Any dreams he had that night, he mercifully forgot. Having the constant sense of one’s every moment being filled with portent and significance was exhausting, and the howling headache that had followed yesterday’s events kept at him until he was finally able to drift off into the darkness of his windowless room.

At least Suliat had been able to explain how to make the little alcove work, the one that looked like it might be a window but wasn’t. Touching the stone of the back wall, and imagining the sky, caused the alcove to glow as though it really were a window looking out on that very sky. He experimented with bright sunny days, grey Seattle spring mornings, and finally settled on moonlight and stars. The light animated in an undefinable way that made the illusion — so long as you didn’t look into the alcove with the expectation of seeing the outside world — almost perfect.

So he slept in the moonlight, and woke into a gentle morning sun.

The sounds of low conversation and occasional crockery clinking let him know there were already people awake in the common room, so he struggled into a robe and emerged with sleep still crowding the corners of his eyes.

Suliat spotted him first. “Riley! Good morning!” She and Himari were sitting in the armchairs around the low central table, and on the table was a carafe, a tray of what looked like croissants, and a bowl of sliced fruit.

Himari, facing away from him, turned to look, and was revealed to have some kind of pastry stuffed into her mouth. Embarrassed, she turned back to sort out her breakfast situation before speaking. “Hey! Check this out: if we ask, we can get breakfast and coffee and shit sent to us, instead of having to go down to the dining hall!” She grinned. “Yet another thing I owe you. I hate having to get dressed before I get coffee.”

Riley realized she was wearing nothing but the shapeless white nightgown, which despite its nearly ankle-length hem was still thin and uncomfortably revealing. It’s why he’d thrown the robes over his head before exiting the room. Himari seemed to have no such qualms about her body and its relative visibility, judging by the way she sprawled across the chair.

Suliat, it seemed, had a more moderate morning routine; her short curls were wrapped up in a towel, and though her feet were still bare, she was wearing her robe and had a freshly-scrubbed look about her. “And tea, as well, if you prefer it.” She gestured with the teacup she was holding above a saucer.

He smiled at her. “I’m from Seattle.” As he dropped into a chair, he looked around conspicuously.

“She’s in the shower.” Himari nodded her head to the door to the bathroom. “It’s Theory today, so we can finally start learning what the hell it means to be at a magical school.”

Suliat said, “Though to be entirely honest, after yesterday I’m afraid I’m going to have far more questions than they’re going to be willing to answer.”

Riley shivered and nodded at the memory. “I keep expecting them to change their minds about telling me anything. Y’know, given the results so far.”

“Let me do the fucking up this time, okay?” Himari grinned. “I have a reputation as a pain in the ass to maintain, and you’re kind of crowding my spotlight.”

The bathroom door opened and Eve stepped out in a short terrycloth bathrobe with a towel wrapped around her head. As Riley looked up reflexively, their eyes met, and her red-flushed skin turned even redder. With an involuntary squeak, she scrambled through the door of her room and closed it quickly behind her. Riley felt his own cheeks flushing.

Neither of the others said anything for a moment, and then Himari snorted. “That’s so fucking cute and precious.”

Riley started to stammer out some kind of apology — to whom, it wasn’t clear.

Himari cut him off. “Okay, look, both of you are gonna have to get used to being around the other in a bathrobe. We’ve got years of this to go. Years. Sooner or later, you’re gonna see someone’s tit, and if you’re still losing your shit at bathrobes? You’ll probably just die on the spot of embarrassment.”

Suliat laughed. “I promise to do my best to make sure it isn’t my tit that kills you.”

Riley tried to crawl all the way back into the upholstery of his chair, making himself as small as possible. He wished he could dig a hole directly through the floor and escape the room entirely.

Himari and Suliat returned to talking about the upcoming class, but Riley couldn’t bring himself to rejoin. His embarrassment and his self-consciousness, teaming up against him, left him only able to drink his coffee and take tiny nibbles of his pastry. This was going to be every morning, wasn’t it? This was going to be every shower and every late night and every lazy afternoon. These women, seeing him.

Eve emerged after what was, if she’d only been getting toweled off and dressed, far too long. Her face was still pink, and she avoided Riley’s gaze, though she did her best not to seem like that’s what she was doing. It wasn’t hard, because he was doing the same thing.

Movement in the corner of his vision: Suliat, tapping her foot hard against Himari’s outstretched leg. The look she directed at Himari was one of warning; Riley saw that Himari’s mouth was tweaked into a smirk, and he just knew she was about to say something rude to Eve, to provoke her — and him — all over again.

