Page 67 of Siren Problems
I nearly drop a rune shard.
I stare at him. “What?”
He holds up his smoothie like it’s a diplomatic offering. “No judgment! Totally chill. Just, y’know, the wholetownis kind of on edge, and Calder’s been moodier than usual—which is saying something for a guy whose resting face screams ‘do not approach or you will die of emotional frostbite.’”
“Lyle—”
“He growled at a tide shifter for wearing a hoodie similar to yours. Also someone said he punched a mirror in the fisherman's cove? So. Context.”
I clench my jaw. “We weren’t a thing. We were just... adjacent.”
Lyle’s brows lift. “Adjacent?”
“Adjacent to something. Curse therapy with benefits.”
“So... situationship with trauma?”
“Pretty much.”
He slurps his smoothie.
“Still sounds like a breakup.”
I groan, dropping my head to the table with a muffled thump.
Mira strolls in at that exact moment, arms full of scrolls, eyebrows already raised. “He’s bothering you, isn’t he?”
“He’s doing that thing again,” I mumble, face still buried, “where he casually dismantles my emotional repression with questions wrapped in kelpie sass.”
Lyle beams. “It’s a gift.”
“Out,” Mira says, pointing toward the door.
“Fine. But I’m leaving the smoothie. It’s passionfruit and chaos. Just like this lab.”
He backs out dramatically. Mira closes the door behind him and drops the scrolls beside me.
“I pulled everything from the wreck overlay logs. You said you wanted to look again.”
I sit up, dragging my fingers through my hair.
“Yeah. I do.”
She spreads the materials across the table, careful and precise. Spiral glyphs. Fragmented binding sigils. Ley residue imprints from the altar stone.
“He won’t ask for help,” I mutter, picking up the spectral map. “So I’m going to fix this without him.”
Mira doesn’t argue.
Just starts sorting glyph translations like she already expected this.
“I’ve been thinking,” I say slowly, “the curse doesn’t just silence him. It turns his power inward. His voice—his gift—it’s not gone. It’s bound.”
Mira frowns. “Like a sealed frequency?”
“More like a looping command structure. The kind designed to contain a source of immense powerandemotional volatility.”
She nods. “And his voice was both.”
