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By the time we’ve finally climbed back down the tower, the aurora is already fading. The sky settling reluctantly back into its usual grey afternoon self.

Every alarm we pass is still shrieking. The streets are full of people standing on doorsteps and pavements, staring up at a sky that’s stopped looking wrong. Nobody looks especially reassured by it.

Hex and Dis stay pressed close to Adam and Felix, still flickering intermittently. Neither of them say a single word about what they felt that sent them running to their loved ones’ side.

We reopen the shop mostly out of habit rather than any real belief that customers will come. Felix spends the rest of the afternoon glancing at Dis every few minutes, like he’s checking he’s still solid, still there, still real.

None of us say much. There isn’t much to say. I spend the rest of my shift only half present. One eye permanently on the window, the other on Hex and Dis, who are still not entirely solid, still not entirely themselves. I wonder whether Dark is still flickering too, and whether there’s any part of him left steady enough to come find me once whatever this is finally settles.

Chapter 18

Last Visit

The flat is properly asleep by midnight, Hannah’s door shut, the telly in the other room finally switched off an hour ago. The whole building has settled into that particular hush that only happens when everyone has somewhere better to be than lying awake.

I am lying awake.

I can’t sleep. Not after today. Not after a sky that turned colours it had no business turning. Not after watching Hex and Dis flicker like a badly tuned television. Not after an entire city’s worth of alarms finally falling quiet, only for my own mind to keep going regardless.

I’ve tried the usual things. Revision notes, though the words swim about on the page without arranging themselves into anything useful. A podcast about the history of contract law that I’ve heard three times now and could probably recite from memory. And that’s exactly the problem, my brain having long since stopped needing to actually listen. Counting the cracks in the ceiling isn’t working either. They numbered forty-three the last three times I tried it. A fact I find neither comforting nor useful, but apparently cannot stop myself collecting anyway.

I send a text to Felix, just checking he’s all right after the tower. His reply comes almost immediately. Still up, Dis can’t settle either. None of us are going to sleep much this week, are we?

Felix’s text is somehow both comforting and not remotely reassuring at all. I type out a reply, delete it, type a different one, delete that too. Eventually, I just send a single thumbs up, because there isn’t really anything useful either of us can say to the other at this hour that we haven’t already said a dozen times today.

I lie in the dark and think about the specific loneliness of an entire flat full of people, all breathing steadily behind their separate doors, and me the only one awake in it. Alone while not alone, which somehow feels worse than actual solitude would. At least real solitude doesn’t come with the sound of somebody else’s contented sleep drifting faintly through a shared wall. A small, ordinary reminder of exactly what I’m currently missing, while everyone around me gets to have it without even trying.

I wonder, not for the first time tonight, what it would be like to fall asleep properly tangled up with someone. Not just beside them, not just nearby, but actually wrapped around each other. Someone’s arm heavy and warm across my chest. Someone else’s breathing slowing mine down until we’re matched, until sleep isn’t something I have to fight for on my own in the dark. I’ve never had that. Not once, not with anyone. Lying here now, exhausted and wide awake in equal measure, I let myself wonder, properly, painfully, whether I ever will.

I picture it anyway, the way I’ve started doing more often than I’d like to admit. His arm across me, cool rather than warm, but steady in a way that would probably matter more than temperature ever could. The particular quiet he brings with him, the one I’ve missed every single night since the pause began, filling up this room instead of just the space three paces behind me on a pavement. It’s a foolish thing to lie here wanting so specifically, given everything currently standing between us. But wanting has never been especially interested in whether it’s convenient.

I get up, because lying here is achieving nothing. I make myself tea in the dark kitchen, careful not to wake anyone, the kettle sounding enormous in the quiet. I drink it standing at the counter, wrapped in a blanket I’ve dragged off my bed, watching my own reflection in the black window rather than anything actually outside it.

I’m halfway through the mug when the hair on my arms rises, every single one at once. A shiver crawls up the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the temperature of the kitchen.

I know immediately, the way I always know, except this time it isn’t the corridor, isn’t the street outside, isn’t the careful distance of a bush beneath my window. It’s my actual room. He’s never once been in here, not properly, not past the doorway that first Easter evening when even that felt enormous.

I set the mug down and go to look, blanket still wrapped around my shoulders, feeling faintly ridiculous standing in my own doorway like a burglar in my own home.

He’s standing by the window, solid, still, watching me with an expression I can’t immediately place. Amber eyes glowing softly in the shadows.

“You’re okay!” The words are out before I’ve worked out what else to say. Relief crashes through me so fast my knees go unreliable all over again, differently this time. “I’ve been worried since the tower. Wondering if you were flickering too, wherever you were.”

He inclines his head, solemn. “The effect of the solar flare has passed. I can control my form again. Fully so.”

“Good,” I say, and mean it more than the word can really carry.

I let myself have a second of just this, him whole, him here, before the rest of it catches up with me properly. Because being whole doesn’t explain why he’s standing in my bedroom at long past midnight, days into a pause neither of us has managed particularly well.

Everything about this is wrong, in the specific way that means something important. The bush beneath my window has been his spot since the very first night I let him walk me home, the one boundary he’s never once crossed without being invited. And I know, I know, some part of him wanted to. And now here he is, inside, past the door, past every careful line he’s drawn around himself, standing in the one room I’ve never once shown him.

“You’re in my room,” I say faintly.

“Yes,” he says, not moving from the window.

“You’ve never been in my room,” I say, wrapping the blanket tighter.

“No,” he agrees.