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“Caelith?” she breathed, not sure what she was asking.

“Don’t ask me, Maia. I’ll say yes.”

He held there, at the very edge of it, and she understood that the edge was where he had decided to stay. She turned her face, so that her mouth very faintly brushed the corner of his.

She felt his fingers curl into the fabric at her waist and felt him decide all over again not to move.

Then there were voices. The far end of the corridor. Guardians changing patrol, their armour ringing closer.

He began to draw back but went still against her instead, just for a breath, as though he couldn’t quite make himself complete the movement. Then the voices sharpened, and the moment was taken from them both.

He stepped back into the dark, his hand the last thing to leave her. At the very edge of the light, he stopped.

“I will come back for you,” he said. “Trust me. That is all I ask.”

And then the shadows had him, and she was alone in the corridor with the patrol’s light spilling around the corner where, a breath ago, he had almost been hers.

Her back found the cold stone that had just been warm and stayed there, long after the corridor had gone dark and silent around her.

22

The Hidden Courtyard

Maia had spent the whole night, and more of the morning than she cared to admit, watching the light change across her ceiling. She continued watching as the gold gave way, slowly, to the grey of dawn. She couldn’t escape the memory of Caelith’s voice. I will come back for you. Trust me.

If she had been wiser, she would have pulled away from him last night. Instead, she replayed the way he’d looked at her, as if she were the only part of the world still holding him together.

***

Later, Selinne found her near the archive terraces, moving at the half-run that was simply how Selinne moved. She carried messages between the Archive and the council and the watchtowers, and the city had taught her never to be still in it for long.

Of everyone Maia had met in Eryssan, Selinne was the one whose company had crept up on her. It wasn’t a deliberate friendship, rather something that had accumulated, conversation by conversation, until one day Maia realised she’d have called her a friend without needing to think about it first.

They didn’t work side by side the way she and Julen did; Selinne was forever halfway out a door, a sealed packet under her arm, gone before a conversation finished. But she was Eryssan-born, and she was one of the only other women Maia had found in the whole grey warren of the Archive’s business, and the two of them had recognised something in each other early: two people the place made use of without making room for. It had been enough. It still was.

“Maia! Oh Gods, have you heard?” Selinne rushed to her side, gripping her arm. “They’ve started unchaining them. Not all, but enough. Some of the Umbralyn are moving freely.”

Maia froze. Unchained. Caelith… unbound.

She had only known him with silver at his wrists. She’d built her whole understanding of him around the sound of the chains when he moved. What was left of him, she wondered, once that sound had gone?

The streets felt hollow, the whole city braced for the curfew to come, lanterns casting muted light across the stone. Maia and Selinne stayed close to the walls, moving through a quiet upper-tier corridor that led past the healer’s wing. Worry for Julen tugged at them both, a shared weight.

Selinne slowed as they passed the old archive annexe. “The healers moved half their supplies down here after the last quake,” she said quietly. “I promised Julen I’d bring back the notes he left in the east stacks before the curfew tightened further.”

“Selinne,” Maia whispered, slowing. “Hold on.”

Selinne stopped, confused. She knew these corridors better than Maia ever would - knew which were used and which were forgotten - and Maia saw her register that this one shouldn’t have voices in it at all.

Beneath the distant clatter of armour, another sound threaded through the quiet: a low, rhythmic murmur. Something secretive. A single unbroken note, passed from voice to voice so that it never paused, and threaded through it: words. The same words over and over in a tongue that Maia didn’t know.

Selinne’s fingers tightened around Maia’s sleeve. “Those voices,” Selinne whispered. “Umbralyn voices. They sound different though,” she leaned in. “Whoever they are, they don’t think anyone’s listening.”

This part of the city had been abandoned since the second quake, its wards left dormant, its passages half-forgotten. They followed the sound just far enough to confirm it was real, steps soft, breaths held.

The corridor hadn’t been swept in weeks; dust lay thick enough to show their footprints, and something about that - the fact that no one seemed to have walked this way in all that time - made the murmuring ahead feel even more ominous.

The temperature dropped drastically as they went further down the corridors. Maia felt with every inch of her being that she should turn back, but her feet, like Selinne’s, kept moving forward.