Aster couldn’t stop hearing it.
Not the sound, exactly. The Unfiled hadn’t screamed with a voice; it had screamed with pressure—air folding in on itself when it noticed her. But her brain gave it a sound anyway, because that’s what brains did when they didn’t know where else to put fear.
Bones grinding through glass.
She lay on her back on the Skylight House couch, staring at the ceiling. The faint cracks in the plaster made familiar constellations—Esme’s “potato dragon,” the crooked “teapot,” the “guy doing a handstand wrong.” Usually they were comforting.
Tonight they just looked like fault lines.
The Row was quiet outside. Not dead quiet—she’d lived in buildings like that before, and they were worse. Hearthfall Row had its own background noise: dishes clinking, someone humming off-key through an open window, the soft rhythmic creak of a sign two streets over that needed oil and probably always would.
She listened for those things. Clung to them.
The Unfiled’s attention lingered anyway.
It had turned when she moved. Not just swung around because something loud happened in her direction. It had chosen her—like a cursor snagging on one file over and over, no matter how many times you tried to scroll past.
Aster curled her fingers into the blanket bunched across her stomach.
She’d washed her hands twice since they got home. They still felt wrong.
“You’re going to rub a hole in that,” Esme said from the other end of the couch.
Aster jumped. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”
“So are you,” Esme pointed out.
Esme was curled on her side, feet tucked under the blanket, black hair fluffy and chaotic from the number of times she’d run her hands through it tonight. Her phone sat dark on the table between them. The room smelled faintly of tea and whatever cheap candle had been on sale last time they went out.
“I was asleep,” Aster lied.
Esme snorted. “You haven’t blinked in ten minutes.”
“That seems like an exaggeration.”
“It isn’t.”
Aster sighed and dragged a hand over her face. Her palm was cold. Everything was cold.
“I keep thinking about… it,” she said finally.
“The thing in the alley,” Esme supplied. “The bone knot.”
“Don’t call it that,” Aster muttered. “You’ll make it into a menu item.”
Esme’s mouth twitched. “We are never opening a restaurant.”
“Good,” Aster said. “We’d poison people.”
“We’d accidentally change the flavor profile of reality and confuse people,” Esme corrected. “Totally different crime.”
Aster huffed a laugh despite herself, then sobered as quickly as she’d softened.
“It looked at me,” she said quietly.
Esme’s expression gentled. “I know.”
“No.” Aster turned her head, needing Esme to understand the part that wouldn’t stop chewing on her ribs. “Not like people do. Not like ‘hello, other person in the room.’ It felt like… selection.”
Esme was quiet for a beat. “Okay,” she said carefully. “I’m with you.”
“I was the file,” Aster whispered. “It was choosing me.”
Her throat tightened.
“If Eiran hadn’t been there…” She couldn’t finish it. She’d replayed that sentence too many times already, and every version ended with something she refused to look at.
Esme shifted closer, propping her head on her hand. “If Eiran hadn’t been there, I still would’ve been,” she said. “It noticed you; I noticed that. We’ve done this dance before.”
Aster stared at the cracks in the ceiling again.
When she spoke, her voice came out smaller than she meant. “It felt like back home.”
The room went very still.
Esme didn’t pretend not to know what she meant.
“Aster,” she said softly. “Hey. Look at me.”
Aster did. Esme’s pink eyes were steady, worried and sharp in equal measure.
“You didn’t go that far,” Esme said. “Not tonight.”
“I felt it,” Aster insisted. “That baseline hum under everything. The pull. Like the world was waiting for me to pick a direction and it would just… fall that way.”
She clenched her jaw.
“It didn’t care if it broke,” she whispered. “As long as it broke toward me.”
Esme exhaled slowly. “Yeah,” she said. “That part sounds familiar.”
Aster’s breath shook on the way out. “So I’m not imagining it.”
“I would love for you to be imagining it,” Esme said. “But no.”
Silence pooled between them. The building creaked around them, old wood and old stone settling for the night.
