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Patting my arm again, she lets me go. “In the morning.”

I go up to our door and find it open exactly the way she said, standing off the latch Ferro fixed so the dust wouldn’t get in.

Walking into the kitchen, I stare at the two mismatched chairs and my maps stacked on the table where I left them. The plants are watered. His cup is washed and turned over on the rack next to mine.

Mine still has yesterday at the bottom of it because I washed his and left my own. That’s what I do every morning of my life.

I stand there for a second, then start going through my own home like a thief.

The bed in his room is made, just as Mrs. Varga said. The corners are folded under. I run a hand over the washed sheets with a wry smile. He’s never made a bed once.

The bracket on the wall has nothing hanging from it. The tube is gone. There’s a clean, pale rectangle on the paint where the machine sat for two years, and dust has settled around it.

I open his wardrobe. Everything’s there. Both jumpers. The good trousers. The shirt with the mend at the elbow that he wears when he wants to look like a person. His boots are under the chair, their laces still tied because he can’t get down to them anymore, and I loosen them for him.

He didn’t pack.

Somebody packed for him.

The shelf by his bed has his tablets gone off it, the tray gone with them, and the little chipped saucer he kept the morning ones on is gone too. Whoever came knew what to take. Someone stood in my brother’s room and read the labels.

That doesn’t sound like something Vasco’s men would do.

I check the drawer and find his slate charger still plugged into the wall.

He went without his charger.

Looking at the door frame, I find my own handwriting in pencil: 8, 2, 10. Second dose with food. Don’t skip the water. It’s been there so long that the wood’s gone dark around it.

Why did you leave me, Onyx?

Did they take you?

Did you go?

I don’t know which one I want to be true. One of them means my brother is in the back of one of Vasco’s cars. The other means he walked down those steps and didn’t look back at the building once. I don’t know what I did to make that possible, except that I wasn’t in it.

I turn off the light in his room and make my way across the hall to mine. I push the door open, reach for the switch, then freeze. The light’s already on, and there, at the foot of my bed, stands Ryven with his hands in his pockets, looking at the wall where I’ve pinned nine years of old Calder: maps, photographs, and my own pencil copies of both.

“You did all this yourself.” He doesn’t turn around, studying the big survey map I redrew by hand when the original started coming apart at the folds.

“Where is my brother?”

“Above us.” Now he turns, far too calm for a man standing in my bedroom after helping steal my brother. “He cleared atmosphere hours ago. He’s on a Clement carrier with two nurses, a doctor who’s treated graylung, and enough equipment to keep him stable all the way to Tempest.”

“And Seren?”

“With him. Somebody had to stay with Onyx while I came back here to deal with you.”

“And Asher?”

Ryven’s mouth twitches. “Also with him, obviously. You think Ash was going to send your brother halfway across the Reach and stay here?”

The room goes narrow. “Bring him back.”

“No.”

“Bring him back.”