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Vandor slipped the scanner into his pocket but didn’t look at him. His eyes stayed on the sky. “They wanted someone here tonight.”
Daven scoffed and kicked the curb. “Yeah? Well, congratulations to them. Helion’s finest investigative unit has arrived.”
Vandor didn’t smile. His eyes were still on the sky.
Daven followed his gaze. “What?”
Vandor hesitated. “You remember the drawing Cyprian showed Ryneth?”
Daven stared at him. “What the hell does that have to do with anything right now?”
Vandor didn’t answer immediately. Rain ran down his hair, down his jaw. “I just had to think of it.”
Daven shook his head. “We’re standing in the middle of a storm chasing Concordant and you’re thinking about drawings?”
Vandor looked at him. There was something about that long look that made Daven’s irritation falter. Something that made unease crawl up his spine.
“There was nothing on the other side of the Ward,” Daven muttered.
“What?”
“I said there was nothing there. Ryneth guarded that wall for years.”
The memory surfaced whether he wanted it to or not.
He scoffed, angry with whoever had decided for Ryneth to stand there like a fool protecting an illusion. He could still taste Ryneth on his mouth, still feel the way he’d clung to him in the hallway like he already knew something was wrong.
And now he couldn’t stop thinking about that damn drawing.
Why had it stayed in his mind?
“Cyprian portrayed the guards,” he muttered. “The wall. And that empty stretch on the other side. And Ryneth—he said he saw those words…”
And above it—
Nereth Solan.
“Nereth Solan,” he whispered.
“Good Light. Look!”
Lightning split the sky so hard the hospital windows flashed white, and for one violent second a single room lit up near the upper floor. Thunder rolled across the district.
When the light steadied again, someone was standing there.
Daven’s breath caught so sharply it hurt.
The silhouette at the window was royal consort Norma Zephyranth. Or it looked enough like her to make Daven’s blood turn cold. Standing where she should never have been, her pale shape motionless behind the rain-streaked glass as if the storm had only just decided to let them see her.
For one suspended second, Daven simply stared. The last time those words had been spoken, the queen had stirred in her sleep. Now she was standing at the window, looking out.
Was she trying to show them something?
The cut cable. The hospital looping through the screens. The dead feed the second they arrived. None of it had pulled them here by accident.
His gaze moved past the woman at the window, past the hospital roof and the sheets of rain, climbing higher into the storm-dark sky.
Thunder rolled across Helion.