“Do you ever think,” Aster asked, carefully, “that if I’d just… done nothing, it would’ve been better? Back then. Tonight.”
“Yes,” Esme said.
Aster blinked. “Wow.”
Esme’s mouth quirked ruefully. “You asked if I think it. Thinking and believing aren’t the same thing.”
Aster narrowed her eyes. “Explain, before I throw a pillow at you.”
“Doing nothing is the easy fantasy option,” Esme said. “If you never move, you never have to choose. No input, no guilt.”
“That sounds great,” Aster muttered.
“It also doesn’t exist,” Esme said. “The world doesn’t stop being bad because you sit on your hands.”
Aster winced. “Can you be less right?”
“No,” Esme said. “Rude to ask, honestly.”
Aster pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead, trying to push the pressure back down into something manageable.
“Tonight…” she said, searching. “It almost felt like back then. Like the alley and the stones and that thing were all waiting for me to pick an answer. But there was a difference.”
Esme’s brows lifted. “Yeah?”
“I heard him,” Aster said.
Esme’s expression tightened. “Eiran?”
She nodded. “Not his voice. Just—” She made a helpless gesture. “He was there in the math.”
It sounded ridiculous out loud. It still felt true.
“I don’t know what that means,” she admitted. “But it helped. I didn’t go under.”
Esme leaned back slightly, studying her.
“Do you trust him?” she asked.
The question landed heavier than it should have.
Aster picked at the blanket seam. “I trust that he doesn’t like being surprised,” she said slowly. “I trust that when something awful happens, he moves toward it instead of away.”
“That’s not nothing,” Esme said.
“I also trust that he’d hand me over to the Ministry if he thought I was going to break the city open,” Aster added. “Which is… complicated, on the feelings side.”
Esme nodded once. “Okay. So. You trust his ethics more than you trust his institution.”
“Yeah,” Aster said. “That.”
Esme’s gaze held hers. “Do you trust me?”
Aster stared. “What kind of question is that?”
“The kind where you answer out loud,” Esme said.
Aster’s throat tightened. “Yes. Obviously.”
“Okay,” Esme said briskly, like she’d needed to hear it to keep breathing. “So. You trust me. You partially trust him. You’re terrified of yourself. And you think you’re one bad night away from going Full Tilt.”
Aster winced. “When you summarize it like that, it sounds dramatic.”
“It is dramatic,” Esme said. “You are dramatic. That’s fine. Here’s the part you’re forgetting: every time you’ve gone off the rails, someone has pulled you back. You are not doing this alone. You’re not allowed to. It’s in the contract.”
Aster’s mouth twitched. “Did I sign something without reading it?”
Esme’s lips quirked. “Day we met. Tiny, exhausted gremlin girl who thought dinosaurs were a personality trait. I said, ‘Hey, wanna be friends?’ You said, ‘Do you like triceratops?’ I said, ‘I can learn.’ Contract sealed.”
Aster snorted, the sound catching on something that wanted to be a sob instead. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth until it passed.
“What if it happens again?” she asked finally. “What if I can’t stop at one nudge next time?”
Esme didn’t joke immediately.
“Then we do what we did before,” she said. “I yell your name until you come back. Only now we have a necromancer who hates mess watching the perimeter, and a whole street of people invested in not becoming abstract math problems.”
“That doesn’t sound reassuring,” Aster muttered.
“It’s the only kind of plan we’ve ever had,” Esme said.
Silence settled again, but it was less jagged now—more like a blanket thrown over sharp corners.
Aster stared at the ceiling one more time.
“Do you ever miss it?” she asked suddenly.
Esme blinked. “What, the old place?”
“No.” Aster swallowed. “The feeling. When everything bends.”
Esme’s eyes flicked away for a fraction of a second.
“Sometimes,” she admitted. “Just for a second. When something awful is about to happen and I think, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if you just—’” She mimed scrubbing something out. Then her mouth tightened. “Then I remember what you looked like afterward.”
Aster’s stomach dipped. “Bad?”
