to keep breathing.
Maren arrived without a greeting, giving her a curt nod toward a pile of rocks and metal.
Audrey sighed and got started.
It was always the same lesson. Two hours of Audrey staring at objects, begging them to move, managing little more than a pathetic vibration.
Today, Maren’s emotions thickened the air more than usual, until breathing felt like wading through hot tar. Fury and that same jealousy.
“You know,” Audrey muttered, “maybe I’d get better if you gave me some help.”
“Help?” Maren spat.
Audrey blinked, surprised she answered.
“You’re a child—use some common sense,” Maren snapped in mangled English, then launched into a hissed torrent of insults in Voírían.
“Why don’t you just move my arm and make me?” Audrey shot back.
“Kínisimove things. Not useless people,pórnes.”
The insult—whore—didn’t bother Audrey. She’d been called worse by better. But today, after Kat’s fist and Ryker’s threats, something inside her had shifted. She was done swallowing disrespect.
Switching to fluid Voírían, Audrey hissed, “Call me a whore again, Maren. I fucking dare you.”
Maren’s eyebrow arched with delight. She obliged.
Audrey didn’t listen. Instead, she slipped into Maren’s mind.
Ryker was there. Naked in a bed, smoking. And Maren watched him as if he were something sacred.
Everything clicked.
Maren wasn’t just hostile—she was threatened. Furious that the man she twisted herself into knots for was even momentarily fixated on someone who shared her face.
Audrey pulled out of Maren’s mind just as the woman finished her rant.
“...you’re a waste of everyone’s time.”
Audrey let the silence deepen between them. Then she examined her nails. “What’s actually wasting my time is listening to the delusion pouring out of your mouth,” she said. “He said we look alike. That’s all it took to send you spiraling?” She leaned in. “Worried you won’t be his favorite fuck anymore?”
Shock flickered across Maren’s hateful face.
Audrey pressed the knife deeper—not physically, but mentally.
“And honestly? You deserve better. He’s a prick who hates himself and everyone else. He doesn’t even deserve your smile, let alone your body.”
“You don’t know anything about him,” Maren snarled.
Oh, Audrey knew. She’d been inside the furnace of his mind.
