“Can you stand?”
“I tried.”
“Then we stay here.”
She positioned herself on the stair above him, settled his hand in her lap, and placed her other palm flat against the mark on his forearm.
The beacon reacted. Her palm against the mark’s output produced a frequency interference he had experienced before—her warmth disrupting the signal the way Maman’s wards disrupted it, but the wards blocked while Delphine absorbed. The distinction mattered.
He leaned into her hand. His body moved toward the source of relief without consulting the part of his mind that had spent months managing distance. Her palm became the fixed point around which the stairs reorganized. The steps found their single positions. The wall settled. The banister became a railing again.
The trumpet on the avenue had stopped. His breathing came ragged. Hers came controlled. Her exhales landed at his temple, and the scent of shea butter and black tea reached him through his own salt sweat and the burned mineral smell the mark produced.
The drawing slowed. The beacon’s output diminished in increments. Blood returned to his fingers, his feet, the outer edges of sensation the curse had commandeered.
His hands trembled. The tremor ran from his wrists to his fingertips and did not stop.
“I’m here,” Delphine said.
The tremor worsened—hands into arms, arms into shoulders, shoulders into the muscles along his spine. His body had held itself rigid against the curse’s extraction, and the rigidity broke now in stages he could not govern. His jaw clenched hard enough to send pain through his molars.
“Breathe.”
He breathed. The air entered his lungs without the resistance the spike had produced. His chest expanded, and the expansion met no wall.
“How long,” he said.
“Since I found you or since it started?”
“Since you found me.”
“Eight minutes.”
“Before that?” he asked.
“I heard you fall. I was in the kitchen. I reached the stairs in four seconds. You were on the third step with your hand pressed to your side and your forehead against the riser. Your eyes were open, but you did not respond when I called your name from the landing.”
He had not heard her.
“When did I respond?”
“When I touched you.”
The tremor lasted another six minutes. When it subsided in his hands, she noted it. When his breathing found a sustainable rhythm, she noted that. When his pupils contracted to match the ambient light—a detail she checked by tilting his chin toward the window—she studied the reaction and released him.
She stood. Her palm left his arm, and the beacon surged in her absence, the sustained tone climbing past its pre-intervention register.
“I’ll get water,” she said. “And something for your hand.”
Her footsteps climbed the remaining stairs. The kitchen door shifted in its frame as she passed through, and the sound faded, and the stairs held only him.
The beacon reclaimed every inch of ground it had surrendered.
Within thirty seconds the sustained tone had climbed past the register it held before Delphine reached him and settled into a pitch that vibrated his molars. The pressure returned behind his eyes—not at the intensity of the seizure but present, insistent, pressing against the interior of his skull with a patience the first spike had lacked. The spike had been violence. This was occupation.
Bastien sat against the wall with his legs extended across the treads and his hands in his lap, palms upward. The burned right palm throbbed in the ambient air. The left hand shook with a fine vibration he could not arrest. He watched his own fingers and could not will them still.
Control had left him.
