The noodle steam hit her first.
That was always the trick of Tier 88, the way the smell of broth and scorched oil masked everything underneath, every transaction, every secret, every lie traded between mouthfuls of synth-protein. Cassia Venn stepped through the gap between the vendor's cart and a dented service hatch, letting her eyes adjust to a gloom that smelled of grease and old paper and something faintly metallic, like coins left too long in rain.
The hatch groaned behind her. Ahead, a curtain of strung beads clattered once as she parted it, each bead striking its neighbor with a sound like small bones settling, and then she was inside.
The shop was smaller than she remembered. Or perhaps she had grown larger in the months since her last visit, in ways she could not measure on a scale. Shelves climbed three of the four walls, crammed with objects she could not name: glass jars filled with amber liquid, their contents floating in lazy spirals that suggested viscosity and refused it; a rack of dried botanical specimens that might have been herbs or might have been small mummified creatures, pinned in place with tarnished needles; a tray of rings, each one set with a different stone that pulsed with its own faint, sourceless light, the colors shifting in slow gradients she could not predict. A single bulb hung from a wire overhead. Its filament flickered at a frequency that made her back teeth ache, and the ache spread up into the bones of her skull.
Yorin Castellan stood behind a counter made from what appeared to be a repurposed airlock door, its surface scarred with circular weld marks and the ghosts of pressure gauges. He was watching her.
His eyes caught the light.
That was the thing she could never get used to. The mirrored lenses he wore, or that had been grafted into him, she had never been entirely sure which, reflected the shop's cluttered interior in miniature. But the reflections sat wrong. His pupils tracked left toward the shelf of jars, and the reflections slid a fraction of a second later, catching up like echoes arriving out of sequence, a delay no human eye should possess.
"Cassia." His voice was warm the way good coffee was warm, a low heat that promised comfort and threatened to scald. "You look tired."
"I am tired." She did not move toward the counter. Her boots stayed planted on the warped floorboards, which gave a faint creak beneath her weight, the kind of complaint only old wood made. "You said you had news."
"I have many kinds of news." He lifted a cloth from the counter and folded it once, precisely, the way a surgeon might fold a drape before an incision. "Some of it is better priced by weight. Some by silence. You know my rates."
"I know your rates are criminal."
"My rates are competitive. The market is criminal. I merely participate." The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile. "Close the curtain behind you, please. The broth sellers have ears, and one of them owes me a favor I would prefer not to spend on your visit."
She turned and pulled the bead curtain back into place. The beads clicked against each other, a sound like teeth in a cold mouth, and when she faced him again, he had moved a step to his left, and now his shoulder was to a shelf of small wooden boxes, each one lacquered in a different dark color: oxblood, beetle green, the black of a pupil, the black of deep water.
"You said you wanted to see it," he said.
"I didn't say that. I asked if you had heard of it."
"And I said I had. And I asked to see it." He tilted his head, and the reflections in his eyes performed their strange delayed dance, sliding across his irises like weather across a small strange country. "So. Did you bring it?"
Cassia reached into the inner pocket of her jacket. The sphere was warm against her fingers, warmer than it had any right to be in a shop this cold, where her breath hung in faint gray plumes and the metal shelves wept a thin film of condensation. She could feel its weight, which was wrong too. Heavier than its size suggested, as though it carried something compressed inside it, something that wanted out. Her thumb found a hairline groove in its surface and traced it, a spiral that tightened as it approached the sphere's center. She did not take it out. Not yet.
"Tell me what you know first."
"I know it is not obsidian. Or rather, it is obsidian, but not only that." He folded the cloth again, a second precise crease. "I know three buyers who would each pay triple market rate for it, and none of them would flinch at the price. I know one of them is currently in this tier, which means the window for a private transaction is narrow. I know that if you walk out of this shop without selling it to me tonight, you will not sell it at all, because by morning it will be noticed by people whose methods are not so polite as mine, and who do not bother with rates."