Thankfully, Suliat’s moderation kept the peace, and after a few more minutes of awkward silence, she lured Eve into the conversation. “You said something a few days ago about having some kind of unusual experience?” She glanced over at Riley. “This was the day before you showed up, I think.”

Eve nodded, but seemed reluctant to continue.

“We’re talking Theory today, babe.” Himari shifted her weight, leaned forward to give Eve her full attention. “So talk. What was it?”

Eve’s eyes flickered to Riley. “I mean it wasn’t— it was just a little—”

He shrugged. “I doubt anyone’s going to top my bullshit. It’s not a contest. I want to hear, too.”

“I— o-okay.” She looked down at the floor. “I guess this was a week or so before, um. One of the Rangers showed up to talk to me.” She wrapped both her hands around her teacup, and put her face down to it. “I was going to be late to class, and I was running. I live — lived — in housing north of the river, so I had to cross the bridge to get there, and…”

She looked down at her tea again. “It’s so stupid, when I try to say it out loud.”

Suliat reached out to put her hand on Eve’s knee. “We’re not judging, we’re just curious.”

Eve smiled at the older girl, fleeting, and after a moment and a sip of tea, continued. “Okay, well, sometimes people play music along the river, so I was hearing music and that didn’t seem strange, but halfway across the bridge I thought, that’s coming from beneath me, isn’t it? The echoes, right, like the music was coming from a cave.”

“And there’s no way down there, I’m guessing,” Riley said.

“No, I mean, someone could be on a boat or something, I guess? But this was singing, and it wasn’t moving, and so I stopped to listen, and… I must have lost track of time, because I missed class and I missed lunch and I missed the sunset, too.”

“You just stood there?” Himari had a faint note of indignation in her voice. “Nobody tried to help you or ask what was wrong or anything?”

Eve shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember any of it. It was all just the song, and me wondering who the singer was, and imagining her, and…” She blushed deeply.

“Yeah, honey, I figured out you were gay as hell about an hour after we met,” Himari said, but gently, quietly.

Eve started to stammer out a denial, or an explanation, or an excuse, but Suliat patted her knee again. “Never mind, love. Continue the story.”

“I, um, I guess—” She was entirely derailed and flustered, but found her footing again eventually. “I don’t remember standing there, but I remember when the song ended. I had walked over to the edge of the bridge, and there’s like, a metal railing? Waist high or so? Anyway, I was holding onto it, and I had one foot on the bottom rail of it, and there was someone standing next to me.”

“Not the singer,” Riley guessed.

“No, it was an old man. In a like, professor coat? Like the kind with the patches on the elbows? And mutton chops and one of those stupid flat caps. I mean, he was a caricature, like? You could ask an AI to make a picture of an old Irish guy and it would have been this guy.” She shook her head. “Anyway he had put his hand over mine, and he said something, but I couldn’t make it out. I um,” and she looked down again, “I don’t actually speak Gaeilge, I mean, not very well. Not since school, really. So I guessed it was something like that. But then he said a weird thing.” She paused, her eyes flicking up and to the side in recollection. “He said, ‘She’ll have you if you’re not careful.’ I guess I said ‘what?’ or something like that. And then he said, ‘You can hear her, and it’s been years for her, and she’s bloody hungry, isn’t she?’”

Everyone was completely silent and rapt. Finally, Himari burst out with, “Well? And then what?!”

Eve shrugged. “That’s it. He patted my hand, I looked around, saw how late it was, and turned to head home.”

“You didn’t ask him what he meant?” Riley said.

“By the time I was all there again, he was all the way down the bridge, and I would have had to run to chase him down. And, I don’t know, it felt like…” She paused, thinking. “Like I wasn’t supposed to?”

Himari sat back in her chair with an exasperated sigh.

Suliat said, slowly, “I wonder how folk legends and folk magic fit into this whole Tower thing. I mean, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? The water-spirits of your stories try to lure people to their deaths, right?”

“Yours don’t?” Himari asked.

Suliat shook her head. “Yemọja is the closest analogue, and she’s a mother goddess. The mother goddess, really. She’s not drowning people.”

Eve said, “Sirens, mermaids, merrow, I mean… there’s a whole tradition.” She shook her head. “Figures I’d end up with a stupid fucking folklore monster story.”

