"Everything happened so fast," Aine said, her voice distant, her eyes somewhere the room could not reach.
Hayland was quiet for a moment. "Did you chew the garlic?"
"I did." Something moved across her face, a flicker of memory that came and went before it could settle into anything nameable. "He found his way around it anyway."
Hayland looked at her and said nothing for a moment. Then, "It is fine. Open your mouth."
She looked at the spoon he was holding out and something in her expression shifted, not quite acceptance but something adjacent to it. She opened her mouth.
He fed her in silence, unhurried, waiting each time without comment. She took her medications one by one and he tucked the blanket around her when she was done, adjusting it at the corners with the efficiency of someone who had decided that this was simply what needed to be done and was doing it.
He looked at her once she had settled, her eyes already growing heavy, and allowed himself a small quiet sound that was almost a laugh. Not at her. Never at her. Just at the strange and specific shape the world had taken to land both of them in this particular room on this particular morning.
The large black doors swung open and the warehouse revealed itself in full.
Jokull stood at the entrance and let his eyes move slowly across the space. Weapons lined every surface, crated and catalogued and arranged with the precision of an operation that had been running long before he was old enough to know what it was.
Otz came to stand beside him. "Your father was one of the most significant weapons dealers in the world before he stepped away from it a few months ago. Third best globally at his peak." He paused. "That position does not disappear simply because the man steps back."
Jokull looked at the room for another moment. Then, "Tell the gang we begin tomorrow. Open the portal and restart the marketing."
"Yes sir." Otz turned and left without another word.
Jokull stayed where he was, standing alone in a warehouse full of weapons that had always existed in the shadow of his name, and spoke to no one and nothing in particular.
"I will find you," he said quietly. "No matter what it takes. I will find you, Aine."
The tap on her thigh pulled Tesni out of sleep before she was ready.
"Tesni." Bianca's voice was low and urgent. "It is nine in the morning. Look at this."
She pressed the phone into Tesni's hands without preamble.
Tesni stared at the screen.
Silas was on the obelisk in the city square. His body had been displayed exactly where Ravi promised it would be, somewhere the dark world could not look away from. And carved from his eyebrow down the length of his cheek was the signature. Clean and deliberate and signed with a blade.
Tesni sat with the phone in her hands and did not speak for a long time.
"I am sorry, Silas," she said finally. Quietly. Just for him.
Bianca sat beside her and let the silence run its course. Then, "I have to leave today."
"I know." Tesni handed the phone back. "I understand. And thank you, Bianca. For all of it."
"What are friends for?" She stood and began gathering her things with the brisk efficiency that characterised everything she did. Then she paused. "The money. Since you need it urgently I will see what I can do by tomorrow."
Tesni looked up. "Really?"
"Really." Bianca pulled her bag over her shoulder. "Do not thank me again."
"Thank you," Tesni said anyway.
Bianca shook her head and walked out.
The room was still and quiet around her.
Aine had been drifting in the shallow space between sleep and wakefulness when she heard the soft sound of her door and felt the presence of someone small and careful entering the room.
"Ma'am."
She opened her eyes slowly, blinking the sleep away. "Yes."
Sienna stood just inside the doorway, her eyes moving quickly to the door behind her and then back. Her voice dropped to barely above a breath.
"No one is here right now." She took one step closer. "You can escape. Hurry."
She pushed her feet into the slippers and followed Sienna out of the room, moving as quietly as she could, one hand trailing the wall for support.
"Hurry, ma'am," Sienna whispered without looking back.
"I am sorry." Aine kept her voice low, her jaw tight against the pain that moved through her with every step. "I cannot run right now."
Sienna glanced back and whatever she saw in Aine's face settled the argument immediately. "I understand. Just walk as quickly as you can."
"Sure."
Sienna reached the top of the staircase first and started down. Aine followed, counting each step carefully, her hand firm on the banister. She was five stairs from the bottom when Sienna stopped.
The change moved across her face like a shadow passing over water. Every trace of urgency and hope drained out of her expression and what replaced it was something Aine had only seen once before in her life and never forgotten.
She had seen it on her mother's face.
Aine stayed on the fifth stair and gripped the banister. She could see a figure below but not a face. Never a face.
"I am sorry, sir," Sienna said. Her voice had become very small.
"You tried to be clever, did you not?" Ravi's voice filled the stairwell without effort, the way cold fills a room.
"I was only—"
Sienna's body hit the floor before the sentence could find its ending as the sound of gun run out.
The sound of it moved through Aine like electricity and then the image of her mother came, unbidden and total, the wet road and the headlights and the way a person could simply stop being a person in the space of a single second. The headache arrived behind her eyes like something splitting and she opened her mouth and the scream that came out of her carried nine years of everything she had never let herself release.
Then the darkness took her again.