“Like you’d dug your own grave and forgotten which way was up,” Esme said gently. “I’ll take the harder road over that.”
Aster let her head roll sideways until their foreheads touched. Esme didn’t pull away.
“I don’t want to be that,” Aster whispered.
“You’re not,” Esme said. “You’re the girl on my couch who buys too many houseplants and argues with the sink. The rest is just… context.”
Aster huffed a damp laugh. “You have a terrible grasp of scale.”
“And you have a terrible grasp of how much I love you,” Esme said. “So we’re even.”
They lay there a while, breathing in sync, the city’s small noises threading through the room.
Eventually Esme spoke again, voice barely above a murmur.
“If you tell him,” she said, “about back then—about Glassfall—you should get to do it on your terms.”
Aster’s stomach flipped. “I don’t… I don’t know if I can.”
“You don’t have to yet,” Esme said. “But he’s building guardrails around you without knowing what the cliff looks like. That’s a little unfair.”
Aster grimaced. “When you’re right, you’re awful.”
“I’m always right,” Esme said. “It’s a burden.”
Aster stared at the cracks. The ceiling hadn’t changed.
She had.
“I don’t want the Ministry to get hold of this,” she said.
“Then we pick who does,” Esme said. “And we stack the deck.”
Aster closed her eyes.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
Esme’s eyebrows lifted. “Tomorrow?”
“I’ll talk to him,” Aster said. “Not everything. Not the whole ‘please experiment on me’ nightmare. But enough. Glassfall. The almost. Why I’m scared.”
Esme’s mouth softened. “That’s fair.”
“And I’m going to ask,” Aster added, “what he does when he’s about to break something to protect someone. Since he’s so perfect and all.”
“Oh, absolutely not,” Esme said. “You’re going to make the necromancer talk about his feelings. I’m bringing popcorn.”
Aster laughed, small but real.
The ceiling cracks finally looked like shapes again instead of fault lines.
“Hey, Esme?” she murmured.
“Yeah?”
“If I ever stop hearing you when you yell,” Aster said, eyes heavy now in a way that wasn’t fear, “pull me back anyway.”
“Obviously,” Esme said. “It’s in the contract.”
This time, when sleep came, the world didn’t tilt with it.
It just… settled.
_________________________________________________________________________
The first time the world bent for her, it was in Glassfall Court.
Glassfall wasn’t important enough to show up on most maps. It was one of those places that existed in the spaces between other districts—the kind of narrow, slightly tilting neighborhood the Loom swallowed at the edges without ever actually claiming.
Three crooked streets, two half-functional stairwells, one cracked square where kids played kickball until somebody yelled at them. That was it. That was home.
Back then, Asteria Morrow still thought of herself as blonde, not “gold-ringed eyes” or “entropy anomaly.” Just a girl with hair she kept pulling into a messy braid that never stayed, blue eyes haloed with that strange yellow ring everyone assumed was just “pretty” and not “concerning.”
It was late.
Not late like midnight.
Late like we should have been home an hour ago and the air knows it.
Aster jogged up the last flight of stairs from the tram stop, boots scuffing against stone worn down by decades of feet. The Loom’s glow pulsed dimly above, threads of conduit light snaking along higher walkways. Down here, Glassfall Court got the leftovers—one out of every three lamps working, buzzing faintly, casting everything in a washed-out amber.
She’d stayed too long at the print shop.
It was Esme’s fault.
Mostly.
“Move,” Aster muttered to herself, clutching the satchel against her side. The rolled prints inside thumped against her ribs with each step. “If Esmerée complains about the time, just remind her whose project this is.”
The night air carried that particular smell Glassfall always had in summer—stone dust, old rain, frying oil from the noodle stall at the corner, and a faint metallic tang that meant the Veins ran close under this block.
She turned into the main square—really more of a widening in the street where three buildings had failed to line up properly—and slowed.
Something was wrong.
Not big wrong. Not obvious. Just… shifted.
The usual noises were muted. No clatter from the noodle stall. No kids arguing over whose turn it was. No off-key singing from Old Neri’s window.