Riley frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, you know.” She held her hands up, rolling her eyes. “She’s Irish, she must be full of fairy stories and stuff like that. It’s a bloody stereotype.”

Himari laughed. “Girlfriend, we’re in a magical school in a magical tower in another world. Maybe there’s a reason for the stereotypes about this shit.”

Eve said, “You’ll be fine if it turns out yōkai are real, then?”

“I mean, what do you think Banes are?”

# # #

The morning’s class, with Alexis, was another round of meditative practice, and some review of the proper procedures for requesting access to the Archives. Riley kept his face carefully still during that latter part of the conversation, while Suliat wielded her enthusiasm like a shield to keep the nervous energy of the rest of the group from registering too strongly.

Riley suspected Therese would be on the hunt for him during lunch, and he really wasn’t prepared to have that conversation just yet, so he convinced Himari to let him hide out in their common room and bring him a sandwich later. She didn’t buy his claim to still have a headache, but that was fine. She didn’t press, and he gave her a grateful smile as he slumped into the armchair that he’d already started to think of as his chair.

She would have wanted to talk about the thing that happened in the Archive, and he didn’t know what he could even say about it. A night’s sleep had provided no real clarity, and neither had the meditative exercises of the morning class. He remembered speaking the name of the Sigil aloud, and then he remembered waking on the floor in a different Archives chamber entirely, with Suliat and Eve shaking him by the shoulders, and Himari looking up and down the row of overstuffed bookshelves, looking for possible rescuers (or dangers, perhaps; this chamber was very dim and medieval-looking, with some of the books chained to the shelves).

The section turned out to be exactly where they’d been headed: a historical catalogue of defeated Banes. Groggy, Riley still insisted that someone at least look through the books and tell him what was in them: “If I’m going to have this migraine, I want to get something out of it, at least.”

It turned out that most Banes weren’t even killed. The really big ones were eventually just driven back into the City, no longer willing to batter themselves against the celestial Workings and tools and combat skills of the Rangers. One of them, a bear-like creature from the late 18th century called Orthrus that was described as being as large as a castle keep, was able to reach the base of the Tower where it began to scale it, claws tearing handholds in the black stone. Its corpse made the Peripheral Tower uninhabitable for nearly two years, until the Tower itself eventually delivered one of its mysterious quakes and reset the entire area around the rotting monstrosity.

But the time between? The time during which a Sigil apparently had its way with him? He couldn’t remember any of it. It felt like having been asleep, and having a dream that was only barely related to the world around, like the moment when you realize the sound you’re hearing in your dream is really your own alarm clock. It was the vaguest sense of connection between dream and reality, extended over what felt like interminable hours of subjective time.

Except that he knew Therese had somehow seen him, or had seen his dream. Which was profoundly terrifying, both for what secrets she might have seen, but also in a more fundamental way: she was a stranger who had access to some weakness or vulnerability in his psyche, and even if he understood it, he wasn’t sure he could keep her out. Being around her made him question every thought he had, wondering if perhaps it wasn’t his own, if maybe she was influencing him without his knowledge.

I mean, every strange thing that had happened had begun when he’d seen Therese for the first time, hadn’t it?

He obviously couldn’t avoid her forever, but he was feeling a strange sense of detachment from his body and from the world around him, that distant feeling of piloting himself like a puppet through a fictional world, the dissociated hollow feeling he’d had on his first night in the Tower. That wasn’t a state he particularly wanted to verbally fence with anyone in, much less someone who seemed to have a back door into his mind.

After their first Theory class, though. Maybe after that, he’d feel present in his own body again. Maybe it would be crunchy and technical enough that he’d be forced back into banal reality — for whatever ‘reality’ meant in this place.

Or, if nothing else, maybe he’d just be able to finish waking up, because there was honestly only so much coffee he could drink in one morning.

# # #

“We inevitably end up calling what we do magic, because there isn’t a better word for it that doesn’t involve either an excess of technical detail or an implication we’d prefer not to reinforce in our thinking. Magic, being extremely generalized by mass culture, serves well enough.” Nora paused, and then as an aside, said, “I will not tolerate anyone describing a Working as a ‘spell’, however.”

The tangent about terminology had started when Himari opened the class meeting with an enthusiastic “Okay, let’s make the magic happen!” delivered with just enough irony to be irritating to Nora, but not so much irony that it could be ignored. Thus the slate in the comfortable conference room read ‘CELESTIAL THEORY’ in neat letters and then, below that, in much more hurried script, ‘Alteration through celestial power’ and ‘Sigil manipulation’ and ‘Reality control’.

