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He wasn’t on patrol. He was just standing there in the open, looking up at her window.
He didn’t move and did not look away. The rain ran off his shoulders, but from this distance it looked like silver, not water. Was it blood? She put her palm flat to the glass. “Caelith,” she whispered.
After a while, he bowed his head, then turned and was gone. In the morning there was nothing on the flagstones to say he had ever been there at all.
***
The following evening, Selinne caught her wrist before she could disappear towards the east stair. “Sit with me. Just for a minute.”
Maia sat, more out of habit than desire to. Selinne pulled two cups of something bitter and lukewarm from beneath her cloak. A drink she’d clearly stolen from the healer’s wing rather than been given.
“I watched you trying not to look at him again today,” Selinne said, not unkindly. “In the east colonnade. You have a very particular way of not-looking at someone. Your whole body does it. It’s actually impressive.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Maia.”
“I truly don’t know what you mean.”
Selinne huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh, more of an exhale. “Fine. Keep your secrets. I only wanted to tell you that your not-looking has got worse this week, and I worry about you holding your shoulders like that. You’ll do yourself an injury before the Fracture manages it.”
Maia wrapped both hands around her cup instead of answering. It was too bitter and lukewarm besides, and she drank it anyway because Selinne had gone to some trouble to bring it. And because for one moment, it was only a tea, and only a friend and nothing in the room was watching either of them.
It didn’t last. Nothing here seemed built to last.
She noticed later that the Umbralyn presence had thickened significantly since she first arrived. The sight would have shocked her on the first day, but now it seemed inevitable.
They moved in greater numbers now. At intersections, along main thoroughfares, at the edges of the archive tiers, merely observing.
As she walked home, she saw Caelith as she did most nights, but only in fragments of movement. A figure crossing a distant span. A glimpse of dark armour between patrol shifts. Always surrounded. Always controlled.
To anyone else, he looked unchanged.
But she knew better.
She saw the way he moved: the way he conserved energy, the slight delay in his weight shifts, the control layered carefully over strain.
That evening, Maia caught sight of him across an open stretch of stone.
Their eyes met, but he turned away before she could make any kind of acknowledgment.
Everything in her wanted to close the distance anyway - to prove, if only to herself, that his warning had been an overreaction, that surely one look wouldn’t destroy everything.
But she stayed where she was, pressing her tongue with all her strength to the roof of her mouth, bottling both her anger and wanting.
Beside her, Selinne murmured, “You shouldn’t.”
“I didn’t,” Maia replied.
***
The next morning, exactly a week after she had last spoken to Caelith, Maia was summoned away from her usual duties. She was called for a containment assessment as soon as dawn broke.
She didn’t ask what that meant. She’d learned to just comply in the past week; things went easier for her that way.
Nuada was already waiting in the corridor for her, joined by two others she did not recognise. Their attention fixed on her in unison, sharp and harsh. Judgmental.
As they walked, the sun had just started to rise, the dim light lifting the city slowly. She noticed the Fracture pulsed overhead, its rhythm uneven, pressing at the edges of her awareness.