And no Esme.
Aster frowned.
Esmerée Solace was supposed to be waiting on the steps by now, pretending not to watch the tram time board while actually watching it like a bird of prey. That was how this worked. Aster stayed too long at the shop, Esme pretended not to worry, they met in the square and walked home together.
Predictable. Safe.
But the steps were empty.
“Esme?” Aster called.
No answer.
Her stomach tightened.
She did a quick check of the square, eyes skipping from one familiar landmark to another. The noodle stall’s awning was down. Shutters half-closed. A metal crate lay on its side near the alley, contents spilled into the street.
There, she thought. That’s off.
The little alley between the stall and the opposite building was usually just a cut-through—a place cats and bored kids used to get from one block to another without going around. Tonight, shadows seemed piled there thicker than they should’ve been, heavy and still.
Aster’s feet started moving before she’d fully decided to go.
“Esmerée?” she tried again, voice dropping.
Halfway to the alley mouth, she heard it.
Not a scream.
A sound that came after a scream—ragged breathing, a choked curse, the thud of someone hitting stone.
Aster dropped the satchel.
It hit the ground and split, prints spilling across the street like pale flags. She didn’t look back.
She ran.
The alley opened around her, walls too close, air too stale. Someone had knocked over a trash bin; its contents were scattered, sticky in the dim light. Four figures moved in the gloom, heavy boots and cheap coats and the mean, casual posture of people who thought the world owed them something and had decided to collect in the worst possible way.
Three of them were standing.
One was on the ground.
Esmerée.
Aster barely recognized her at first. Esme had one arm wrapped around her ribs, the other braced against the cobblestones, trying to push herself upright. Her short black hair was matted on one side with something dark. Her pink eyes flashed, furious and bright, even as one of the men kicked her hand out from under her.
“Stay down, sweetheart,” he drawled. “We’re just talking.”
“Didn’t know ‘talking’ required four against one,” Esme spat, breath hitching.
“Market tax,” another said. “You run deliveries through our corner, you pay.”
“She already paid,” a third added, nudging a scattered pouch on the ground with his boot. “Not our fault it wasn’t enough.”
Aster didn’t remember deciding to speak.
“Get away from her,” she said.
The words dropped into the alley like stones into a pond. The men turned, almost lazily, attention snagging on the blonde girl standing at the entrance, chest heaving, eyes too bright.
The nearest one looked her up and down, smirk curling. “And who’re you?”
Aster’s mouth was dry. “The person who’s going to make you regret this.”
It sounded ridiculous out loud.
She heard Esme choke on something that might have been a laugh, might have been pain.
“Asteria,” Esme managed. “Don’t.”
The leader—taller than the rest, jaw half-covered in patchy stubble—snorted. “Cute. I like the eyes. You lost, little light?”
Aster’s heart hammered against her ribs hard enough she thought it might break them. Her hands shook. Every instinct she had screamed at her to run.
She didn’t.
She stepped forward instead.
“Glassfall Court isn’t yours,” she said. “You don’t get to decide who pays for existing.”
The leader’s smirk faded.
One of the others shifted his weight, uneasy. “Boss, we don’t have time for—”
“Shut up,” the leader snapped. He looked back at Aster, something colder slipping into his gaze. “You should walk away.”
“I’m not leaving her,” Aster said.
“Asteria,” Esme said again, sharper. “I said don’t.”
She sounded scared.
Not of the men.
Of her.
The realization landed like a punch. Aster faltered.
The leader saw it.
He stepped toward her, boots scraping on stone.
“Last chance, light,” he said, voice low. “Walk away, and maybe we forget your face.”
Aster’s pulse roared in her ears.
She could feel the Veins under this part of the district—faint, old, not as pronounced as under Ravel Street or Hearthfall Row, but present. Usually it was just a background hum, like the city breathing. Tonight it felt… closer.
Her vision narrowed, edges blurring.
When she blinked, the world came back as numbers.
Angles.
Vectors.
Possibilities.