Her jaw tightened. She did not like being managed. She liked it less when he was right.
"Triple market," she said. "For a stone I pulled out of a collapsed transit tunnel with my own hands."
"For a stone that hums at a frequency only certain instruments can detect, and certain people can hear." His voice softened, the slight Mediterranean lilt surfacing the way it always did when he was being precise about something he found beautiful. "For a stone that one of my buyers believes is a piece of what the old records call the Pattern. Whether or not that is true, and I am not saying it is, the belief alone carries a price. As belief always does. As it has since the first human looked up at a sky they did not understand and decided to be afraid."
The bulb above them flickered. In the half-second of darkness, she thought she saw his pupils glow, a faint amber, deep and steady as banked coals. When the light returned his eyes were only mirrors again, reflecting her face back at her in two small warped ovals.
"Show me," he said.
She set the sphere on the counter.
It sat there, black and perfect, no larger than a plum, and the shop seemed to contract around it. The smell of old paper receded. The flicker of the bulb steadied, as though the sphere had spoken to it in some language filaments understood. Even the ambient hum of the tier, the constant low groan of ventilation and distant machinery that she had stopped hearing years ago, seemed to pull back. The way a crowd pulls back from something they do not understand. The way she had pulled back, the night Mira had not come home.
Yorin did not touch it. He leaned forward, studying it the way a jeweler studies a suspect stone, and his breath did not fog its surface, though hers did, a thin gray bloom that faded before it reached the glass-black skin of the thing. The reflections in his lenses now showed only the sphere, doubled, tripling back on itself at angles that should have been impossible. She watched his pupils move and the reflections lag and thought of a dog watching itself in a pond.
"It is warm," he said, though his hands were at his sides, palms open, fingers slightly curled. "I can feel it from here."
"Yes."
"It is heavier than it looks."
"Yes."
"It is singing." He said this softly, almost reverently, the way a man might speak in a cathedral, or at a grave. "Can you hear it?"
Cassia listened. She closed her eyes, and underneath the shop's creaks, underneath the distant clatter of the noodle stall where a vendor was hawking a synth-boar special in a voice like a rusted hinge, she caught it. A tone. Not quite a sound, more the memory of a sound, a vibration that seemed to start in her inner ear and settle somewhere behind her sternum, in the soft architecture of her chest. It was low. It was patient. It was the kind of note a bell might make if bells could grieve.
"I hear it," she said.
"Good." He straightened. His hands rose, hovered, and then settled again on the counter on either side of the sphere, not touching it, framing it. "That means you are one of the ones it calls to. I had suspected. From your file, from the way you described the collapse in your report, from certain phrases you used that you perhaps did not notice you used." He paused. "From your sister."
The word landed like a slap.
"Do not," Cassia said, and her voice dropped into that low rasp she hated, the one that betrayed her, the one Mira used to tease her about by mimicking it at breakfast until Cassia threw a dish towel at her, "speak about her."
"I am not speaking about her." His tone did not change, but something behind his eyes did, a flicker that had nothing to do with the bulb. "I am speaking about what she left behind. There is a difference, Cassia, and you know it. You have always known it. That is why you are here, and not at the office, and not at home, and not asleep, which is where anyone sensible would be at this hour in this tier."
She stared at him. The sphere sat between them, warm and black and patient, and the hum behind her sternum deepened by a single degree.
"You're offering more than triple," she said. "What do you want in return?"
"Information." He folded the cloth one more time and set it aside, a perfect square on the scarred counter. "A single conversation. After the sale. No recording, no report filed. No entry in any ledger. Just two colleagues who have known each other a long time, sitting across from each other somewhere quieter than this, and talking about what the Pattern might be, and what it might want, and whether what happened to Mira was an accident or an invitation."
The bulb flickered again. The sphere did not.
Cassia's hand hovered over it. The groove spiraled beneath her thumb, tightening, tightening, and the hum in her chest was no longer quite a hum. It had acquired an edge, a shape, almost a voice, and in its furthest fold she thought she heard her sister's name spoken in a register that was not quite sound, a syllable pressed against the inside of her ribs like a palm against a window from the other side.
