Astra
The reader had already measured my wrist. Her fingers were still against Kieran’s throat when his hand locked around mine.
She looked up sharply.
Kieran had been half asleep beside me, his breathing shallow but even. Now every muscle in his arm had gone rigid. His eyes opened without finding either of us.
A moment earlier, his thumb had rested loose against the side of my hand. I had been watching the pale light travel over the blanket and wondering whether he was warm enough. Then his fingers closed hard enough to grind my rings into my skin.
“Kieran?”
His back arched away from the bed.
The sound that left him stripped his voice of everything familiar. Green-gold light split through the Mark at his shoulder, a bright jagged line where his skin should have hidden it.
I had seen that light through his collar when pain weakened his control. I had watched it brighten when I came near. This time its edges were white, the color burned out of the center, and the skin around it had begun to gray.
“Something’s wrong.” His grip crushed my fingers. “Astra, something—”
His body seized again before he could finish.
The reader pulled the emergency cord. A bell rang beyond the door, hard and immediate. She shouted for a healer while I held on to Kieran’s hand and called his name.
The iron note carried into the corridor. Locks turned. Boots struck stone. Kieran gave no sign that he could hear the alarm or my voice beneath it.
The sheet dragged loose beneath his heels. The fractured light spread toward his collarbone, then recoiled.
“Don’t touch the Mark,” the reader said.
“I’m not.”
She opened the ledger with shaking hands and looked from the last entry to the light at his shoulder.
“What?” I demanded.
“Both readings rose again.”
Hale reached the room with a guard behind him and a healer close after. He went straight to Kieran’s left side. The healer opened her case on the floor and pressed her fingers to Kieran’s throat.
“His pulse is too fast,” she said. She bent over Kieran, listening to his breathing. “Help me turn him.”
They moved together. Hale’s hands remained steady, but his face had gone bloodless.
I knew those hands from the lower salle, where they had corrected a careless grip or caught a falling body before it reached the floor. Hale had always made steadiness look effortless. Now his thumb trembled once against Kieran’s jaw before he forced it still.
The healer pulled Kieran’s torn collar away from the Mark. The green-gold fracture widened while she watched.
“Can you stop it?” I asked.
“I can keep his airway clear. I can’t repair a Mark.”
Her case lay open beside the bed, crowded with folded linen, glass vials, and silver instruments. She used what she could. None of it touched the broken light.
Marrow appeared in the doorway.
His gaze took in the healer, Hale, and the broken light beneath Kieran’s skin. Then it settled on my hand clasped around Kieran’s.
“Move away from him.”
“No.”
“Your readings were rising together before this began. Until the administrator determines whether your presence is worsening the fracture, you step back.”
I tightened my hold. “And if leaving makes it worse?”
Marrow looked toward the reader.
She clutched the ledger against her chest. “We don’t know.”
“Then you don’t move her,” Hale said. He kept one hand beneath Kieran’s jaw while the healer worked. “His Mark has been pulling toward hers. Taking her away now could be as dangerous as leaving her here.”
Marrow held the doorway a moment longer. He did not order the guard forward.
“Where is the administrator?” I asked.
“She has been sent for. I don’t know how long.”
Kieran convulsed beneath the healer’s hands. Hale caught his shoulder before it struck the wall, careful not to touch the Mark. The light spread farther across his chest.
The healer called his name. He did not answer.
“His pulse is falling,” she said.
Hale bent close to Kieran’s face. “Stay with me.”
Terror struck through my bond with Caspian so sharply that I lost my breath. It came from beyond the room, from somewhere past the locked corridor.
The emergency bell had stopped, but raised voices carried toward us. A guard tried to block the doorway. Caspian came through anyway, another steward close behind him. No one had sent for him.
His eyes found me first.
Then he saw Kieran.
“What happened?”
“His Mark is breaking,” Hale said.
Caspian looked at the healer. “Do something.”
“I am.” Her voice remained controlled. “It isn’t enough.”
Marrow turned on the guard. “Get the administrator here now.”
The man left at a run.
Kieran’s fingers loosened around mine.
That hand had covered mine while he told me he wanted ordinary mornings. Now the fingers lay slack against the sheet, the rings at his knuckles cold beneath my thumb.
“No.” I closed both hands over his. “Kieran.”
His eyelids did not move. His lips had lost their color, and the pauses in his breathing stretched until I could no longer trust that another breath would come.
Hale looked at the healer.
She shook her head once.
The unfinished line at my wrist pulled so hard it hurt.
I pushed back my sleeve. Caspian’s line ran silver and complete across my skin, carrying him to me even through locked doors. Hale’s lay rain-dark beside it. The green-gold ended abruptly near my pulse, brightening at the unfinished edge while Kieran’s light failed beneath his collar.
It had burned when his Mark reached toward me in the corridor and warmed again during the review.
Now the heat ran from my wrist into my palm.
I did not know whether following the line would save him, but it had answered every change in his Mark, and nothing the healer tried had slowed the fracture.
“Astra.” Caspian had followed my gaze to my wrist.
He looked from the unfinished line to Kieran. His hand flexed once at his side. He was afraid, but he did not tell me to stop.
Marrow stepped toward the bed. “Astra, you have no idea what that line will do.”
“No.” I turned back to Kieran. “But waiting is killing him.”
Kieran’s chest failed to rise.
The healer reached for him. Hale said his name again.
I put both hands over the failing light at Kieran’s chest and followed the green-gold line.