The Arcane Annex by the lake never looked like a tower. It hunched by the water like a bunker someone forgot to bury. A single steel door. Slit windows. Wards that tasted metallic on the tongue if you stood too close. People called it Buba's place and crossed the street.
Rose keyed the ward plate. The glyphs buzzed faintly against her teeth. The bolt thunked. Cold air and chalk dust breathed out to meet her, with coffee and the sharp bite of denatured spirits under it.
Inside, the old warehouse felt like a chapel for stubborn work. Canvas dummies were pinned with copper needles. Etched glass flasks lined a shelf. A blackboard was crowded with spirals and field notes. A kettle hovered a finger above Buba's palm while the coil under the bench clicked to life.
Buba stood barefoot on the mats. Her hair was in a sleep-ruined braid. An old shirt slipped off one shoulder. Time had tried her and failed; her face kept a late-twenties lie, but the stillness told the truth. Space seemed to step aside to let her pass. Her hair hung like a black river to her hips. Her eyes were dark enough to drink light. Nothing on her was just pretty: the earrings were phials, the blade was a focus, the smile was a measurement.
"You are late," Buba said. Not a scold. A measurement.
"I ran," Rose said. The words came out thin.
"I can smell it." Buba set the kettle on the coil with two absent fingers and, with her other hand, cut a chalk line in mid-curve. She studied Rose for three quiet seconds. "Sit. Do not touch anything with a skull on it."
There were six skulls. Rose sat at the worn edge of the mat. Her legs still remembered the perimeter track. Her breath rode too high in her chest. The room vibrated with all the things she was not saying.
Buba crossed the mat. She pressed two fingers just below Rose's collarbone. Power prickled there, soft as the first static before a summer storm.
"Your breath is wrong," Buba said. "It is living in your throat."
"It will not go down," Rose said.
"It will. Or it kills you and I will have to teach the next one." Buba's thumb found the knot where panic hooks its claws. "Hold here. Bring air to the place that hurts your pride."
They ran the Lake Pattern. Five in. Five hold. Five out. Tongue up and wide to leave less room for the mind to invent disasters. By the fourth cycle the hinge in Rose's chest moved. By the fifth, the sting behind her eyes returned, and she was angry at her own body for being honest.
"Better," Buba said. She turned back to the scarred workbench. Mismatched mugs waited. The tea was bitter with a medicinal sweetness Rose could never place. Buba did not sit. She leaned, hip to wood, and watched Rose like a carpenter checks a beam for warp.
"Mages are rare," Buba said. Not a lesson. A premise. "Three in a million can do more than light a candle. The Republic can train ten thousand cultivators for every one of us. Cultivators build by increments. We set the mortar on fire and make the bricks remember holding." She lifted a brow. "For you that means two things. You break faster. And when you do not break, you keep others from breaking."
Rose sipped. It hit like truth. "He is back," she said. No preface. There was no way around it. "And he is not."
"The twin," Buba said. Her mouth tugged for a heartbeat—almost sympathy.
Rose nodded. "He came in with the empty ship."
"That ship is not empty," Buba said. "It is heavy with what it brought back, heavier with what it did not." She rolled two fingers. Go on.
"He is Zack until you are close enough to count breaths," Rose said. "Then he is not. His eyes are blue."
"Ah." No softening. No edge either. "And?"
"I thought for one heartbeat." Rose set the mug down before she cracked it. "Then he said it. He is gone. And the floor was not there anymore."
"Which words," Buba said.
"He is gone." Rose hated how her throat answered, but it did. "He caught me. I hit him and called him a liar. He held me anyway. He held like if he moved, something would fall on someone else."
Buba closed one eye, sighting an invisible line. "And you are here because you cannot decide where to put your hands."
"That." The honesty startled Rose. "Also because if I stayed in that house another minute, I would start arranging cutlery by headstone."
"Good," Buba said. "Hands I can fix."
She sat at last. The chair protested. "The Republic breeds two kinds of soldier," she said. "Orders and oaths. Orders make good units. Oaths make legends and ghosts. Which was Zack?"
"Oath," Rose said, faster than thought.
"And the twin?"
"He looks like an oath, acts like an order," Rose said. The words tasted like salt. "That is the part that hurts."
Buba's grin flashed—quick, a little unkind, and proud. "You did learn something on the Maw."
Devil's Maw dropped iron into the air. Light never reached it in memory. Six months there had ground grit into Rose's teeth and alarms into her sleep. Then a woman everyone called a drunk had set two fingers on her wrist and said: You burn clean or you burn out. Choose.
Buba nudged a small wooden box across the table. No lock. No sigil. Inside was a dusk-colored cloth strip and a smooth stone carved with the simplest mage glyph there is: breathe.
"I took this off a child a few years ago," Buba said, keeping her tone casual so it wouldn't turn into a sermon. "Sirens made her faint. I told her: when your head goes, put the stone in your palm, tie the cloth around your ribs, send the breath where the cloth presses. After two months she could tie it in the dark. After three she did not need it. After four she taught it to a boy and moved north and wrote me terrible letters."