Those other terms had been offered by an impassive Nora, as alternatives that were more accurate than ‘magic’ to describe what they’d be learning. “But,” she admitted, “this is a losing battle that only the most pedantic of us in Theory continue to engage with. So consider this my token objection, duly registered.”

Now, having satisfied herself on the terminology, Nora moved on to the basics. “The universe is, from what we can observe through divination, entirely described by patterns we call Sigils. You can imagine a Sigil as an ideogram, a single character in a vocabulary of effectively limitless size.”

Himari said, “Kanji.”

Nora nodded. “Yes, although I’d warn against allowing yourself to draw too many parallels between the two concepts in your understanding, because Sigils aren’t actually a language, and they’re not… composited from simpler elements or characters. Every one of them is unique, and when they share common visual elements, those are coincidental, rather than meaningful.”

“How many of them are there?” Suliat had been taking notes, and now she was giving a sidelong look at the Goetia, sitting on the conference room table next to her notebook.

Riley said, “They’re infinite,” just before Nora could speak.

She looked at him sharply, but then returned her gaze to Suliat. “That’s one theory. We honestly don’t know. There’s a point at which continuing to explore the possibility space of Sigil construction has diminishing returns. Each new Sigil is more challenging to identify, and offers less value in Working.”

“That sounds like a cryptocurrency,” Himari offered, but the reference was lost on Nora, and only sort of made sense to Riley.

“They become less applicable to reality, the further afield we go in trying to catalogue them.” She looked across the table at all of them, but let her eyes linger on Riley. “I’m going to give you an example, but before I do, I need to reiterate the central safety rule. Especially here, where you’ll eventually be able to produce effects by simply thinking about these symbols in the proper way, it’s very important that you do not try any imaginative exercises.”

Eve looked nervously up from her notebook, one hand held up tentatively. “Like what? I— I mean, what counts as imaginative?” She didn’t actually look over at Riley, but he could feel the way her body language pulled away from him. Which was great; he’d terrified one of his cadre before their second day. Well done, Riley.

Nora didn’t see the tension, or chose not to comment on it. “Picturing the symbol in your mind. Attempting to draw the symbol in your mind piece by piece. Imagining it as lines of fire. And, most importantly, speaking the name of the Sigil aloud while doing any of the above.”

Eve’s nervous expression became, if anything, even more alarmed.

Nora’s voice, deadly serious, became more reassuring. “You don’t really need to worry about it, to be clear. You’ll feel it happening with plenty of opportunity to stop it before anything happens.” She tilted her head to one side. “It feels like a distantly-approaching orgasm. If that analogy happens to be meaningful to you.”

Eve blushed, and Riley did too, and even Himari’s smirk seemed a tad bit less self-assured.

“I was, however, in the middle of an example. This,” she said, drawing a shape like a Y with a loop at the end of the top left branch, “is Answers Found In Heartbreak.”

Riley felt a whispering in his mind, but stamped down on it.

“It is extremely easy to draw, and the descriptive name for it is, I think, quite relatable. It seems to describe an experience you might yourself have had. It has a conceptual simplicity to it, yes?”

They all nodded. Riley couldn’t remember the names of any of the Sigils he’d apparently been conjuring, but he felt like they were all much less comprehensible than this one. Learning lessons from your bad relationships was pretty universal, really.

“This, much further along the spectrum of utility and applicability, is Foundation Built Within Spectral Fragments of Phenomenology.” The symbol she drew was a tangle of loops that crossed each other at particular angles — that the angles mattered was revealed when Nora frowned and erased part of the Sigil, re-drawing it with a very slight difference in the overlap of the loops. Piercing the entangled loops were seven lines, a group of six in parallel crossed at a particular angle by the seventh, which seemed to pin the others into the knot of loops.

“What does that mean?” Himari asked, incredulous. “Foundation— what?”

Nora smiled. “It’s the Sigil I researched for my graduate project, two years ago. It’s new. It turns out to have a small number of extremely specialized uses, but largely it’s irrelevant to everyone who isn’t working in Theory or the Armory.” She looked the symbol on the slate over with a quiet smile. “Eventually I hope to use it for a Working to create true invisibility,” she said distantly.

“The less we understand the name of the Sigil, the less useful it is. Is that a property of the Sigil or our own understanding?” Suliat had written the name of the strange Sigil down, one word per line, and seemed to be trying to define each term individually.

