The palace learned how to be quiet.

  Eleven days had passed since Eli had fled the battlefield; five since he had arrived at Lydia with a horse that hated him and a throat that felt flayed by smoke. Scouts were sent the moment he crossed the gates. They came back one by one, faces coated in ash they hadn’t earned, reporting the same helpless facts: a valley hammered flat, craters turned to bowls of cooling glass, teeth like spears sunk to the hilts, armour fused into shapes that weren’t people anymore. No Hound in sight. No movement. No survivors found among the main bodies—just the wake of a thing that could decide what a day meant.

  Wyre and Lydia declared a ceasefire, ten days long by parchment and much longer by the look of men’s eyes. After the third day, stragglers began to arrive: a few Wyre who had run early and kept running; a handful more who lived because Nhilly had won them a path long enough to use. They came in limping pairs, sometimes carrying a third, sometimes arguing in the strange, breathless way of people who hadn’t decided yet whether they were enemies or witnesses.

  Eli avoided the courtyard where tally was taken. He walked the palace instead, the way a child worries a loose tooth with his tongue. He went to Seris’s old room and stood in the doorway because stepping on the threshold felt like a lie. He went to Celeste’s and sat on the floor with his back to her bed the way they had done once when the city sounded too loud. He went to Kael’s cell of a room—empty now but still shaped like him—and apologized for every joke he’d failed to make. He went to the little guest room that had held the perfect actor and said goodnight out loud as if tone alone might pull a ghost out of plaster. Then he stood in front of a mirror and tried Nhilly’s smile until his cheeks hurt and the face looking back at him was an insult.

  The officers recognized him—“Hero Eli,” with nods they hadn’t earned—and asked for his report again and again until he learned to give it while walking. He said Astraea was real and not a rumour; that she did not mind arrows and could nick a man through law; that the Margin-Hound learned lies and moved like geology deciding to be an animal. He told them how the retreat had worked and hadn’t. He said how many he thought were alive when he left and how he knew he might be wrong. He did not talk about the moment Nhilly had smiled at him with his whole face and lied “not today.”

  Nights, he slept badly, the kind of sleep that removes nothing. Days, he practiced Celeste’s fours without knowing it. The ceasefire ticked down.

  And then, elsewhere—beneath the kind of elsewhere that maps can’t draw—

  Nhilly fell.

  He fell through an infinity that had chosen one colour and stuck to it. White above, white below, white in his mouth if mouths still counted. He couldn’t move—not arms, not breath, not the stubborn seam of his jaw. He couldn’t feel his skin. Falling was simply what the world was now, like weather that forgot to change.

  Silence came next.

  No—it did not. Sound arrived in a different grammar: the soft clatter of cups on a table he had never owned; a girl’s laugh that hurt for being familiar without belonging to any of his rooms; the slap of sandals on a dojo floor that had not met his feet since childhood, except he did not recognize the rafters. Around him, like lanterns bobbing in a closed sea, memories bloomed—his, he thought—except none of them fit anywhere his mind could walk.

  He called them lost memories, because naming things is the first lie we teach ourselves to live with.

  In one, he was small and bright and running down a hallway in a house that wasn’t his, counting the doors because that had once felt like safety. In another, he was older, hair salted and eyes mean with use, kneeling in a garden whose trees spelled a word he had never learned. A woman’s voice called him “Yaro,” and the name felt like a shirt put on backwards. A boy with the same mouth as his tugged his sleeve and said “Brother,” and Nhilly’s ribs tried to remember how to widen without breaking.

  Then the gentler lanterns went out.

  The rest were fights.

  A hundred variations on the same professional argument: him—always him, always with Draco’s Shroud humming like an old machine—set against men and women in armours that spoke a shared dialect. Their plates were black shot through with iron-blue, or pale like bone, or iridescent like oil in rain; all of them bearing that same unearthly craftsmanship. His own armour—unhelmed—was the version he had seen glinting back at him once in a dream he had told no one: black as a decent suit, the joints edged in dark silver, red diamonds set in gauntlets, knee, and breast, the gold calligraphy of Draco’s line poured down each sleeve like a law written by a hand that loved aesthetics too much.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  The fights were beautiful and wrong. He moved with the economy of a man who had learned not to show an audience anything they didn’t pay for. Sometimes he killed three cleanly and the fourth untidily; sometimes he died on his knees with a laugh in his mouth that didn’t belong to him; once he walked away with his own blood in his hair and an apology on his lips for someone he could not see.

