Morning comes slowly like a thing on crutches — the light in the dormitory is thin and reluctant, slipping in through the high windows in pale and suspicious bars. Val is still asleep, drawing in shallow breaths, but Heidi can see the tension in how her fingers curl under the blanket and feel the tremor at the corners of her mouth even in rest. It's a fragile sort of peace, the kind that coats everything after a storm and makes the world look like it might keep breathing.
Heidi eases off her bed and moves quietly. The room smells faintly of detergent and the ghost of sweat and iron from all-night nightmares. The whole dorm carries that same smell. She pads down the hall past other doors, past the soft, dangerous hush of other girls who know, all of them, what the labyrinth did. A pair of Moon Blessed sit on the common steps outside the baths, the ones who were in the labyrinth with them.
