She found Talin three nights later.
Her consciousness slipped through the dark corridor between their buildings, sliding along the cold stone until she found the crack beneath his door where moonlight didn't reach.
His room was smaller than hers. A bed, a chamber pot, a single window too high to see anything but sky. He sat cross-legged on the floor with his back against the wall, picking at a loose thread on his sleeve with the focus of someone who had nothing else to do.
Twelve years old. Skinny in the way all Quiet Wing children were skinny, fed enough to keep them alive but never enough to make them strong. Dark hair that needed cutting falling into eyes that had already learned not to hope.
She pulled back before he could sense her watching. The return to her body left her dizzy, but the headache was manageable now. Progress measured in pain she could tolerate.
"The girl," she said. "Nessa. Where is she?"
"Two doors down from the boy. Sleeping, last I checked."
"How old?"
"Seven. Maybe eight. They don't exactly celebrate birthdays here."
Seven. Eight. Young enough to still believe in rescue, or old enough to have stopped believing entirely. She wasn't sure which was worse.
Wei came earlier than usual the next morning, before she'd finished the tasteless porridge the servants brought at dawn. He slipped through the door with a finger pressed to his lips and a grin that made him look younger than his nineteen years.
"I have news," he whispered, settling beside her on the bed. Close enough that their shoulders touched. Close enough that she could smell the soap he used, something sharp and herbal that the palace wards were given to mask the smell of labor.
She set down her spoon. "What kind of news?"
"Good news. The best news." He took her hand, laced their fingers together. His palm was warm and slightly damp with excitement. "I found it. The gap in the schedule — the real one, not the one I thought before. There's a window on the night of the spring festival. Everyone will be distracted, even the Quiet Wing guards. They rotate a skeleton crew so the rest can attend the celebrations."
The spring festival. Two months away.
"How long is the window?"
"Nearly an hour. Maybe more, if we're lucky. Enough time to get past the wall and into the lower city before anyone notices you're gone."
His eyes were bright with triumph, with the satisfaction of a puzzle finally solved. He squeezed her fingers, waiting for her reaction, waiting for her to match his excitement with her own.
She smiled. It felt like cracking ice.
"That's wonderful, Wei."
"I knew you'd be happy. I knew it." He lifted her hand, pressed his lips to her knuckles in that gesture he loved so much. "Two more months. That's all. Two more months and we're free."
Free. The word tasted like copper in her mouth.
"What about supplies? Money for the cart driver?"
"I'm working on it. I have some saved already, and there's a merchant in the lower city who owes me a favor. It'll be enough. It has to be enough."
He spoke with such certainty, such unshakeable faith in his own plan. She remembered this feeling — the way his confidence had wrapped around her like a blanket, making her believe that someone else could carry the weight of her salvation.
Now she saw it for what it was: desperation dressed up as conviction. He needed this escape as much as she did, maybe more. The palace had no future for someone like him, a ward without family or connections, useful only for manual labor and destined to remain that way until he aged out of usefulness entirely.
He wasn't saving her. He was saving himself, and she happened to be the anchor he'd chosen to tie his hopes to.
"You've thought of everything," she said.
"I've tried. For you, I've tried." He leaned closer, and she saw it coming — the tilt of his head, the softening of his gaze, the way his attention dropped to her mouth.
She turned her face. His lips landed on her cheek.
"Soon," she murmured. The same excuse. The same deflection. "When we're free."
He pulled back, disappointment flickering across his features before he smoothed it away. "I know. I'm sorry. I just..."
"I understand."
He nodded, accepting her forgiveness for something she hadn't actually forgiven. They sat in silence for a moment, his hand still holding hers, the space between them filled with everything they weren't saying.
"I should go," he said eventually. "Before the morning shift changes. But I'll be back tomorrow. And the day after. Every day until we leave."
"I'll be here."
The words had become ritual, empty sounds that meant nothing. She watched him slip out the door, watched it close behind him, and felt the absence of his presence like a weight lifting from her chest.
The afternoon brought a visitor.
A woman — middle-aged, dressed in the simple gray robes of palace staff, but carrying herself with a straightness that suggested something more. She entered without knocking, closed the door behind her, and studied the room with the quick efficiency of someone cataloguing everything she saw.
"You're the oldest one," the woman said. Not a question.
She rose from her seat by the window, every muscle tensing. "Who are you?"
"Oria. I rotate through the eastern building on a three-week cycle. The children know me."
The children. Talin and Nessa.
"What do you want?"
Oria crossed the room, stopping an arm's length away. Up close, she was older than she'd first appeared — lines around her eyes, gray threading through dark hair pulled back in a severe knot. Her hands were rough with work, nails bitten to the quick.
"The boy talks about you," Oria said. "Not to me directly, but I hear things. He calls you the voice in the dark."
She said nothing. Waiting.
"I had a daughter once. Unnamed, like you. She died before her fifth birthday — a fever that swept through the lower palace one winter. They burned her body with the others and never spoke her name again, because she didn't have one to speak."
She watched the ripples cross Oria's face — old grief, long buried, surfacing for just a moment before sinking back down.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because I know what you are. What they're planning to do with you." Oria's eyes met hers, steady and hard. "And because I want to help."
The silence stretched between them. She felt Kaelan's attention sharpen.
"Help how?"
"I can carry messages. Pass information in and out of the Quiet Wing. I know people in the lower palace — servants, laborers, a few who remember what it was like before the current Emperor tightened his grip on the naming laws." Oria paused, something almost like a smile crossing her lips. "There are more of us than you'd think. People who've lost someone to the Void alignment. People who are tired of watching children disappear."
"And what do you want in return?"
"Nothing you can give me now. But someday, if you survive whatever it is you're planning..." Oria shrugged, a gesture that was almost casual despite the weight of the conversation. "I want to see them burn. The Keepers, the Emperor, the whole rotten system. I'm too old to light the match myself. But I can help someone who isn't."
She considered the offer. The risks. The possibility that this was a trap, a test, a way to expose whatever plans she might be making.
Kaelan was silent. No warning, no guidance. Leaving the decision to her.
"The boy," she said finally. "Talin. He gave me a blanket last week. Pushed it under my door during the guard change."
Oria nodded. "I saw him take it from the storage room. He tried to hide it under his shirt, but he's not very good at sneaking yet." A pause. "He's a good boy. Braver than he knows."
"And the girl? Nessa?"
"Quiet. Scared. She cries at night when she thinks no one can hear." Oria's expression didn't change, but something shifted in her voice. "They're both running out of time. The Keepers have already started the purification preparations. Minor things — adjusted diet, additional examinations. But it's beginning."
"I need information," she said. "Guard schedules. Keeper rotations. The layout of the third building — the one they use for preparations."
"I can get those."
"And I need to know if anyone else is watching me. Besides the obvious guards."
Oria's eyebrows rose slightly. "You're smarter than you look."
"I have to be."
"I'll be back in a week," Oria said. "Same time, if I can manage it. Have your questions ready."
She left as quietly as she'd come, the door closing with barely a sound.
"Well," Kaelan said, and there was something in his voice she couldn't quite identify. "That was unexpected."
"You didn't warn me she was coming."
"I didn't know. She moves carefully, this one. Stays in the spaces I haven't learned to watch yet."
She filed that information away. Someone who could evade Kaelan's attention, even accidentally, was either very lucky or very skilled. Either way, worth watching.
"Do you think she's genuine?"
He didn't answer immediately. She felt him considering the question from angles she couldn't perceive, weighing factors she had no access to.
"She believes what she's saying. Whether that makes her trustworthy is a different question entirely."