“Mostly the former, because the concepts represented by each Sigil become narrower and more esoteric. But that’s an excellent question, because even if a Sigil is highly applicable to what you’re Working, you still have to know that to make use of it.”

“Which means we can’t just memorize them, we have to understand them, right?” Himari asked. Nora nodded, and Himari sighed. “Memorization, I can do. This sounds like a pain in the ass.”

Nora smirked in a mirror of the one Himari had been wearing earlier. “I like to believe that my field of study has more to offer than mnemonics and memory tricks.”

After a moment’s pause, she resumed her explanation. “When we attempt a Working, we call a Sigil that has some applicability to whatever we’re trying to do. If I wanted to perform a divination, I might use Answers Found In Heartbreak, as its area of influence is the gathering of information.”

She closed her eyes, and whispered under her breath. Riley couldn’t make out the words, but he didn’t need to hear them to know she was saying the Sigil’s name. His skin prickled and he felt a crawling unease in his gut, and the others started to shift uneasily in their chairs.

Nora’s voice was strangely abstracted, as though she were no longer present in the room with them, as though she were speaking to another world entirely, only visible to her. She raised her hands, her fingers flickering through complex shapes like a kind of abrupt and stuttering sign language. Her whispers continued and Riley felt just barely unable to comprehend them, and unsure as to whether it was her volume or the contents of her speech that was evading him.

Then the gestures and the whispers came to an abrupt end, and in the silence that followed, the table beneath Riley’s hands began to glow, as well as the areas at Himari, Eve and Suliat’s seats. Several handprints glowed near Nora, and Riley recalled her leaning forward and resting her hands on the tabletop.

At the far end, a smear of glowing color spread across the entire surface of the table. Some of the smears looked remarkably round and symmetrical, like—

“Ah. Well.” Nora’s voice betrayed nothing, but there was a flush of color in her cheeks. With a wave of her hand, the glow faded from the table, and Riley felt the hair on his arms subside.

“I created a Working to let us see where the tabletop had been touched in the past day. It seems we aren’t the first to use this particular conference room.”

Himari snorted, suppressing a laugh, and Suliat palmed her face. Eve said nothing, but her cheeks also brightened to a rosy pink.

Riley kept his voice completely neutral. “Theoretical research seems very athletic.”

That was too much for Himari, whose stifled laughter burst out of her in a fit of giggles. The others followed, and Nora was hard-pressed to maintain her impassive instructor facade. Finally, her lips desperate to quirk up into a smile, she dismissed the class.

# # #

Suliat said, “I’ve been trying to understand what happened in the Archive, and it just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Suliat and Riley were in the common room alone, with Eve retreated into her own room and Himari off to the second level where the Rangers facilities had a well-equipped gym. She’d tried to convince all of them to come along, but Riley begged off with a vague gesture at his stick-thin arms, and Suliat had held up the Theory book she’d been reading.

“You’re already a hundred pages past where we’re expected to read for tomorrow,” Himari complained, but Suliat remained impassive.

“If I stay ahead, I can do a better job of saying things like ‘No, Himari, that’s a terrible idea,’ and ‘No, Riley, we should not call mysterious Sigils.’”

“Not just being a teacher’s pet, but also intentionally planning to spoil fun and dangerous activities. Fine. That’s fine.” Himari’s voice was inflected with just enough humor to ensure Suliat didn’t take it personally.

Now the two of them were left to their own devices, and while Riley wanted to follow Eve’s example and retreat into silence and privacy, Suliat had caught him before he could make his excuses.

“What doesn’t make sense about it?”

Suliat had the textbook open in her lap, and was apparently focused on the contents of the pages. “You shouldn’t have just been able to come back from a possession. You should be damaged badly enough that it would be apparent even without magic.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It just wasn’t that bad, I guess?”

“No, look. Sigils aren’t just magic symbols with interesting names. I’ve been reading about them. They’re fundamental ideas about the universe. They express deep principles about how the narrative structure of things all hangs together.” She pointed to the diagram on the page, which showed a kind of web-like design, with what Riley assumed were Sigils at the intersecting lines of the web. “But the thing about them is, they’re not the actual real world. They represent alternate possibilities. Different ways the universe could have gone, but didn’t.”

“So they’re not real.” He felt like all this was somehow familiar, but he couldn’t say why. “Doesn’t that explain it, then? If it’s not real, then reality would just… reassert itself, right?”

