Too much training. Bad sleep. Old injury.
But I knew the truth. I was twenty years old and my right arm could not lift an apple.
Astra’s Mark had moved toward Caspian Ashford in attunement.
Enough people saw it.
What they missed was worse.
Her Mark had moved wrong for a Mark built for one bond.
I knew because it had moved toward me too.
Quietly. In the east kitchen, on the night I met her, with Rev on the counter and an apple in my hand.
Astra had looked at me, and something under my Mark had answered.
I knew enough cosmology to know a Pull when it put its teeth in me.
I also knew enough to understand what it meant that her Mark had pulled toward Caspian and toward me.
So I’d brought her to the tower.
Partly because I’d wanted to kiss her from the moment I’d laid eyes on her.
But because the clock tower was the only place in Zenith Hall where wanting her did not immediately become a thing the school could use.
Or take away from me.
The truth landed before that night ended, and for thirty-six hours, it stayed where all dangerous knowledge stayed: behind my teeth.
There were books in the archive no one had opened in fifty years. Aldric had signed for them because Aldric had the decency not to ask a dying boy why he wanted old cosmology.
The books avoided the wordsave.
They usedrewrite.
A Mark like Astra’s could rewrite the ending of a Verse like mine.
Save would have been cleaner. Kinder. A word with a window in it.
Rewrite meant the ending stayed. Something had to reach into the sentence and change what the sentence cost.
But asking would be theft.
Worse than theft.
It would be evidence.
Sadie Corwin had taught us what happened when a girl’s Mark became evidence before the girl understood the charge.
Rev still cried about Sadie. I heard her sometimes in the kitchen, though she tried to hide it.
I refused to add Astra’s name to that lesson just because I wanted to live.
So I would keep my mouth shut.
Apples, yes. Kisses, if she wanted them. The roof. The wind.
