Chapter 6
Symond
They returned to The Hive without Florence.
The wagons rolled back through the gates lighter than they’d left, apprentices filing in with subdued energy, voices low, shoulders drawn in. No one talked about the rally. No one asked Symond what he thought.
That silence followed him inside.
The manor’s marble floors gleamed in the afternoon light, not a speck of mud or dust to be seen.
Chairs sat tucked perfectly under tables, tapestries hung without a single wrinkle.
Symond’s boots echoed too loudly in the silence.
He shoved his institute uniform at a waiting apprentice and veered away from the crowded main hall, eyes darting from doorway to doorway.
He searched for the silver-white crown of Violette’s head, the sharp angle of her shoulders, the low rasp of her voice that would make the buzzing in his skull finally quiet.
He stalked through the lower corridors, boots scuffing against stone, fingers flexing and unfisting at his sides.
Each empty training room made his jaw clench tighter until his teeth ached.
His thoughts were too loud now, crowding in where numbness had once lived.
He needed her. Not for answers—he wasn’t ready for those—but for permission to start asking the right questions.
When he rounded the corner into the east wing, the scent hit him first—sawdust and limewash, sharp and clean.
His fingers brushed against plastered walls no longer crumbling, smooth beneath his touch.
Sunlight streamed through windows that had been mere arrow-slits before, casting long rectangles of gold across the floor and illuminating dust motes that danced toward an open doorway.
A dormitory.
New beds lined the walls, rough-hewn but sturdy, each with a folded blanket at the foot. A few personal items already sat on nearby shelves: boots, a chipped cup, a scrap of cloth tied carefully into a knot.
Violette stood near the far end of the room, one hand resting lightly on the shoulder of a boy she was speaking to.
Blond hair. Thin frame. Too alert.
Symond stopped short.
He knew that boy.
The recognition hit him fast and sharp, followed by a hollow drop in his chest. He remembered standing in an alley in the city weeks ago, rain slicking the stones, the boy’s hands clenched tight in his sleeves as he spoke too quickly, eyes bright with a dangerous kind of hope.
I want to go to The Institute, the boy had said.
Symond remembered grabbing his arm. Remembered arguing. Remembered the certainty—sudden and overwhelming—that if the boy went, something irreversible would happen.
He couldn’t remember why.
What he remembered was waking up the morning after, a tight, choking sense of failure lodged in his throat.
Violette had sent him away.
Symond had known that much. He’d never asked where. Never demanded an explanation. At the time, it felt easier not to.
Now it didn’t.
“Why is he here?” Symond asked.
His voice carried farther than he meant it to. Violette turned, surprise flickering across her face before she smoothed it away. The boy followed her gaze and lit up when he saw Symond.
“Big brother!” he said, breaking free and crossing the room in quick, eager steps.
Symond stared at him, mouth half-open with words that wouldn’t form.
The boy’s presence felt like a wound and a balm simultaneously—like finding something precious he’d lost, only to discover it had been deliberately taken from him.
The boy grinned up at him, familiar and unafraid, as if no time had passed at all, while Symond’s mind lurched between the urge to protect him and the desperate need to back away.
“You remember me,” the boy said, pleased.
“I—” Symond faltered, then nodded. “I remember you.”
Violette watched the exchange closely, her expression unreadable. “This is Rhylee,” she said calmly. “He’ll be staying here.”
Symond dragged his gaze back to her. “You sent him away.”
“I did.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere safe.”
The boy tugged on Symond’s sleeve. “She found me again,” he said proudly. “Said I could come here instead. Said I wouldn’t have to be afraid.”
Understanding crept in slowly, unwelcome but undeniable. Florence hadn’t told them everything, not about the rally, not about what came next. And Violette hadn’t gone with them.
She’d been busy.
“You knew,” Symond said quietly. “About this. About recruiting children.”
Violette didn’t deny it. “Florence told me enough.”
“And you agreed.”
“I agreed to make sure the ones already slipping through the cracks didn’t fall into worse hands,” she said evenly. “The city doesn’t wait for villages to decide.”
Symond looked around the dormitory again.
The beds. The blankets. The careful way the space had been made ready.
Something twisted in his chest—part relief that these children would have shelter, part dread at what they were being sheltered for.
He wanted to be grateful, wanted to be furious, and found himself suspended uncomfortably between both.
This wasn’t an impulse. This was a plan he couldn’t decide whether to embrace or fear.
Rhylee looked between them, suddenly uncertain. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Symond said quickly, the word sharp with urgency. He crouched slightly, bringing himself closer to the boy’s level. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Rhylee relaxed, smiling again, and scurried off toward one of the beds, already making himself at home.
Symond straightened slowly, heart pounding.
He turned back to Violette. “I need to remember,” he said.
Not everything right away.
But enough.
Violette studied him for a long moment, her gaze steady, assessing. Then she nodded once.
“I know,” she said softly. “And we’ll do it the right way.”
Symond exhaled, some small, brittle piece of tension easing in his chest.
∞∞∞
The room didn’t feel dangerous, which made Symond’s racing pulse all the more confusing.
Some of him wanted to believe this: no restraints, no guards, no commands.
Just a low flame flickering at the center of the space and a woman sitting across from him with her hands folded loosely in her lap.
Yet another part of him tensed, waiting for the moment when the gentle facade would crack open to reveal what truly lurked beneath.
Symond pressed his back against the wall, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around them in a posture he hadn’t consciously chosen but couldn’t bring himself to change. The stone pressed cool and solid into his spine.