“No. That’s the point. They want to be real. They try to remake the world around them to be whatever ideas they represent. When we call them, we’re letting them impose their idea of what reality should be onto the actual real world, just for a moment. They have to be broken right away, because otherwise they start rewriting the world around them.”

She stopped, made sure she had his full attention, pointed one finger at his forehead. “Starting with the person calling them.”

“Which means what?”

“It really seems like you should be a walking shell of a person, just the hollowed out remains after the Wretched Fall sigil finished rewriting you into a copy of itself. Once it left, it should have left you hollow and empty.”

He laughed, soft and self-deprecating. “How do you know I wasn’t that already?”

She gave him a sharp, irritated look. “Not in some privileged white American angst kind of way, you idiot. Hollow and empty like a zombie. Like an automaton.” She reached out to put one hand on his knee. “You should be dead.”

He felt a cold shiver race goosebumps up his spine. A memory tried to untangle itself, rise to his conscious mind, something recent. As the shape of the memory began to come into focus, he crushed it, hard, with the ease of long years of practice. He’d decided that the solution to intrusive thoughts was to simply not allow them to intrude, to become so good at derailing unwanted thoughts that it was as if he didn’t even have them.

It just stopped working when he slept, is all.

He gestured down the length of his body. “Yeah, well. Not exactly typical circumstances here.”

“You think this has to do with gender?” Suliat was genuinely curious, he thought, not incredulous. “I wonder what that could have to do with it.”

“I remember a series of fantasy novels I read where women’s magic involved submission and—”

Suliat’s decidedly unladylike snort cut him off. “Oh, let me guess. This was written by a man, wasn’t it?”

Riley nodded, feeling foolish.

“Very Carl Jung. Very Jordan Peterson. I’m not buying it. Something happened, and I want to know what it was, and I’m not willing to believe it was some kind of gender essence at work.”

“Even though we already know that only girls can do magic?”

Suliat gave him a pointed look. “I would say that we know precisely the opposite of that, now, don’t we?”

He looked down at his feet, breaking eye contact. “I guess. I dunno.” His voice became abstract and distant. “The whole thing scares the shit out of me, to be honest. All of this. This place, the… things I did to get here, the things that happen whenever I get near this magical shit. The blackouts.”

She squeezed his knee gently. “Hey, Riley. You’re going to be safe, okay? That’s why they put us together. We’re going to keep you safe, and you’re going to keep us safe. Right?”

He sighed and met her eyes again. She’d leaned much closer.

“Y-yeah. I mean. That’s the idea, I guess.” He didn’t lean in, but neither did he pull away. Her eyes were huge. Black pools in her deep brown face, liquid and bottomless. “But what if whatever is going on with me is too much for you? I mean, gender or whatever, me being here is weird in so many ways, right? What if…” He let his right hand curl in, fingernails biting his palm. “What if I hurt you?”

Suliat laughed, gently, patted his knee again, leaned back. “I don’t think they’ll let you. The Academy. The Tower. I don’t think they’ll let you hurt us.” She smiled and cast her eyes down to her hands. “But more importantly, I don’t think you’ll let that happen either. I think you’re much, much stronger than you think.”

“Because of what?”

“Surviving possession? Stopping yourself from falling to your death? Jumping across worlds with a magical gate? I think there’s some pretty reasonable evidence, don’t you?”

“The car accident,” he said, low and almost inaudible.

“The what?”

“Six months ago. I escaped a car accident. It’s why my hip is all fucked up and I walk with a limp.”

“When you say escaped—”

Riley could feel a prickle in his eyes, and his throat was trying to close up. What is this? Unfamiliar, hot, burning in his sinuses.

“I don’t know how. I was in the car, then there was darkness and I was really far away from the car.” He shivered a little at the memory. “At the time I thought it was just one of those weird things. Car accidents are weird. People get thrown around. Sometimes people are fine even though other people die—”

That was too much for him, and his voice choked, his throat closing on tears.

I’m fucking crying. In front of someone. In front of a girl.

He held himself to a single sob, because that’s all he thought he’d be able to manage, but then Suliat was on her knees at his feet, leaning in, enfolding him with her arms. She was humming something softly in his ear, in a language he didn’t know, and stroking his hair.

And held by her, somehow, his emotional defenses fell to pieces, all of them, all at once. All the tears he’d walled off came pouring out of him, and he collapsed into her.