Page 11 of The Witch They Fear

It's small.

A bed, a kitchenette, small table with two chairs, a bathroom I can see from the doorway, a wardrobe standing open with dark grey uniforms hung in a neat row. Functional. Impersonal. Staged like a model room—technically livable, completely devoid of evidence that a person lives here.

For a dizzy, horrible second it looks exactly like the room I left this morning. Same dimensions. Same emptiness. Same feeling of a space that was built to hold a body and nothing else.

But the window doesn't have wire mesh. And the lock is on my side of the door.

I step inside. Close the door behind me. Lean my back against it.

The wood is solid and warm against my spine. I let my duffel slide off my shoulder and hit the floor with a soft thump. I close my eyes. Take one breath. Deep and slow and shaking at the edges—pulling the air all the way down to the bottom of my lungs, past the fail-safe still humming at my neck, past the dampeners still fogging my blood, all the way down to the place behind my sternum where my magic lives.

It's still there. After everything—the implant, the activation, the half-second of total erasure—it's still there. Muffled. Restless. Pressing against its walls like something pacing in a cage.

I know the feeling.

Tomorrow the dampeners finish their wean. Tomorrow I meet the full, unfiltered version of whatever I am—the version I haven't felt since I was thirteen, the version that killed everyone I loved. And then someone is going to put me in a room and ask me to perform, and a man with hazel eyes and a remote in his pocket is going to watch me try, and a diplomat with a leather portfolio is going to write down whether I passed or failed, and the answer will determine whether I ever stand in a room with a lock on my side of the door again.

Twelve months. That's what I have. Twelve months to learn what I am, learn what I can do, learn how to hold the fire without burning everything down.

I press my palms flat against the door behind me. Feel the wood. Feel the lock. Feel the thin, fragile boundary between me and the rest of this place.

No pressure.

Chapter 3

I wake up and the world is loud.

Not sound—although that's different too. Birds outside the window, sharp and distinct, each call separable from the next in a way it hasn't been in years. The hum of the wards in the walls, no longer a vague pressure but a layered, textured thing—I can feel the individual strands of enchantment woven through the stone the way you can feel individual threads in fabric. The creak of the cottage settling. My own heartbeat, strong and steady and present, not the muffled, faraway thud I've been living with for twelve years.

But it's not sound that wakes me. It's me.

The dampeners are gone.

I know it before I'm fully conscious—the way you know a storm has passed before you open your eyes, the silence of it, the changed pressure. The chemical fog that's been sitting between me and the world since I was thirteen has lifted, and what's underneath it is—

Oh.

The power fills my entire chest. Not the muted hum I've been feeling through the wean, not the restless pressing against walls. The walls are gone. This is the real thing—a sun behind my sternum, warm and enormous and radiating outward into my limbs, my fingertips, the roots of my teeth. I can feel my own body in a way I haven't felt it in over a decade.

Every muscle, every nerve ending, every square inch of skin suddenly online and reporting in. I'm here. All of me. For the first time since the night that ended everything.

I lie still for a moment. Just breathing. Feeling it.

Colors are sharper. The morning light coming through the window—no wire mesh, I remind myself, no wire mesh—is golden and specific, catching dust motes that drift through the air like tiny, lazy planets. I can smell everything: the cedar of the wardrobe, the starch in the uniform shirts, the faint lavender of the soap in the bathroom, and underneath all of it, drifting through the window I left cracked open last night, the apothecary garden. Green and dark and alive, the soil practically humming with old witch-magic, and something in it is reaching for me the same way I'm reaching for it—a pull, low and warm, like a hand extended in the dark.

I sit up. The mattress creaks. My stomach growls—not the polite, muted hunger I'm used to but a savage, demanding thing, my body suddenly remembering it has needs it's been too sedated to articulate.

I'm starving.

When's the last time I was actually hungry? Not facility-hungry, where meals are schedules and you eat because the tray is there.

Real hungry. Body hungry.

I swing my legs off the bed and stand and the floor is cold under my bare feet and I feel every grain of it and I laugh. Actually laugh—a short, startled sound that comes out of me before I can catch it. It echoes in the small room and I press my hand over my mouth because the enforcers are on the other side of that wall and the last thing I need is Zeva kicking in my door because she heard something unexpected.

But the laugh felt good. It felt real.

I pad to the kitchenette. Someone stocked it—bread, butter, a few apples, instant coffee, the bare essentials of a life they expect me to maintain between supervised sessions. I put the kettle on. Drop bread in the toaster. Get a glass from the cabinet and fill it with water from the tap.