The leader’s weight leaning slightly forward—if he lunged, he’d overcommit. The broken bin at his feet—if it slipped, he’d fall left. The wall behind him—two bricks already cracked; one hard push would send them both down.
Her breath hitched.
This wasn’t new.
She’d always felt when things were about to go wrong. The wobble of a stool before it tipped. The way a dropped plate chose a path to the floor. Tiny things, little nudges.
This was not tiny.
Paths branched in front of her. A dozen, then a hundred, then more. In one, the men walked away. In another, they didn’t. In too many, Esme didn’t get back up.
The pull started then.
Not from the Veins.
From the space between events.
A slow, inevitable drag toward a point where everything would snap if someone didn’t decide how it broke.
Her eyes burned.
“Aster,” Esme said, and there was that edge to her voice now—the one Aster had only heard once before, when a kid had nearly fallen off the old bridge and Aster had reached out without thinking and the entire walkway had shuddered like it wanted to collapse and then didn’t.
“Don’t,” Esme repeated. “It’s not worth it.”
One of the men laughed. “She’s shaking. Look at her.”
The leader reached out, grabbing Aster by the front of her jacket.
That was the mistake.
The pull surged.
The branching futures in front of her flickered, then collapsed inward, condensing around a single, burning point: him touching her, Esme on the ground, fear twisting under her ribs like a knife.
Everything inside Aster clenched.
No.
The world listened.
It always had, in little ways. A dropped cup landing rim-up instead of shattering. A loose tile choosing not to slip when Esme stepped on it.
This time, it didn’t listen politely.
It obeyed.
The Veins under Glassfall Court shivered, channels of old power sliding an inch closer to the surface. The air thickened. Light from the one functioning alley lamp fractured, turning sharp and too bright, edges haloed in gold.
Aster’s vision went strange.
The men in front of her doubled, then tripled, outlines flickering as if someone were scrolling through different versions of them and couldn’t decide which one to keep.
She heard Esme say her full name, distant and distorted.
“Asteria.”
Her braid lifted in a wind that wasn’t there.
The leader’s fingers tightened on her jacket, then spasmed.
The stone beneath his feet forgot how to be solid for a second.
He stumbled—not just forward or back, but sideways into a space that hadn’t been there a heartbeat ago. His foot hit the rim of the overturned bin at precisely the wrong angle. The bin skidded, slammed into the wall, bounced, struck his shin with enough force to send him crashing down.
He didn’t fall where gravity said he should.
He fell where she’d refused to let him.
He hit the ground hard, wrist twisting under him with an ugly crack. The bones in his forearm did not break cleanly. They folded, angles wrong, like a drawing someone had scribbled over until the original lines were lost.
One of the others lunged for her.
He didn’t make it.
The alley warped.
Just a little.
Just enough that the distance between him and Aster lengthened for one step, then shortened too fast on the next. His momentum misjudged itself. He slammed shoulder-first into the wall instead of her, skull cracking against brick, eyes rolling back.
The third man tried to run.
The path out of the alley closed for him.
He hit an angle that shouldn’t have existed, rebounded off invisible resistance, and went down in a heap, ankle bending in a way ankles weren’t built for.
Aster stood in the middle of it, chest heaving, breath coming too fast. Her hands shook, fingers splayed as if she were holding threads no one else could see.
Her eyes burned.
If anyone had been close enough to see clearly, they would’ve sworn the blue had gone almost neon, the gold ring around her pupils blazing bright like someone had set it alight from the inside.
For a heartbeat, she felt… huge.
Not tall. Not strong.
Just everywhere.
The alley wasn’t an alley; it was a series of potential failures and possible escapes, all of them branching out from where she stood. She could feel each one, like plucked strings.
If she pulled—
She could erase them.
Not just trip them. Remove them.
The men.
The wall.
The square.
Glassfall Court itself.
It would be easier, a small, terrifying part of her whispered. One push. No more fear. No more pulls. No more almosts.
“Asteria.”
Her name cut through the pressure like a knife.
Not the men.
Esmerée.
Aster blinked.