  The armour of the opponents looked like cousins: shapes that came out of the same smithy’s dream, each piece tailored to a soul and never repeated. The helmets hid their faces—antlered crests, smooth domes, jawed visors—but their movements carried personalities. He knew them without names and killed them anyway. Or they killed him. The ending insisted on itself: his blade through a throat; his body folded under a spear; his shoulder a ruin; his eyes closed and then open again to the next fight, the next life, the next lie.

  He could have watched forever. He understood, in that cold, spare way you understand a stage direction, that the watching would not stop until he decided it should. So he decided: he closed his eyes.

  The voice arrived the way thunder does when it has been standing behind you, patient.

  Wake up, Number Sixty-Six.

  His eyes opened on a white so bright it might have argued with the idea of edges. The lanterns had gone. His breath—if he had breath—ran like an animal in a small pen. He did not panic because his body could not, not here. He simply fell faster. The white tore all at once, like badly applied paint peeling off a wall.

  He dropped into pitch.

  Weight returned as if someone had put the room back on top of him. Pressure cupped his skin. Heat introduced itself in the old, rude manner. He fell, and fell, and then the falling stopped with an unromantic thud, the kind that disrespects the notion of climaxes.

  He lay on something warm and wrong. It shifted under him with the slow laziness of heat finding new structures to break. When he turned his head, the surface rasped his cheek like a badly washed wool blanket.

  It wasn’t a blanket.

  It was a body. It was many bodies. It was a slope of flesh cooling toward decision, dead weight laid on dead weight until the pile made a hill. He pushed up onto one elbow—his one elbow—and looked down the incline. Faces looked back up at him.

  His.

  All ages. A boy whose front teeth were too big for his mouth, the gap already closing from a punch he had earned in a different lifetime. A teenager with a cut along his brow that would—had—healed into a line Seris once touched with a fingertip without meaning to. A man in early middle years with a beard he had never trusted himself with, eyes amused at a joke he wasn’t telling. An old man with a good suit ruined, a ring he didn’t recognize on his hand. A dozen in armour. A dozen in rags. A dozen with throats slit in the same pragmatic angle he favoured. A dozen burned to a gloss, red diamonds blackened to old wine.

  He did not speak.

  Shock has its own etiquette. He followed it.

  His breath, when it finally took him back, arrived in small, budgeting sips. He tried to move and his body consulted a ledger and said: later. The heap sighed, and a face near his knee turned slightly, lips parting in that last, dumb invitation the dead sometimes wear.

  He shut his eyes, discovered he couldn’t keep them closed, and opened them again.

  The dark wasn’t empty. It had walls. Far off, a shape like a ceiling bowed down as if burdened by the idea of sky. The air tasted of metal and old smoke and something sweet that had rotted to philosophy. Above him—no, not above; directions were poor here—points of faint, colourless light drifted like dust you could insult with a breath.

  “Beautiful,” said a voice, light and friendly, as if complimenting a coat you’d put on for a party. “Gruesome, but thorough.”

  He knew the voice. He didn’t know how one knows one’s own voice when it comes from outside the mouth, but he knew. It sounded like him on days he had forgiven himself in advance.

  Something shifted up the slope. A figure detached from a seam in the dark and came walking down the mound with the deliberate, unhurried footing of someone who did not bother to avoid faces. The shape wore armour—a black that made other blacks feel na?ve—edged in dark silver, red facets gleaming dully at chest, knees, and gauntlets, gold calligraphy threading both arms in the same pattern Draco’s Shroud hummed with when it pretended to be kin to him. No helmet. The face was his, unscarred, lit from nowhere, the eyes full of jokes he hadn’t told yet.

  It stopped a pace away, tilted its head, and smiled with the kind of affection that makes dogs suspicious.

  “So,” the familiar voice said, and even up close he could not decide if it came from the mouth or the air. “Number Sixty-Six. Do you now have the conviction needed to kill the stars?”

  He did not answer.

  He could not.

  His throat worked once and produced nothing, the way a well sometimes offers up a bubble before it remembers water. His eyes moved, reptile-slow, over the slope of hims. He let the dead fill him without a lesson. He let the question hang because some questions are truer when they’re not answered.

  The other Nhilly—the one in the armour that fit too well—looked past him at the mountain, then back, and nodded, as if the silence had said exactly the thing he was hoping to hear.