She did not pick up the sphere. Not yet.
"You said the window was narrow," she said.
"It is."
"Then talk faster."
Yorin's mouth curved, just barely, and the reflections in his eyes finally caught up with his pupils, both of them, at the same instant, looking at her with the same expression, which was the first time she had seen them agree all night.
"Tell me everything," he said. "From the beginning. From the tunnel."
ia did not sit back down. She turned toward the window, or what passed for a window in this sublevel: a rectangle of polymer scarred by decades of weather it had never seen, behind which the service corridor hummed with the breath of the recycling pumps. Her reflection stared back at her, older by a year than she had been this morning, and that was the only honest thing in the room besides Yorin and the sphere.
"The tunnel," she said. "Sublevel 41. Mira went in on the seventh of last month. Standard sweep. She'd logged seventeen minutes of passive observation when her tracker went dark. Not damaged. Not jammed. It went soft, like a hand unclenching."
Yorin did not move. The bulb above them guttered, steadied, guttered again, and the shadows in his face rearranged themselves into a patience she did not trust.
"The Corp marked the section quarantine within the hour," she said. "I was two sectors away, finishing a noise complaint that turned out to be a migrating flock of maintenance drones. By the time I cleared their perimeter tape, Mira's entry log had been sealed under a Level 3 advisory. I have never, in eleven years with this organization, seen a Level 3 advisory applied to a missing persons file."
"You filed for access."
"I filed. I waited. I filed again. I bribed a clerk in Records with two weeks of coffee ration. The file came back with three pages redacted and a note from Compliance recommending I redirect my attention to 'active investigations.'"
"The compliance officers," Yorin said softly, "who visited you this evening."
She looked at him sharply. The bulb chose that moment to flare, and in the sudden brightness the sphere on the counter seemed to lean toward her, just slightly, the way a sleeping thing adjusts itself toward warmth.
"You know about them."
"I know they were dispatched. I know their names were on the rotation three days ago, which means someone advanced the schedule. I know they will ask you about the tunnel. They will be polite. They will be very polite, Cassia. That is the part you must not confuse with safety."
The pump behind the polymer window hitched, coughed, resumed. Somewhere deeper in the sublevel, a relay clicked twice and was silent. The hum behind Cassia's sternum answered both sounds with a single low tone, as if her body had become an instrument she did not remember learning to play.
She turned from the window. She looked at the sphere, and then at Yorin, and then at the door, and then at the sphere again.
"Finish your story another night," she said. "I have a meeting to dress for."
---
The hab was on the thirty-fourth floor of a stack-tower in Sector 9, one of the older verticals that the Corp had stopped pretending to maintain and started pretending to monitor. Cassia took the freight lift because the passenger lift had been chirping a fault code since Tuesday and she did not want to be remembered by the building's logging system on a night like this. The freight lift smelled of hydraulic oil and the particular staleness of recycled air that had been recycled one time too many, and the walls were tagged with a glyph she did not recognize, which meant it was new, which meant someone below her in the stack was reading.
She keyed into her hab at 18:47. The door sighed open onto the dark.
She did not turn on the overhead. She set her bag on the hook, slid her jacket off and laid it across the back of the single chair, and walked to the kitchen alcove on the balls of her feet, the way Mira had taught her when they were children in a much smaller stack, playing a game whose rules she could no longer remember except that silence was the point.
The kettle was where she had left it. The mug was where she had left it. The note she had left on the counter for herself, a single line in her own handwriting: do not forget the quartermaster's chit, was still there. She looked at it for a long moment and then put the kettle on.
The knock, when it came, was at 19:03. Two soft knocks, evenly spaced, the polite knock of people who had been trained to begin every interaction as if they were doing you a favor by arriving.
Cassia turned the kettle off. She wiped her hands on a cloth that was not clean. She walked to the door and opened it.
