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You’re safe. Safe.

And yet, I have never felt more hunted.

2

ROWAN

The sound of the Noctis reaches me before the street does.

A long, low note rolls through the air, deep enough to settle in my ribs instead of my ears. It hums through my chest, climbs the back of my throat, and leaves nowhere for another thought to go.

Another note follows, thinner this time, trembling through the dark, and suddenly I’m small again, my shoes slamming against uneven stone as I tear through narrow streets that smell of rain, smoke, and market dust.

I know these streets.

I know what happens here.

So I run harder, but the music keeps following me.

It should be beautiful. It is beautiful. That’s what makes it worse. Because the bow keeps pulling across the strings in long, mournful strokes, each note catching inside my ribs while panic claws higher and higher through my body.

But they’re here.

They’re behind me.

Always behind me.

I don’t look back at first, because I already know what I’ll see if I do. Shadows moving too fast, chasing me down, searching, always searching, never finding.

What are they looking for?

I’m twelve. Maybe thirteen. Old enough to understand danger, but young enough to still believe I can outrun it.

The Noctis cries out again, louder now, the sound so full it blurs my vision. I try to scream, but my mouth is full of grit, thick and dry and impossible, the whole street turned to sand. I can’t breathe right. I can’t get the sound out.

No.

The word never makes it past my teeth, because a hand catches the back of my coat.

I lurch forward, choking on air that won’t come, and the music breaks apart into splinters of sound, bow against string, wood against stone, footsteps closing in, someone shouting, someone grabbing for me⁠—

No—

Wake up.

I come awake hard, dragging in air as if I’ve surfaced too fast, my heart pounding against my ribs as the dark room around me comes back into focus.

The dream tears away the way it always does, leaving only splintered wood, a bell ringing somewhere too far away, and the sense that something is already gone. Even so, it stays with me, tightening my chest.

For one second, I stay motionless on the mattress, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, disoriented enough that I almost expect to find home around me instead of stone walls, narrow windows, and the strange, expensive quiet of a place that still doesn’t feel real.

Back home, we all sleep in one room. For years, I used to dream about having a bedroom of my own. A door I could close. Silence when I wanted it. I never imagined how lonely it could feel. How big and dark a room can seem when it still doesn’t feel like yours.

Across from me, Damaris is still asleep, one arm thrown over his face, blankets half-kicked down around his waist, abandoned by someone who passed out too fast to care where they landed. The sight of him takes the edge off for half a breath. For the first time since arriving on Sero, I don’t feel completely alone.

Registration, dorm assignments, and my brief meeting with Professor Halvern the night before already feel blurred together, as though they happened to somebody else and I merely watched.

I shouldn’t have left him last night, shouldn’t have gone to Black Chapel. Shouldn’t have bumped into⁠—