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“Sloane and I…” She pressed her forehead into my shoulder. “We were left at a fire station when we were four.”

“What—”

“It’s a building, a place people who are trained to put out fires stay. They help with other things, too, like with people who have been hurt and need to see a… a healer.” She tripped over the word, and I wondered what she’d been about to say, what thing from her Arizona we did not have here. “And it’s… it’s also a place where parents can leave their kids. Like, permanently. I remember we were both crying while one of the men was trying to keep us entertained. They’d wrapped blankets around us and given us small stuffed dogs that were probably from some kind of display. They smelled list dust. Then someone came and we were sent to a foster home. Lots and lots of them over the years. Most healthy kids get adopted out of the system, but Sloane and I never were. We aged out of the system when we turned eighteen and became adults.”

I soaked in the story. How terrifying it must have been to be so young and only have her sister. The memory of the flash of pain she’d had in the Forest when I’d asked about going back tightened like a band around my chest, heavy as a brick on my breastbone.

Only Sloane, she’d said.

No wonder she had felt such a strong way about Molly and wanted to help her feel more comfortable here.

“I… I thought I had vague memories of my mom. Men don’t wear their hair long in Arizona. Mostly, at least. It’s just women there who wear hair as long as yours. Before the fire station, I have these blurry memories of long hair like mine brushing my face while I was being carried and a soft voice singing to me.”

“You dream of when she left you?”

She shook her head and pressed closer into me, a whine building in her throat. I’d never seen her so distraught, so willing to seek solace. It unnerved me to my core even as a part of me warmed at knowing it was me who she was allowing near her.

“I’ve… I’ve never had this dream before. I don’t even really dream, not unless I’m having those nightmares. But this one felt so real. So real. It was impossible to realize it was a dream at all, even after waking up.”

A stone dropped in my stomach, so heavy I wanted to be sick.

“How many times have you felt that?”

I’d asked her that first morning here, when she’d awoken in a similar panic, if she dreamed of the past or of things yet to come. She hadn’t actually answered, had she? She’d only explained why she had been terrified that morning.

“I think three times.”

“Tell me about them.” I laced the words with an intrinsic bark soft enough she might not actively notice it. She rubbed her cheek against my shoulder, seeking more tactile comfort. Pushing back the honorable part of me that was screaming my vow, reminding me to keep distance until she asked for something different, I cupped the back of her head, letting my thumb trace over her translation mark and the shell of her ear in a continuous circuit. I put more bark, more command in my voice. “Tell me about this one.”

She sucked in a deep breath and then slowly described it in halting sentences. With each one, that stone grew heavier and the tightness pressing down on my chest grew more pronounced. She’d had a true dream, one of the past. Her past.

“You’re sure the collars were black?”

She nodded and then pressed harder into my touch.

“Are they a thing in your Arizona?”

I prayed that they were, that they were not what I feared them to be: the assassins kept by the Varím crown and used at its own discretion. They had no more autonomy than the war-prize slaves some in Sepra kept even now, despite the practice being illegal in all five nations.

“No. I’ve never seen them before.”

Dread settled heavily in my bones, a harbinger I wished I could ignore.

“He prayed to Oltia and Persynthia,” she whispered. “And… and there was magic. There was a fire jar on the desk.”

It had not been her Arizona, then. Not when they did not worship the gods the way we knew them or had magic the way we did.

The name he’d called her clanged through me, too, the old language that only the most devout continued to use. So few even knew of its existence, only the small amount of titles still left from before the Great Exodus continuing on, like the one I’d given her. The name the man had called her? I wasn’t even sure what that particular one meant.

“That memory I have, of the person with long hair singing. I think it was that man from that night. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does if it was a true dream,” I admitted.

She didn’t seem to hear me.

“He… he must have been the one who left us at the fire station. I… I thought it was because our mom didn’t want us, because I wouldn’t stop crying.”

Tears fell onto my shoulder, soaking through the shirt I wore. I tightened my hold on her, but she didn’t complain or try to pull away.