I stand.

  The bed frame creaks as my body leaves it. The sound is loud in the silence, louder than the distant voices, a small announcement of motion that the room seems to resent.

  I move to the window.

  The reinforced glass is cold against my palms when I press them flat. The darkness beyond has shifted while I sat to something less absolute, a darkness that admits shape and distance

  Below stands a small, utilitarian courtyard, paved with stone that has cracked and been repaired and cracked again. Lit by glowglobes that hover at intervals.

  The voices come from there.

  Figures move across the courtyard. Dark shapes against darker stone, four Exarchs converging on someone at the center of their formation.

  And then I see her.

  Platinum hair.

  The color catches light differently than anything else in the courtyard. Pale fire in the darkness. Longer than when I last saw her, bound in a severe braid that swings with each movement. The braid moves because she moves, because she is fighting.

  Cyra.

  My chest constricts with something older and less nameable, something that lives in the space between recognition and response, between seeing and understanding what the seeing means.

  The Exarchs grip her arms with impersonal efficiency; they are moving her toward an exit. She is making that movement as difficult as possible without crossing the line into resistance that would justify force.

  I press closer to the glass.

  My breath fogs the surface. I wipe it with my sleeve.

  Cyra twists against their grip.

  Her mouth moves. Words I cannot hear through glass and distance and the wind that cuts between buildings. But I can read the tension in her face. The set of her jaw. The angle of her shoulders. She is arguing. Demanding. Refusing to accept whatever they have told her with the same stubborn certainty I remember from childhood, from family gatherings, from every moment she chose to stand beside me when standing beside me was a choice that cost her.

  She is not panicked.

  She is furious. The fury radiates from every line of her body, from the way she holds her head.

  Cyra's head turns.

  Upward.

  Toward the tower. Toward the window. Toward me.

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  Our eyes meet.

  The distance collapses.

  Glass and courtyard and cold air cease to matter. The darkness between us becomes irrelevant. I see her expression shift in the pale light of distant glowglobes, fury softening into something else, something that breaks across her features like water breaking against stone.

  Recognition, then relief, then love.

  Her mouth shapes words I cannot hear.

  But I know them.

  I know them in the way her whole body changes, tension releasing into something that is almost relaxation. I know them because she has spoken them to me a thousand times, in a thousand different moments, in every voice she has ever used.

  Little brother.

  She smiles.

  This is not the careful expression of someone trying to appear stronger than she feels.

  This is real.

  Pure and unguarded and impossibly warm despite everything. Despite the glass between us and the distance and the wind and the dark and the certain knowledge that neither of us can reach the other.

  She smiles because she sees me.

  And for that moment, nothing else matters.

  I lift my hand.

  The motion is instinctive. Childlike. Fingers spread against the glass in the gesture of a boy greeting his sister across a distance too great for words. I do not think. Do not calculate. Do not consider how it looks or what it reveals or who might be watching from other windows or what the Exarchs below might report.

  I wave.

  Cyra's smile widens.

  Her hand twitches against the grip of the Exarch holding her arm, trying to wave back. She cannot lift her arm but I see the attempt, see her fighting for even this small thing.

  The Exarchs turn her away from the window, away from me, toward an exit I cannot see from this angle.

  She cranes her neck, trying to keep me in view, still smiling.

  Then she is gone, out of the courtyard, out of my sight.

  The Exarchs follow.

  The glowglobes hover in place, illuminating empty stone.

  The courtyard holds the memory of familial warmth.

  I do not move from the window, my hand remains still against the glass. Palm flat. Fingers spread. The cold seeps through my skin and into my bones but I do not pull away. The glass holds the shape of my breath, fog that forms and fades and forms again with each exhale.

  Tears fall.

  I do not expect them.

  They arrive without permission, without the architecture of the Inner Hell to catch them before they reach my face. They track down my cheeks, warm against skin that has grown cold, proof of something I do not understand and cannot control.

  I have survived worse than this.

  The First Baptism. The Labyrinth. Fire that should have ended me. A blade that separated my head from my body. Transformation into something that grew mouths along my arm and reached toward kin with hunger that was not hunger.

  I have consumed what should not be consumed.

  I have killed what should not be killed.

  I have become something that the Mere does not know how to classify, something that requires determinations and protocols and placement in a tower that exists for purposes I am only beginning to understand.

  And this breaks me.

  The sight of Cyra smiling.

  The sight of her lips shaping little brother. The proof that someone still sees me as human. The evidence that I am not alone.

  I do not understand why this, of all things, unravels me.

  The transformations should have been worse. The fire should have been worse.

  But the Inner Hell is gone.

  There is nowhere to put Cyra's smile, nowhere to file the warmth that bloomed in my chest when she saw me.

  I feel weak and helpless. I do not like it.

  The tears continue. I do not wipe them away.

  Behind me, Binah rocks, steady rhythm unchanged.

  The courtyard below remains empty.

  My hand claws at the glass. The fog of my breath spreads.

  The cold settles deeper.

  "Which one is Gorath Maw?" I ask Binah without turning. My voice sounds strange to my own ears, too loud, too small.

  The rocking stops.

  Then Binah moves, almost absently, her hand rises from where it wrapped around her knees, finger extended. She points.

  Not toward the coldness I sense nearby, nor at the ceiling.

  At the window.

  Through it.

  Her gesture aligns perfectly with the depths of the school.

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