Two figures stood in the corridor, framed by the sickly amber of the stack's emergency lighting. Their armor was graphite over graphite, the layered kind that absorbed light instead of reflecting it, so that the seams between plates seemed to float in midair like the outlines of a body that had not quite decided to be there. The taller of the two had a voice box at her throat that hummed faintly even when she was not speaking. The shorter one carried a folio of actual paper, which was unusual enough to be worth noticing, and which smelled faintly of the sub-basement archives where paper still existed in ledgers too old to digitize.
"Ms. Venn," the taller one said. "I am Compliance Officer Thenn. This is Compliance Officer Vasik. We apologize for the hour. May we come in?"
The politeness was a kind of armor too. Cassia recognized the cut of it. She had worn it herself, in another life, before Mira, before the organization, before the hum.
"Of course," she said. "Please."
They entered the way water enters a glass, without hurry and without wasted motion. Thenn took the chair after a glance that asked permission. Vasik did not sit. Vasik stood by the window, which in this hab was a real window, a narrow slit of true exterior view, and looked out at the vertical stack with the expression of someone counting exits.
"I will be brief," Thenn said. Her voice box made the vowels round and warm, a studied comfort that Cassia noted and filed. "We are conducting a routine review of research materials associated with former personnel of your organization. Specifically, materials attributed to your sister, Mira Venn."
"My sister is missing."
"Yes. We are aware."
The folio opened. The paper inside was pale, almost cream, and Vasik did not turn around but the rustle of it was audible in the room like the turn of a leaf.
"On the seventh of last month," Thenn continued, "your sister entered sublevel 41 for what was logged as a passive observation sweep. Her instruments recorded seventeen minutes of data before transmission ceased. We have recovered partial logs from the corridor relay. Among them is a reference to 'anomalous readings' that does not match any classification in our current indices."
She paused. The pause was not empty. It was shaped, the way a good question is shaped, with room for an answer to fall into.
"We have been authorized to inquire," Thenn said, "whether you possess any of your sister's personal research notes, whether you have discussed the readings with any other member of your organization, and whether you would be willing to accompany us to the Compliance offices on the seventeenth floor for a more thorough conversation."
Vasik, at the window, turned just enough that the amber light caught the edge of her jaw. The folio in her hands was closed now. The hum behind Cassia's sternum chose that moment to sharpen, to become a single clear tone, and in that tone she thought she heard a word, or the ghost of a word, that might have been stay.
"The notes are in storage," Cassia said. Her voice was smooth. Underneath it, somewhere, a thin wire was pulled taut. "I will need to retrieve them. I can bring them to the seventeenth floor tomorrow morning, if that suits your schedule."
"It would be our preference," Thenn said, "to wait while you retrieve them now."
"Then you will be waiting a long time. The storage facility is in Sector 3. I do not have after-hours clearance."
The two officers looked at each other. The look lasted less than a second and contained, Cassia suspected, an entire procedural manual.
"Tomorrow morning, then," Thenn said. "Ninth bell. The reception desk will expect you."
She rose. Vasik did not move from the window immediately. The amber light caught the graphite of her armor and held it, and for a moment the outline of her seemed less like a person and more like a seam in the wall, a place where one thing ended and another had not yet begun.
"Ms. Venn," Vasik said, without turning. "A final question. Has your sister ever spoken to you about the Pattern?"
The hum in Cassia's chest went silent. Not quieter. Silent. The kind of silence that has weight.
"I do not know what that is," Cassia said.
Vasik turned then. The folio was tucked under one arm. The smile she offered was small, and professional, and did not reach the part of her face where smiles live.
"Of course," Vasik said. "Thank you for your time."
They left. The door closed. The hum returned, slowly, like a tide coming back in, and in its lowest register Cassia could have sworn she heard her own name, spoken in a voice she almost recognized, from a place she had not yet been.