"You read them," Rose said. The room needed a smaller thing.
"I use them to level the table." Buba pushed the box closer. "Take it."
The stone was warm when it should not have been. The glyph bumped Rose's skin like a second pulse. She tied the cloth under her jacket, tight enough to make her lungs argue, and felt the next inhale slide down the line like a bead on a string.
"Again," Buba said. "And while you breathe, say the thing you did not plan to say."
Three cycles. The breath found its rails. Rose exhaled and the words came, stripped.
"I went into his room."
Buba's eyes did not flicker. "Good. Keep breathing while you say it."
"The shirt was on the floor," Rose said. Her voice went flat because there was no safe shape for it. "His back is a ledger. Forty-eight names cut into him. Raised. Keloid. Angry. Not ink. Knife."
Buba said nothing. She let the silence hold.
"Everything else is scars," Rose went on. "Chest, sides, arms. Puckered burns. Long tears where claws missed arteries. Pits where teeth failed to find bone. Marks that say the thing wanted him and could not decide how to keep him. His left leg is flesh. His right from mid-thigh down is metal. There is a tiny whir when he shifts his weight. You do not hear it until you hear nothing else, and then it is all you can hear." She swallowed. Copper rose in her mouth again. "He hit the wall with his fist until his knuckles split. He kept the dog tag in his hand. He cracked the plaster. Three times. Then he went to ground. Not a clean fall. Like a building that finally admits what is wrong with it."
Her throat closed. Buba moved her finger a hair lower on Rose's sternum. The breath obeyed.
"He smells like Zack," Rose said, hating and loving the cruelty of it. "Soap and iron and the barracks laundry powder. When he put his hand on the back of my head, I stopped falling. I did not think about anything. I just stopped."
Buba let a long moment pass. Outside, the lake knocked its quiet fists against concrete.
"You are right to be angry at that," Buba said. Her voice softened and, for once, did not hide the empathy inside it. "The body is selfish. It seeks the familiar place where it stopped dying. He looks like Zack. He smells like Zack. He is not Zack. He was not then. He is certainly not now. You will have to teach your body that while you teach your breath to live lower."
Rose nodded, small and stiff.
"Another thing," Buba said. "You are allowed to want the thing that kept you alive. You are not allowed to confuse it with the thing you lost. Grief ties fast knots. They look like other knots."
"I am not thinking about romance," Rose said. It came out too fast, ashamed of itself.
"I know what you are not thinking about," Buba said, and spared her the rest. "You came because your instrument shook itself out of tune. I will tune it. Here are your rules."
Rose braced without looking like she braced.
"You will keep your breath low," Buba said. "You will put the Maw in your breath, not your head. You will put the boy in your breath, not your hands. You will not lean on him. You will not offer him your spine. Not yet."
"What do I do with everything else?" Rose asked. Small voice. Honest question.
"You do not," Buba said. "You let it pass your gate. This is the gate." She tapped the cloth knot. "The cloth is the rule. If the Republic wants a performance while grief chews the floorboards, you give them breath and stance and nothing they can spend."
Rose breathed. The cloth told her where. The stone warmed—an uncomplicated task in a day of impossible ones.
"If he shows you his humanity," Buba added, level as a blade, "do not mistake that for permission to save him. Hinges look like walls until the door swings. Push wrong and you break it. When it falls, it does not choose who it crushes. Right now, that would be you. And his mother."
"I am not trying to save him," Rose said. Truth and a small lie in the same breath.
"Good," Buba said. "Because you cannot. Not from what he is under. Not now. If he ever wants saving, he will have to ask like a person and not a wall." A beat. "If he never asks, you breathe anyway."
Buba finished the chalk spiral she had left open. Under it she wrote one word: retention. Then she boxed it. "Two practicals. Do not go where the crowds are. Their grief has sharp edges, and you like to catch falling knives. If you must see him, decide before you go where your hands will be. Pockets. Behind your back. On a mug. Not on him."
"I have not decided if I will see him," Rose said. It was true—until it was not.
"Then decide how you will decide," Buba said. "Breathe first. Choose after. Not the other way around."
Rose looked at the little box, at the cloth pressing her ribs, at the stone warming her palm. It was so stupidly simple she wanted to laugh and cry at once.
"Thank you," she said.
"Bring the cloth back when you stop needing it," Buba said. "Or keep it and lie about it. Either way, breathe."
Rose reached the door, then paused. "You do not want a report. About him."
Buba's eyes crinkled. Mischief hid the care. "Why would I? He is a boy who lived and a boy who did not. The Ministry will make of that what it always does. I do not care about their paper. I care about your lungs."
Outside, the lake had picked up a chop. White scars chased wind across the surface. Rose pulled her jacket tight, set the knot firmer under her ribs, and walked the long curve of the shore. Five in. Five hold. Five out. By the time the city noise swallowed the water and Buba's dark square of a tower was behind her, the breath had settled on its rails again.
Grief moved in her like weather over a plain. Fine. Let it. She had a rule now. A cloth on her ribs. A stone in her pocket. A list of places to put her hands that were not a blue-eyed face that smelled like the life she had lost.