The world ended in the half-beat between heartbeats.

One moment Finn’s hand was on her shoulder, shoving her down into the shadow at the pillar’s base. The next he was airborne, and Nyx’s body remembered every decade she had ever spent learning the precise sound a person made when they were about to die.

She did not think. Thinking was for after.

[Shadow Step.]

She arrived at his side before he had finished sliding down the wall. Her knees hit the marble hard enough to crack.

Her hands found him, and he was warm in some places and far too cold in others, and his chest moved in a way that chests were not supposed to move, like a shallow lift that forgot, halfway through, what it had been doing.

The Knight was turning. She felt the air shift as its helm came around, that slow deliberate seeking, hunting them in the wreckage of the chamber.

She had thirty seconds.

[Shadow Veil — Active.]

She drew it over them like a cloak. The shadow at the base of the pillar reached up and folded itself around their bodies, and the chamber’s pale blue glow fell away from them entirely. To the Knight, they would now be a piece of the dark.

For thirty seconds.

Her hands were shaking. She did not remember when that had started. She catalogued his wounds. His ribs were caved in along the diagonal, his chest was gaping wide enough that she could see what no living thing should ever see of itself.

His HP read three percent and ticked lower with every passing second.

He was going to die in her lap.

Her voice came out very small.

"Bearer."

He didn’t answer.

She bit her own wrist. The fangs went in clean, and her blood welled up dark red and immediate.

"Drink." She pressed her wrist to his slack mouth. "Drink, drink, drink—"

It dribbled past his lips and ran along his jaw.

She tipped his head back with her free hand, parted his lips with her thumb, and tilted her wrist again. Blood pooled in his mouth. She closed his jaw and held it.

"Swallow," she breathed. "Swallow for me. Please."

His throat moved.

It was the smallest motion, a single reflexive contraction, but she felt it like a thrown rope. She bit her wrist again, deeper this time.

He swallowed again. And again. And then, on the fourth, the percentage stopped falling.

It did not rise. But it stopped.

Her breath broke against the wall of her teeth and came out as something raw.

"There. There, you see? You stubborn, stubborn thing." Tears she had not noticed gathering were already on her face, and she did not have the dignity left to be ashamed of them. "Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare, Finn. Don’t you dare die on me—"

She had never said his name before. Not once. Not out loud.

It came out wrong. It came out cracked and small and wholly unlike her, and she hated the sound of it, but she said it again anyway.

"Finn. Wake up." 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

The Knight took a step. She felt the marble shudder.

"You don’t get to leave," She said. "Not now. Not after giving me hope. Wake up. Wake up. WAKE UP—"

☼☼☼

He was twelve.

There was no transition. One moment he was in the boss room, and the next he was standing on the linoleum of the kitchen, his school bag at his feet, and the air smelled the way it had smelled that day.

Burnt toast from the morning. Old cigarette smoke from the night before. A faint trace of his mother’s perfume, the cheap one, the one she’d bought because the real one had stopped fitting into the household budget two years ago.

The kitchen window was the wrong colour.

He noticed that first. The afternoon sun came in through it the way it always had, that long honeyed slant across the table and the chipped enamel of the sink, but the gold of it was a fraction too warm, the way memory makes things warmer than they were.

Real sunlight had edges. This didn’t.

This was a dream. Or something close to one. So he knew what came next.

The bathroom door was closed at the end of the hall.

He didn’t have to go in. He had been in. He had been in every night for six years, the way you keep going into a room in your own head because the part of you that lives there hasn’t been told it’s allowed to leave.

He sat down at the kitchen table instead.

The chair scraped the linoleum exactly the way it always had.

"You’d think," he said to the empty room, "after a while, this would get less."

It didn’t, of course. The bathroom door was still there. He could feel its weight at the end of the hallway, the same way you can feel a tooth that hasn’t started hurting yet but is going to.

He looked down at his hands.

They were his hands at fourteen. Smaller than he was used to. The knuckles of the right one were skinned, and there was a thin half-moon of dried blood under the nail of his index finger that he had not been able to scrub out for three days after.

He hadn’t meant to.

That was the thing nobody ever quite believed, and the thing he had stopped trying to explain by the time he was sixteen. He hadn’t meant to.

His father had come home the way his father came home, and his mother had been on the kitchen floor again the way his mother had been on the kitchen floor before,

Finn had been twelve and skinny and a head shorter than the man who was kicking her, and he had picked up the thing that was nearest, which turned out to be the heavy iron skillet from the stovetop, and he had swung it.

He had only swung it once. He remembered that very clearly, because afterwards he had stood in the kitchen with the skillet in his hand and counted, in his head, the number of times he had brought it down.

His father had gone down badly. The angle, the doctors said later, had been very unlucky. Finn had read the report when he was eighteen and old enough to request it. Unlucky was a word that did a great deal of work in a coroner’s report.

His mother had not screamed.

That was the other thing. She had stood in the doorway of the kitchen with one hand at her mouth, and she had looked at Finn, and her eyes had been a stranger’s eyes, and she had not screamed at all.

Three weeks later she had used the showerhead.

His sister, Ellie, eleven years old, Ellie who had hidden in the cupboard during the worst of it and who had come out only after the police had gone, Ellie had not screamed either.

She had waited. She had waited until the funeral, and then until the social worker had finished her paperwork, and then, on the night before she was due to be moved in with their aunt, she had stood in the doorway of Finn’s bedroom and she had said,

"You killed her."

"You killed Mum. You killed her by killing him. She would have stayed if you hadn’t done it. She would have stayed."

And then Ellie had gone, and the aunt had not been able to keep both of them, and the system had taken Finn instead, and somewhere along the way a girl who had once made him paper crowns out of magazine pages had stopped being his sister and started being a person who did not return his letters.

He had not seen her in six years.

He looked down at his hands at the kitchen table, and he said, to no one, very quietly:

"Mum."

The empty kitchen did not answer.

"Mum, I did it for you."

The sun through the window did not move.

"I killed him for you. So why couldn’t you stay? Why couldn’t you —"

His voice cracked, and he was furious at it, the way he had been furious at it for six years.

"— why didn’t you choose me back?"

The kitchen was silent.

It was always silent. That was the thing about this dream. It had no other people in it. His mother was never at the table. His sister was never in the doorway. Even his father, who had so reliably been everywhere in this house when Finn was alive in it, was never anywhere in the dream. J

It was just Finn, and the chair, and the bathroom door at the end of the hall.

"I just wanted you to stay," he said into his hands.

"I know."

He did not look up at first. The voice had come from behind him. It was a voice he knew, and it should not have been here, because this place did not have other people in it, and he was not ready to look up and find the chair next to him empty.

Then a hand touched his shoulder.

"Bearer."