Chapter 53 #2
The mattress dipped beneath her weight as she lowered herself beside him with care.
Her attention caught on his hand and would not leave it: the fine bones of his wrist, the bloodless knuckles.
Elara folded both of hers around it and closed her eyes before the room could blur.
She reached for the Cara. It was harder here.
Everything was harder in this dead, barren world.
Latheria gave nothing back. She stretched toward the thinnest thread she could feel and found it fraying almost as soon as she touched it.
She opened her eyes and looked to Reynnar.
She did not need to ask.
His hand found the center of her back, fervent through the fabric of her cloak.
A breath later, his Draoth poured into her, filling every corner of her until she was alight with his power.
She caught the faintest current and pushed it toward Raijin the way she had learned to do, extending it outward, searching beneath the body for the signature of him.
The soul-field. The presence a person left in the space they occupied, the impression of being alive beyond breath and blood and bone.
She found nothing.
Her brow tightened, and she pushed farther. Reynnar’s Draoth moved through the room, through the bed, through the still form beneath the blankets. It slipped around him too easily. There was no resistance. No signature at all.
Elara withdrew.
For a long moment, she did not open her eyes.
She kept his hand trapped between hers and held the emptiness because there was nowhere to put it down.
It was too large for her body, too cold for her chest, too absolute to understand all at once.
Grief rose in her strangely, unfolding through her like a bruise blooming beneath skin.
He was here.
He was gone.
He was breathing.
He was empty.
Her fingers tightened around his until she felt the bones of his hand beneath her palms. Some small, desperate part of her wanted to shake him.
To demand he return to himself out of obligation, out of the sheer unfairness of having found him too late after searching for him all her life without knowing she was searching.
But he did not stir.
Only the candle beside the bed moved, flame bending in the draft.
Elara forced the grief lower, folding it into some hidden chamber of herself where it could rage without breaking her. It did not lessen. It only left enough room for breath.
When she opened her eyes, the door stood ajar.
Algernon filled the threshold in a dressing gown, a small lamp cupped in one hand.
Its flame gilded the tired hollows of his face and turned his pale eyes almost silver.
He looked, as he always had, wholly untroubled by being summoned to impossible circumstances at an indecent hour.
“Hallowed,” he said.
Elara stared at him. “Algernon.” His name came out without inflection, because whatever part of her governed such things had gone briefly numb. “You’re here.”
“I have been here a good deal longer than I was there,” he replied.
Elara looked at him, then at Ivan, then back again, and the pieces shifted, fitting into place with a soundless click.
The patient tutor in the Sanct. The man who had brought her paper and ink and instruments while she was caged.
The man who had never once looked at her as if she belonged there, and had never explained why.
“You were a Vredian spy,” she said.
“I was.”
“The whole time?”
“From considerably before your time, in the truthful telling.”
She drew in a shaky breath. “Are you—” She stopped and pressed two fingers to her mouth, as if the question had caught there and cut her on its way out.
Amusement passed through his expression. “I am pleased to see you well.” His gaze shifted past her to Reynnar, lingering in a long and thorough assessment before he inclined his head. “And you, too.”
Reynnar said nothing, but Algernon seemed neither surprised nor offended by the silence. He merely accepted it and turned his attention to Raijin, and the pleasantness on his face dimmed.
“His soul-field is gone,” Elara said, forcing her voice to stay even.
“Yes. I suspected as much.” Algernon crossed the room and set the lamp on the table, the small flame casting a warm, wavering light over Raijin’s still face.
“From the records we found at the compound, I do not think they were testing the shade process there. It was a different extraction. A partial separation of the soul-field from the body, while leaving the body functional.”
Elara felt the words settle into the room like ash. Raijin lay motionless beneath them, though Algernon studied him with the grave concentration of a man who believed every horror could, in the end, be reduced to an equation with one missing variable.
“The Foldholds what it takes,” he said. “If we destroy it correctly, what was stored there should return to where it came from.”
Her heart gave a hard, sudden leap. “He’ll wake.”
“If the collapse is done cleanly enough, and if the field returns intact, yes.” He paused, careful as ever with hope. “That is the plan.”
Elara looked to Ivan. He stood at the foot of the bed, arms at his sides, watching her face with a stillness that made her wonder how long he had been doing it. Since she entered the room, perhaps. Since the first fracture of hope had crossed her expression.
She turned back to Algernon.
“Then I should read through it,” she said. “All of the Foldwork, everything you have.”