They gave her boots.
One of the soldiers — a young one, barely older than her, with a face that hadn't decided yet whether it was going to be kind or hard — had pulled a spare pair from his pack without being asked and set them down in front of her without looking at her directly. Like you'd leave water for a wounded animal. Carefully. With no sudden movements.
She put them on. They were too big. She didn't say so.
She rode behind the general — Caelum, she'd heard the soldier named Petra call him, Caelum Drey, which she filed away the way she filed everything now: carefully, in the part of her mind that was still functioning like a mind should — and she watched the dark road unspool ahead of them and she tried, methodically, to feel something.
It was becoming a project. An experiment. She would identify a fact — my mother is dead, my father is dead, Maret is dead, everyone is dead, I killed the people who killed them and felt nothing doing it — and she would press on it and wait. Like checking ice to see if it would hold weight.
It didn't hold. There was nothing beneath it. Just the hollow, that enormous quiet that had settled in her chest after the fire went out, filling every space where feeling used to live.
She wondered if this was what broken felt like. She had always imagined broken would hurt.
This didn't hurt. That was almost worse.
"You should sleep," Caelum said. He hadn't looked back at her. He said it the way he seemed to say most things — not unkindly, but without softness either. Direct. Like he was reporting a fact.
"I'm not tired," she said.
"You don't have to be tired to need sleep."
"Do you sleep?"
A pause. Shorter than the ones she gave, but present.
"Not well," he said.
"Then don't tell me to."
Another pause. And then, surprising her: "Fair enough."
She looked at the back of his head. He was younger than she'd expected a general to be — late twenties, maybe thirty, with dark hair that needed cutting and a set to his shoulders that spoke of someone permanently braced for impact. He wore the Emperor's colors but he wore them the way some people wore things they'd been given and hadn't chosen — correctly, completely, and without any particular feeling about it.
She had grown up hiding from men in those colors. She had spent seventeen years being afraid of what they represented.
She was not afraid of this one.
She wasn't sure if that was wisdom or simply the absence of the fear mechanism along with everything else.
"The Harvesters," she said. "The ones you were riding behind. Were they yours?"
"No." Clean and immediate. "I was following their route. Not their orders."
"Why?"
He was quiet for long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer. Then: "Because I wanted to see what they were after before they got to it."
"And what were they after?"
He glanced back at her then. Just briefly. His eyes were grey — the kind of grey that wasn't absence of color but presence of something more complicated. Storm grey. Thinking grey.
"You," he said. "As it turns out."
She looked at the road.
"They had a report," she said. "Someone told them."
"Yes."
"Do you know who?"
"Not yet." And then, quieter: "But I will."
She believed him. She wasn't sure why. She had no particular reason to trust anyone in the Emperor's colors, least of all a general who had just admitted to following Harvesters through the dark. But there was something in the way he said I will — not a promise to her, just a fact about himself, about what he did — that felt like something she could put weight on.
Carefully. Small amounts of weight. For now.
The road curved east and the trees thickened on either side, blocking the stars. She felt that loss more than she'd felt anything since the fire — the sudden absence of the sky, the closing in of branches and dark. She had not realized until now how much she'd been relying on the stars. Her mother's stars.
Don't, she told herself. Not here. Not yet.
The hollow held.
"Where are we going exactly?" she said. "Before the capital."
"There's a garrison two hours east. We'll stop there for the night."
"And then?"
"Three days' ride to Vel."
She did the arithmetic. Three days in which she was, functionally, a prisoner — though he hadn't said that word and hadn't treated her as one. Three days in which anything could happen. In which she could try to run, though she had nowhere to run to. In which she could try to fight, though she had no way to control what happened when she did.
In which she could simply — ride. Watch. Learn what she could about the man in front of her and the empire ahead of her and what either of them intended to do with a girl who had burned a mile of everything and felt nothing doing it.
Watching and learning she could do. She had done it her whole life.
"The garrison soldiers," she said. "Will they know what I am?"
"No."
"What will you tell them I am?"
He thought about it. "A witness," he said. "To the Harvester incident."
She almost said: I was more than a witness. But she understood what he was doing — giving her a story that kept her safe, at least temporarily, at least from the garrison soldiers who didn't need to know the rest.
"All right," she said.
They rode in silence for a while. The young soldier who'd given her boots was riding closest to her — she could feel him glancing at her every few minutes with that careful sideways attention. Curious and frightened in equal measure. She recognized it. She had spent her whole life being the thing people looked at that way.
"What's your name?" she said to him.
He startled. "—Finn, miss. Finnian Reyes."
"Thank you for the boots, Finn."
His face did something complicated. Like he hadn't expected manners from her. Like manners were incongruous with the mile of ash he'd ridden through an hour ago.
"They're — you're welcome, miss," he said.
She turned back to the road.
Three days, she thought. Three days to figure out what the hollow was. Where the grief had gone. Whether it was coming back.
And what she was going to do in a capital city full of people who would want to drain her dry if they knew what she could do.
She looked up through a gap in the branches. One star, visible. Just one.
She fixed her eyes on it and rode toward the dark.