The alley snapped back into sharper focus, like someone had dragged a slider from blur to clarity. The light was still wrong at the edges, but not as fractured. The Veins were still too close, but receding.
Esme was on her knees now, one hand pressed to her side, the other reaching for Aster like she was trying to anchor her physically and couldn’t quite reach.
“Look at me,” Esme said.
Aster did.
Esme’s pink eyes were wide, scared, but not of the men groaning on the ground.
Of her.
“Asteria,” Esme said again, voice shaking but steady enough to hold onto. “You’re here. With me. It’s done.”
Aster’s throat closed.
“I—”
The wind that wasn’t wind died.
Her braid fell, settling against her back. The lamp’s light stopped cutting like knives. The weight of all those possible futures slid off her shoulders, leaving her hollow and shaking.
She swayed.
Esme caught her wrist, fingers warm and tight.
“Hey,” Esme said. “Come back, okay? No more.”
Aster sucked in a breath that felt like it scraped her lungs.
The leader groaned, clutching his ruined arm. One of his men vomited into the corner. The third just lay there, whimpering softly.
“Monster,” the leader spat hoarsely, staring up at her with something like horror. “What are you—”
Aster flinched.
Esme’s grip on her wrist tightened.
“No,” Esme said, voice suddenly sharp. “She’s the reason you’re still breathing. Get out.”
The men didn’t argue.
They stumbled, crawled, dragged themselves out of the alley, tripping over each other in their haste. The moment they cleared the mouth, the distance between events went back to acting the way it always had.
Gravity remembered what to do.
Aster stood in the aftermath, chest heaving, hands numb.
The alley walls were subtly wrong now, bricks shifted half a centimeter out of place here and there, as if someone had tugged them and forgotten to put them back exactly right. The ground bore no obvious scars, but when she looked too closely, she could see where paths had almost been.
Esme pushed herself fully to her feet with a hiss, then turned to face her properly.
“Are you with me?” she said quietly.
Aster swallowed. “I… think so.”
“You stopped,” Esme said.
Aster laughed, a raw, broken sound. “Did I? Because that felt like—like I dug a hole and almost crawled into it and pulled the whole street down with me.”
“Almost,” Esme agreed. “But you didn’t. You heard me. You stopped.”
Aster’s eyes burned. “You saw what I was.”
“I saw what you did,” Esme said. “You saved my life and then scared the shit out of me. That’s… pretty on brand, actually.”
“This isn’t funny,” Aster choked.
“I’m not laughing,” Esme said, though her mouth twitched. “I’m also not leaving. So you’re stuck with me. Demon clause and all.”
Aster stared at her. “Demon?”
Esme winced. “Okay, bad word choice. Please don’t implode the alley to make a point.”
Aster’s knees gave out. She sank to the ground, back hitting the wall—slightly too rough, slightly too off—and buried her face in her hands.
“I could’ve broken everything,” she said. “I felt it. Like… like there was this bigger version of me behind my skin, and if I let it out, it wouldn’t care where it stopped. It would just keep going.”
“I know,” Esme said.
Aster’s head snapped up. “How do you know?”
“Because I was there,” Esme replied simply. “I saw the edges. I saw how close you were. And I saw you pull back.”
Aster licked dry lips. “What if next time I don’t?”
Esme’s expression went very serious.
“Then,” she said, “I’ll yell louder.”
“That’s not a plan,” Aster whispered.
“It’s our plan,” Esme said. “Has been since the bridge. You start to go too far, I drag you back. You’re not allowed to do this alone. It’s in the friendship contract.”
Aster let out a helpless sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a sob.
“We have a contract?”
“Verbal,” Esme said. “Sealed when you made me listen to dinosaur facts for three hours and I didn’t leave.”
“That doesn’t count,” Aster protested weakly.
“Too late,” Esme said. “Binding.”
Footsteps echoed faintly from the square. Voices. The neighborhood waking back up, either oblivious or choosing not to look too closely at the alley.
Aster stared at the crooked bricks, the subtle wrongness she never wanted anyone else to have to feel.
