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“We have to stop it,” she said. “For Eryssan. For the people who are still there. For my father.”

“And for you to walk away from it,” he said. “If there’s a way to. That has to be a part of any plan I help you build.”

“And what about you, Caelith? I also need you.”

They stared at each other. The last of his restraint was fraying; she could see it in his face.

“I won’t lose you, Maia,” he said, his hand coming up to cover hers. He turned his face into her palm and took in a deep breath, closing his eyes.

She became aware, suddenly, of how close they were standing. Of the warmth of him, familiar now, although it caught her off guard every time she touched him. She’d spent so many nights without it that she’d almost let herself forget.

How funny, that she had been told her whole life they were cold. Everyone said it. It was the first thing anyone had ever said about them. But he was now warm beneath her palm. He was tired, and frightened, and entirely, wonderfully alive. He wasn’t death. He never had been.

“I won’t lose you,” he repeated.

The hum of the Fracture deepened, distant but insistent. Dawn was coming, yet nothing had been solved and nothing was safe. Behind her, the rocking chair creaked once, forward and back, and then went still.

But Caelith’s hand was still over hers and he had not let go of it, and nothing else in the room was as true as that.

47

Together

Caelith kissed her forehead and pulled her in, arms wrapping around her shoulders.

A thin seam of grey dawn had found its way through a crack high in the stone, the first true light he had seen in days. “You should get some rest,” he said to her. “Even if just a couple of hours. You’ll need it for whatever comes next.”

He stepped back and nodded toward the alcove. Maia looked at it. Then she looked back at him: at the planes of his face caught in the slight dawn-light, the sharp line of his jaw, the darkness under his eyes. At everything these weeks had taken from him, written plainly now that he was too tired to hide it.

Rest was not what she’d fought her way here for. She had saved a hundred things to say to him across this last endless week, and every one of them had collapsed, standing here, into a single, simpler need.

“No.”

Before Caelith could respond, Maia closed the last of the distance herself and kissed him.

Whatever he had been about to say was now lost. He pulled her closer, one hand firm at her waist, the other sliding up her spine, as if he needed the proof of her. That she was real. That she was here.

She gripped the front of his ragged shirt, holding to him just as fiercely.

“Maia.” He murmured it against her mouth, the word uneven.

The kiss slowed, Caelith’s breath shaking now in a way she had never heard before. Like he didn’t trust the moment to last. That it could be taken from him in a second the way it had before.

“Maia, you shouldn’t—” he started to say, but there was no force behind it now, only conflict. “This place, what it does. I—I shouldn’t have put you in the middle of all of it.”

“I don’t care,” she said softly. “Not right now.”

His hand moved, slower now, tracing from her waist up along her side, as though relearning the shape of her. Maia’s fingers tightened against him in response.

“You’re shaking,” she whispered.

“So are you.”

“I’ve just fought my way up a mountain of glass to find you,” she said, kissing his cheekbone. “I think I’m allowed.”

A flicker of something almost like a smile ghosted across his mouth. He pulled her closer. “You don’t know how much I’ve wanted to touch you again.”

His words forced her to become wildly aware of everything at once: the closeness of his body, the heat of his hands, the cold stone pressing in around them, the distant pulse of the Fracture beneath it all. And even beneath that—