Every morning, Wei arrived with small gifts and smaller talk, filling her room with the sound of his voice while she nodded in the right places and let her mind wander elsewhere. He didn't seem to notice her distance — or maybe he'd convinced himself it was shyness, that endearing hesitation he'd always loved about her. She let him believe whatever kept him comfortable.
The afternoons belonged to Kaelan.
He pushed her into the shadows over and over until her nose bled freely and her vision doubled, until she learned to hold herself in that cold space for ten seconds, then twenty, then nearly a minute before her consciousness snapped back like a bowstring. The headaches that followed were blinding, but she stopped vomiting by the fifth day, which he informed her was acceptable progress.
"Acceptable," she repeated, pressing a damp cloth to her forehead while the room slowly stopped spinning.
"Would you prefer I lie?"
"I'd prefer you say something that doesn't make me want to throw this cloth at the wall."
"Noted. I'll endeavor to be more palatable."
The dry amusement in his voice made her smile despite herself, though she hid it quickly. Showing him too much felt dangerous in ways she couldn't articulate — like feeding a stray cat that might decide to bite the hand offering scraps.
By the eighth day, she could slip into a shadow near the door and emerge from the one in the corner, though the distance left her shaking and pale. Kaelan called it passable. She called it a miracle and promptly passed out on the floor.
When she woke, night had fallen and someone had covered her with a blanket.
"Did you do this?"
"Don't be absurd. I can't interact with physical objects yet."
She sat up slowly, the blanket pooling in her lap, and looked around the room. The door was still locked. The window was closed. No servants had been scheduled for the evening.
"Then who—"
"The boy. Talin. He slipped through the corridor when the evening guard changed and pushed the blanket under your door. It took him nearly ten minutes to work it through the gap."
She stared at the thin fabric in her hands, worn soft from years of use and smelling faintly of dust and something sweeter underneath, like the soap they gave the younger Void-borns because the Keepers said it kept them docile.
"He's twelve," she said quietly. "Why would he risk coming here?"
"You spoke to him. Through the wall, three nights ago. You told him he wasn't alone."
She remembered. A whisper in the dark, nothing more. Words she'd offered without thinking because she couldn't bear the sound of his crying through the stones.
"I didn't think he heard me."
"He heard. And now he's decided you matter to him, which is either useful or a complication depending on how sentimental you intend to be about it."
She folded the blanket carefully, running her fingers along the frayed edges where someone — Talin, probably — had tried to mend a tear with clumsy stitches. Such a small thing. Such an ordinary gesture of care in a place designed to make care impossible.
"I'm getting them out," she said, and it wasn't a declaration this time, wasn't defiance thrown in Kaelan's face. Just truth, simple and immovable. "Both of them. Whatever it costs."
He didn't argue. Didn't remind her of the odds or the foolishness or the thousand ways her plan could collapse. The silence stretched between them, and she felt something shift in the quality of his attention — not approval exactly, but a recalculation. Like he was seeing her for the first time and hadn't quite decided what to make of the view.
---
The morning brought rain.
It hammered against the windows in sheets, turning the courtyard into a gray blur and filling her room with the kind of damp cold that sank into bones and stayed there. Wei's visit was shorter than usual — something about a leak in the records room that required all available hands — and she found herself alone with hours to fill and nothing to fill them with.
She practiced shadow-walking until her head pounded, then stopped before she could push herself into unconsciousness again. The last thing she needed was to be found on the floor by a servant, bleeding from the nose and babbling about voices in her head.
Instead, she sat by the window and watched the rain fall.
"You're quiet today," Kaelan observed eventually, his voice sliding through her thoughts like smoke through a cracked door.
"Thinking."
"About?"
"The escape. The timing. Whether any of this is actually possible or if I'm just delaying the inevitable."
"Doubt is useful in small doses. It keeps you sharp, prevents overconfidence." A pause, weighted with something she couldn't name. "Too much of it, though, and you'll paralyze yourself before you ever reach the wall."
"Is that advice or criticism?"
"Can't it be both?"
She almost laughed. Almost. The sound caught in her throat and came out as something closer to a sigh, and she leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window, watching her breath fog the surface.
"In my first life," she said slowly, "I never questioned anything. I just... accepted. The cage, the loneliness, Wei's promises, the future everyone said I didn't have. I accepted all of it because I didn't know there was another option."
"And now?"
"Now I question everything. Including myself. Including whether I'm strong enough, smart enough, angry enough to actually change anything."
The rain intensified, drumming against the roof hard enough that she felt the vibrations through the stone. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled across the sky like a warning.
"You died on an altar because you trusted the wrong person," Kaelan said, and his voice was different now — lower, stripped of its usual sardonic edge. "You came back because you refused to stay dead. Those are not the actions of someone who lacks strength."
She turned from the window, surprised by the unexpected weight of his words. He so rarely offered anything that resembled comfort, and even this wasn't quite that — more like an observation, clinical and detached, but underneath it...
"Was that supposed to make me feel better?"
"It was supposed to be accurate. Whether it affects your feelings is your concern, not mine."
She shook her head, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth despite herself. He was impossible — deliberately so, she was beginning to realize. Every time she thought she understood the shape of him, he shifted, presenting a new angle that contradicted the ones before.
"You're very good at saying things that almost sound kind but aren't."
"I've had millennia to practice."
"Clearly." She paused,
The rain continued through the afternoon and into the evening, transforming the Quiet Wing into an island surrounded by mud and gray water. No visitors came. No servants appeared with trays or inspections. She was alone in a way she hadn't been since arriving in this second life, and the solitude pressed against her skin like a physical weight.
She used the time to explore.
Not physically — the doors were locked and the guards, while reduced, still patrolled — but through the shadows. Kaelan guided her, pointing out the dark spaces she could slip through, the places where the walls met the floor at angles that created pockets of darkness deep enough to hold her consciousness.
The Quiet Wing was smaller than she'd realized. Three buildings connected by covered walkways, arranged around the central courtyard she could see from her window. Her room was in the western building, the largest of the three. Talin and Nessa were housed in the eastern one, smaller and older, the stones worn smooth by generations of captive feet.
"The third building," she asked, her consciousness hovering in a shadow near the courtyard's edge. "What's there?"
"Storage. Records. The rooms where they prepare the vessels for transport to the ritual site."
She felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shadows.
"Prepare how?"
"Fasting. Purification rituals. Drugs to keep you docile." A pause. "You'll be moved there a week before the alignment. Once you're inside, escape becomes significantly more difficult."
"Then we leave before that."
"Obviously."
She pulled back, letting her consciousness snap into her body with a familiar jolt of disorientation. The headache that followed was milder this time — progress, or maybe just exhaustion making everything feel muted.
Night fell. The rain slowed to a drizzle, then stopped, leaving the world clean and glistening under a moon that broke through the clouds in fragments. She lay in bed and listened to the silence, feeling the weight of everything she'd learned pressing down on her chest.
Eight months. It had seemed like such a long time when she'd first woken up. Now, with each passing day, it felt shorter. A candle burning down to nothing while she scrambled to cup the flame in her hands.
"Kaelan."
"Yes?"
"The night of the escape — my first escape, the one that failed — where were you? Could you feel me then?"
"Leave me alone ," he said eventually.
She stared at the ceiling, at the crack she'd memorized across a hundred sleepless nights.
"Do you regret it? Choosing me?"
"Ask me again when this is over," he said. "If we're both still here to answer."