Page 105 of Embers of Midnight
Sera doesn’t look up. Good. Fire makes fast choices when you insult it, and I need her to make slow ones.
She keeps the blade work small. She gives ground to steal it back. When she decides to end it, I feel the decision like a shift in pressure behind my sternum. Heat climbs along my own arms in sympathy—I have done too many hours beside her for my body not to copy. I crush it down and watch.
She builds a ring of fire around Cassandra, narrow and clean, the kind that steals air without touching skin. Half the rim forgets how to swallow. The other half leans in to see a burn. Sera denies them that, holds the circle steady at her own shoulder height, and watches Cassandra’s options narrow to breath and panic. When it is enough, she drops the heat in a blink, steps into the stagger that always follows, and puts her knuckles into Cassandra’s hinge like the final period in a sentence you don’t argue with.
The sound on the rim splits. Pride makes noise. Relief is quiet. I realize I am gripping the railing and make my hands let go.
I am moving before the first shout finishes echoing. “Infirmary,” I say, because I am not asking. She nods once like the ground tilted and she wants it to stop.
Ash launches forward and stops a meter out. He wants to touch. He doesn’t. He grins soft instead, which is his version of a bandage. Ronan’s hand finds the back of her neck and steadies the tremor I have been pretending not to see. He says water and the bottle is in her palm like a promise we practiced. Caelum steps in on the other side and offers a shoulder, not pressure. She takes it and some of the color returns to her mouth. The bruise under the wrap on her right side will be a problem for twelve hours. The cut along her bicep needs closing strips, not stitches. I translate pain into logistics and walk.
The infirmary’s air is cool and clean. I nod at the healer on duty, and she nods back in that way that says we will not chat while she works. Sera’s shirt sticks to blood and the healer peels it back without cruelty. Salve goes on the frost bruise and burns for three breaths. Sera breathes through it like a stubborn saint and then lets her jaw relax. Steri strips kiss the length of the cut. Bandage. Wrap. Water. The routine folds around her like a net that holds instead of traps.
Ash tries for commentary and is told to stand in the hall or contribute saline. He contributes distance and leaves us a doorway to breathe through. Ronan leans his weight against the rail and watches Sera’s face like the walls will behave if he stareshard enough. Caelum puts a cup in her hand and tells her to drink. She does. I count with her without moving my mouth.
“Observation,” the healer says. “An hour. Then you can go be brave somewhere else.” She leaves us with a chart and a look that assumes compliance.
Her shoulders lift once with leftover fight. I set two fingers against the inside of her wrist—contact, not restraint. “Sleep,” I say, low. “I’m right here. Breathe with me: two short, one long.” She obeys the way she only does when she’s spent—eyes close on the next blink, breath matches mine, the small tremor in her fingers goes quiet. Ronan waits through three clean cycles, checks her pulse with a thumb, then tips his head toward the door.
Ronan does not move for a full minute. He watches the slack in Sera’s face, checks her pulse with two fingers like a habit that predates me, and only then tips his head toward the door.
“I’ll start food,” he says, barely above a whisper.
Ash is already easing backward, all bright edges folded down for once. Caelum leans in, brushes his mouth to Sera’s temple, brief and careful. “We’ll leave the porch light on,” he murmurs. It means come home. It means there is a place where pain doesn’t get to choose the name.
They go. I stay. I always stay. Maybe that is a flaw. Maybe it is the only reason I am still here.
The room quiets. I sit beside the bed and let the chair take my weight so I don’t start carving a path into the tile. Her breathing holds an even count. The strip on her arm tugs a little with each exhale and then settles. I keep my hand close enough that she can find it without waking.
When I have no one to manage for three minutes, the old tape rolls whether I invite it or not.
I fell on a day that was bright and wrong. The door had been mapped, chalked, tested. The wind on the threshold smelled like one place and tasted like another, and I told myself I could parse it on the fly. The moment I crossed, the floor was gone. Cold hit my teeth. The air tasted thin and metallic, like a sky that had never decided to be blue. I caught a ledge with my palms and skin went to ribbons before my brain registered the angle. When my grip failed, the landing came at a slant that made ribs talk in a language I never want to learn again.
The shard I landed in was narrow and mean. Not a world. A splinter between worlds. Gravity behaved out of spite. Sound carried sideways. I used my breath to stop my thoughts from eating themselves. Two short in. One long out. I counted until the count counted me. I tore a strip from my sleeve to bind a rib and another to mark a trail because I did not trust the place to remember I existed. Chalk would have lied there. Fabric did not.
Doors in that kind of fragment do not open for free. They open for heat, for patience, for the quiet violence of a hand that will not stop asking. I found a seam by listening for the wrong kind of silence, the kind that sits behind a wall and tries to act like a wall. I pressed my palm to it until my skin knew the temperatureof the answer, and then I cut with the little knife I still carry. When the real air hit my face again, I vomited on my boots and cried once, fast and practical, like a man catching his breath after a long swim. I went back to work the next day. I also stopped trusting doors that smiled too hard.
Sera sleeps like someone who paid in full. The line between her eyebrows loosens a millimeter at a time. At some point, her fingers search across the sheet. I move my hand the distance required. She finds it, and the noise inside my chest drops.
I do not measure the minutes. The clock does it for me. When the hour turns, I pour water. Her lashes lift. Her eyes do the quick inventory they always do—ceiling, light, me—and then settle.
“Pain?” I keep my voice even. No pity. She dislikes pity more than pain.
“Manageable.” Her throat is rough. I pass the cup and wait while she finishes it. “How long did I sleep?”
“Two hours.” I glance at the chart so she knows I’m not making numbers to soothe her. “Your ribs will sing for a day. Your arm will itch later. Do not take the strips off or I will find a way to write you up.”
“Threats,” she says, crooked smile. “Effective.”
The room can hold more than logistics now. This is the only place where asking feels like a good use of breath.
“I have a question,” I tell her.
“Ask,” she answers, because bravery is a habit with her.
“Go out with me next week,” I say. “One evening. Somewhere quiet where no one expects a performance.”
She blinks, then laughs once, the unguarded sound I hoard. “Yes.” The word lands low and correct. “I thought you’d never ask.”