“People are going to notice,” she whispered. “Something. They always do. Rumors. Stories. ‘Monster girl in Glassfall Court.’”
“Let them talk,” Esme said. “We’re not staying.”
Aster blinked. “We’re not?”
Esme shrugged, then winced at the pull on her ribs. “You think I’m letting us sit on top of whatever you just almost turned into a crater? No thanks. We’ll find somewhere better. Older. Maybe a place where the stone already expects weird.”
“Like Ardent’s Reach,” Aster murmured.
Esme smirked faintly. “Heard they’ve got necromancers there who file this stuff for a living.”
Necromancers.
At the time, the word had been a joke. A fantasy—people who understood death and Weight and all the things Aster could feel but couldn’t name.
Now, lying awake years later on a couch in Hearthfall Row, with Eiran Vale building quiet protections under her feet, it didn’t feel like a joke at all.
Back in Glassfall Court, Aster pushed herself upright and took Esme’s hand.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll go.”
Esme squeezed back.
“Good,” she said. “Because I’m not letting you turn into a Demon anything in this dump. You deserve a more dramatic backdrop.”
Aster barked out a shaky laugh.
The alley tilted back toward normal.
The ceiling above Skylight House came back into focus.
Same cracked plaster. Same blanket bunched under her fingers. Same half-broken streetlamp buzz outside.
Esme hadn’t moved far. She sat cross-legged on the other end of the couch now, watching Aster with the same careful attention she’d had in that alley—like she was reading ripples, waiting to see if anything big surfaced.
“You were back there?” Esme asked quietly.
Aster swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Glassfall?”
She nodded.
Esme’s shoulders dropped a fraction. “How bad?”
“Bad enough,” Aster said. “I remembered more this time. The way it felt to be… everywhere. I almost kept going.”
“But you didn’t,” Esme said.
Aster let out a breath. “You dragged me back.”
Esme’s eyes held hers. “You heard me. That’s the point.”
Aster stared at her hands.
“What if it happens again?” she asked. “Not a little nudge. Not a mug or a bookshelf. The other thing.”
Esme didn’t look away.
“Then we stack the deck,” she said. “We add people who know what they’re doing. People who can catch the parts we miss.”
Aster knew who she meant.
“Eiran,” she said.
Esme nodded. “He already knows you’re weird. Might as well give him a more useful definition.”
Aster huffed. “I don’t want him to look at me the way those men did.”
“He won’t,” Esme said. “He’ll look at you like a ledger problem. Annoyed. Focused. Determined to balance you without losing a column.”
“That’s not comforting,” Aster muttered.
“It is in his world,” Esme said.
Aster tipped her head back against the couch, staring at the ceiling one more time.
Glassfall Court. The chalk marks. The way Esme had said we’re not staying like it was a spell.
Tonight’s alley. The Unfiled turning toward her like it had smelled a better way to be wrong.
Eiran in the street, standing between her and an auditor without making a speech about it—quietly rewriting the record so she stayed off the page.
“Tomorrow,” Aster said.
Esme arched a brow. “Tomorrow what?”
“I’ll tell him,” Aster said. “Not everything. But enough. Glassfall. The almost. Why I’m scared.”
Esme’s mouth softened. “Okay.”
“And I’m going to ask,” Aster added, “what he does when he’s about to break something to protect someone.”
Esme made an affronted sound. “You’re going to make the necromancer talk about his feelings.”
“Correct.”
“I’m bringing popcorn,” Esme declared.
Aster laughed—small, but real.
“Hey, Esme?” she murmured, eyes slipping closed.
“Yeah?”
“If I ever stop hearing you,” Aster said, voice fading, “pull me back anyway.”
Esme’s hand found hers under the blanket, fingers weaving through.
“Always,” Esme said. “Contract.”
This time, sleep didn’t feel like falling.
It felt like being held.
Tomorrow, she would go find Eiran Vale and start telling him the kind of truth that didn’t belong in any ledger.
Tonight, she let herself rest.