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“Everyone save the fighting for after coffee, like civilised people,” Felix calls out sternly.

Morgana clutches her crystal tightly. “Dis is right about proof.”

“There isn’t any proof,” I say. “That’s rather the whole nature of a dream. I can’t hand you a receipt.”

“Then I remain appropriately cautious,” Dis says from the kitchen.

“You remain appropriately you,” Felix mutters, his voice carrying clearly to the living room because the flat is so tiny.

A fragile quiet falls as the kettle starts to boil. Everyone is still faintly bristling in their separate directions. Then Adam says, very quietly, from his spot by the window, “Has anyone else noticed it’s not getting lighter out there?”

Everyone stops.

Felix and Dis return from the kitchen. Without tea.

I turn to look properly. The window is showing the exact same grey-gold half light it’s shown since I woke up. It’s the kind of light that’s supposed to last five minutes before proper dawn, then hand over to something more decided. It hasn’t handed over to anything. The street below is still lit the way it was an hour ago. The shadows are the same length. Nothing is moving forward at all.

My hand goes to my arm without deciding to. Some instinct is reaching for proof before my brain has caught up with why. I push my sleeve back and find nothing there at all.

No star. No mark. Just ordinary skin, the way it was before any of this started. Standing here with the whole sky refusing to move, I can’t tell whether that’s the best sign I could possibly ask for, or the worst one.

“Bunny?” Felix says, watching my face do something he clearly doesn’t like the look of.

“The mark’s gone,” I say, holding my arm out so he can see for himself. “It was there when I went to sleep. It isn’t there now.”

Felix takes my wrist and turns it into the light. His thumb traces over the bare skin, like he might find the star hiding underneath if he presses hard enough. Whatever he’s looking for, he doesn’t find it.

“Nobody’s touched you,” he says, not quite a question. He’s checking anyway.

“No,” I say. “It was just gone when I woke up.”

He lets go slowly. He glances between my arm and the frozen window, like he’s trying to decide which impossible thing to be frightened of first. He settles, apparently, on neither.

“That’s probably just cloud,” Felix says, without much conviction.

“It’s not cloud,” Adam says. “I’ve been watching it since I woke up. It’s not moving. At all. Not the light, not the shadows, nothing. I thought I was imagining it for the first twenty minutes. I’m not imagining it.”

We all crowd the window at once, which achieves nothing except confirming what Adam’s already said. The street outside sits frozen in the exact same in-between light it’s held for however long we’ve all been awake. Birds gone silent. Nothing stirring. Not even the usual pigeon that sits on the opposite guttering every single morning without fail. It’s simply not there. Nothing is where it’s supposed to be, and nothing is moving to correct that.

“Right,” Magdalene says. There’s a note in her voice I don’t think I’ve ever heard from her before, something almost frightened underneath the certainty. “That’s the refusal. That’s what happens when you say no to a destiny that was supposed to end a specific way. It doesn’t know where to go next. So it’s simply. Stopped.” She presses both hands flat against the window glass, staring out at the frozen street like she might read something written in it if she looks hard enough. “Forty years I have been reading this prophecy, and not once, not a single time, did anything in it account for the two of you simply refusing to play your parts. There was no verse for this. There is no verse for this now. I suspect there won’t be until whatever’s holding its breath out there decides which way to let it go.”

“You do not actually know that,” Dis says, though with noticeably less conviction than before.

“I know precisely as much as anyone currently standing in this room, which is to say considerably more than you’d like, and considerably less than any of us actually need.” She turns from the window. For once there’s no theatre in her at all. Nothing performed. Just a frightened woman in a kaftan standing in a flat above a coffee shop. “The sun doesn’t simply forget to rise, shadow man. Something is holding its breath out there. I would put money on that something being the exact same something that’s currently deciding whether the entire prophecy still has anywhere left to go.”

“So what happens,” Adam says, and his voice has gone very small, “if it decides it doesn’t? What happens if this is just. It. Forever. No sunrise, no sunset, just this, stuck, the whole world stuck exactly like this because two people decided not to fight?”

Nobody answers him. Hex’s hand finds his, quietly. Felix has stopped pretending to be unbothered, standing very still beside Dis, both of them staring out at a street that refuses to change.

I look back out at the window myself, at the light that isn’t going anywhere. I feel the full weight of what we actually did last night land on me. Not as a romantic decision made in a misty in-between place, but as something with genuine, terrifying consequences. Reaching all the way out into the actual sky above the actual world. Holding an entire world’s dawn hostage while fate decides what to do with the curveball Dark and I have thrown it.

I force a swallow down my suddenly tight throat. I have a feeling that fate is going to be harder to appease than a customer given a cappuccino instead of a latte.

Chapter 29

Smoke Clears

The shadows in the corner of the room start pooling before I’ve even finished my thought about cappuccinos, and every single person in the flat goes rigid at once.