This won’t do anything, he told himself.
He had erased his memories with alchemy. Not buried them. Not avoided them. Removed them entirely. Whatever had happened to him at The Institute was gone by design. You couldn’t undo that by breathing and sitting quietly.
Violette’s voice echoed faintly in his mind.
You don’t have to believe it will work. Just don’t fight it.
He clenched his jaw.
The healer slid a smooth rock across the floor toward him. “If you want to stop,” she said evenly, “you drop it.”
Symond picked it up without comment. This was ridiculous, yet his fingers curled around the rock with unexpected need, its warmth from the candlelight seeping into his palm like an answer to a question he hadn’t meant to ask.
“Don’t look for memories,” the healer continued. “Just notice what your body does.”
He almost laughed, then didn’t. Part of him wanted this to work, the part he refused to acknowledge.
His body did nothing. Did everything. Remained still while something inside him trembled.
For several breaths, there was only the candle and the war between hope and dread in his chest. He focused on his heartbeat, both smugly certain this would prove Violette wrong and terrified it might not.
Then his stomach tightened.
It wasn’t sudden. It crept in slowly, like a shadow lengthening across the floor. A subtle clench low in his abdomen, breath catching halfway in without his permission.
Symond stiffened, caught between leaning into the sensation and running from the room.
“No,” he muttered.
His shoulders had drawn up toward his ears. His thighs pressed together. His grip on the rock tightened until his fingers ached.
You’re bracing, Violette had said once, watching him flinch away from a casual touch. Like something bad happens if you don’t.
Heat flared in his chest, anger, sharp and familiar. His mind latched onto it immediately, using it the way it always did: a shield, a distraction, a way to stay upright.
“This is stupid,” he snapped. “There’s nothing there.”
The healer didn’t contradict him. “What are you feeling?”
“Nothing.” Symond wanted the word to be true even as his body betrayed him.
His breath shortened further, chest tightening like it was being slowly compressed. His skin prickled, every nerve suddenly too aware. He felt exposed in a way that had nothing to do with the room.
Like he was being watched.
“No,” Symond said again, louder now. “I don’t— I need to know, but I can’t—”
His voice faltered mid-thought.
A sensation surged up from nowhere: the certainty that speaking was dangerous. That making noise would make it worse. Yet silence felt equally unbearable—a prison he’d built himself.
His body went rigid.
The healer leaned forward attentively. “You’re here,” she said calmly. “No one is touching you.”
Touch.
The word landed wrong.
Symond’s throat closed. His mind stayed blank, stubbornly empty, but his body reacted as if it had been given an order it recognized too well.
Don’t move. Don’t look. Don’t resist.
Shame flooded him, hot, choking, unearned.
“I didn’t—” He stopped, breath stuttering. “I didn’t do anything.”
The healer nodded once. “I know.”
That almost broke him.
His hands trembled around the rock, gripping then loosening, gripping again. His legs felt heavy, pinned in place by something invisible and absolute, while his mind screamed to run. He wasn’t remembering a moment. He wasn’t seeing anything.
He was remembering what it felt like to be powerless.
A name surfaced then.
Not attached to a face. Not to an image.
Just the weight of it.
Gerard.
Symond sucked in a sharp breath, pain flaring behind his eyes. His anger surged instinctively—but this time it had nowhere to go. It couldn’t turn outward fast enough. It couldn’t bury what was happening.
Gerard wasn’t an idea.
He was a presence.
The healer’s voice anchored him. “You’re safe right now.”
Symond started to speak, but stopped. One part of him wanted to scream that safety was a lie, while another part desperately needed to believe her. “I wasn’t,” he finally whispered.
The admission felt dangerous. Like saying it might make it true again.
His body curled inward, knees drawing closer to his chest, even as a portion of him yearned to stand, to pace, to prove he wasn’t trapped here with these feelings.
“I couldn’t stop it,” he whispered.
The words tasted like rust.
The healer didn’t rush him. “You survived,” she said gently. “That doesn’t mean you consented.”
Something in Symond cracked.
He gasped, breath finally breaking through the clench in his chest. The anger collapsed in on itself, leaving behind exhaustion and a deep, aching grief he didn’t have language for yet.
His fingers loosened, then tightened again, then finally surrendered.
The rock slipped from his hand and hit the floor with a soft, unmistakable sound that felt simultaneously like defeat and liberation.
The healer nodded. “That’s enough.”
Symond held his ground for several long seconds, shaking, waiting for something bad to happen.
Nothing did.
When he finally stood, his legs wobbled beneath him, his head buzzing like he’d been struck. But he was still there. Still whole. Still in control of his body.
Violette leaned against the wall outside the door, shoulders tense.
When Symond emerged, her eyes darted across his face—red-rimmed, jaw clenched—then dropped to his trembling hands.
She pushed herself upright and moved toward him, stopping just shy of his shadow, her body radiating warmth like a hearth in winter.
He swallowed hard. “It didn’t bring anything back,” he said hoarsely.
She nodded. “I didn’t expect it to.”
“But I know his name,” Symond said. “And I know I was scared.”
Violette’s lips pressed together with recognition. “That’s more than you had before.”
Symond closed his eyes briefly.
For the first time since he’d erased his memories, the anger didn’t feel like armor.
It felt like a reaction to something real—which meant he might have been right to erase it all. Yet part of him whispered that knowing, however painful, was better than this half-life of suspicion.
He wanted both truths and neither, simultaneously.
And that contradiction terrified him more than forgetting ever had.