LYRA
I didn't move from the window for a long time after they left. My back was pressed against the wall beside it, my knees drawn slightly toward my chest, my breathing carefully controlled in the way I had learned to control it when everything around me felt too loud and too close and too real.
The courtyard below was empty again. Like nothing had moved through it at all.
But I had seen it.
Every detail of it was still sitting behind my eyes with the particular clarity of something your mind refuses to release because it knows it matters.
The figures moving along the wall in perfect silence. The precision of every step. The way the torchlight never touched them because they already knew exactly where the torchlight would be.
And the last one. The one who had stopped.
Who had looked directly at my window without searching. Without hesitating. Without any of the uncertainty that came with guessing.
He had known.