She did not move for a long time. The kettle sat cold on the counter. The note she had left herself was still there, and the handwriting, she noticed, was not quite hers.
sat where she had left it. The note sat where she had left it. The handwriting, she saw now in the steadier light of her own kitchen, was not hers, and yet it was. The pen had been hers. The paper had been hers. The shape of the letters had been trained by the same hand that held the pen, and so the imitation was not quite perfect. The downstroke on the V leaned the wrong way. The cross of the T sat too high.
Cassia stood for a long time in the middle of the room, listening to the building settle. A pipe ticked in the wall behind the stove. The floor under the sink had a soft, perpetual complaint, a creak she had memorized years ago and now could not unhear.
The sphere sat in its velvet cradle on the counter.
She did not approach it. Not yet. She walked to the window instead. Outside, the lower city was doing what the lower city always did at this hour, which was to pretend to be asleep while remaining, in every particular, awake. A transport hummed past three stories down, its headlights sweeping the wet cobbles. Somewhere a door closed. Somewhere a voice rose in a language she did not recognize, singing what sounded like a lullaby, and then fell silent.
She thought about Yorin. She thought about his offer. She thought about the way his hand had closed over hers at the door of the storage facility, the warmth of it through her glove, the brief pressure of his fingers against her knuckles, the way he had looked at her when he said the word sister.
I can bring her through, Cassia. I can bring her back to you.
She had not answered him then. She had taken the sphere in its cradle, signed the receipt he had not asked her to sign, and walked out of the building under the amber lamps, and the weight of it in her arms had felt heavier than any artifact she had ever carried, including the bone flute in the Varre collection, including the glass eye of the Saint of Lost Things.
She set it down. She walked home. She boiled the kettle and did not drink the tea.
Now she stood at the window and let the refusal form in her chest, because that was where refusals formed for her, not in her head. Her head was good at lists, at procedures, at the precise angle of a thing held to the light. Her chest was where the no lived.
She thought about the way Yorin had smiled when she had asked him what it cost. He had smiled the way a man smiles when he has already paid a thing and knows you have not, and does not wish to make you feel the weight of his paying. She thought about his hands on the lid of the crate, the care with which he had lifted it, the reverence, and the fear underneath the reverence, which she had recognized because she had seen it in herself, once, in a mirror, on the morning of the day Mira had not come home.
She picked up the sphere.
It was warm. Not warm in the way of a thing that had been held. Warm in the way of a thing that had been waiting. The warmth traveled up through her palm, into the bones of her wrist, into the softer architecture of her forearm, and settled somewhere behind her sternum like a second pulse.
She closed her hand around it.
The note on the counter fluttered.
Cassia.
She did not jump. She did not flinch. She stood very still, and the name she heard was not spoken, and yet it was spoken. It arrived in her ear the way certain smells arrive in memory, whole and without warning, and with it came the smell of her mother's kitchen on a winter morning, the steam from the kettle, the sound of Mira laughing at something Cassia had said, the particular weight of being known by someone who did not need to ask your name to find you in a room.
Cassia, the voice said again, and this time it was not her mother's kitchen. It was Mira. It was Mira's voice, but younger, but older, but both, and there was a sound under it like the wind through tall grass, like the hum of the amber lamps outside, like the low complaint of the floor under the sink.
Mira said, Don't give it to him.
Cassia opened her eyes. She did not remember closing them.
The kitchen was the kitchen. The note sat where it sat. The kettle sat where it sat. The building ticked and complained and went on being a building.
But the sphere in her hand was no longer warm. It was hot. It was the temperature of a living thing, of a held hand, of a forehead checked for fever, and under her fingers the surface, which had been smooth, which had been the smoothness of a river stone, was moving. Not spinning. Not vibrating. Moving the way breath moves under skin, the way the chest of a sleeping animal moves, slow and certain and alive.
She held it tighter.
The light in the kitchen changed. Not the color. The quality. It became thinner, more expensive, the kind of light that costs something to look at. The shadow of the kettle on the counter sharpened. The shadow of the sink divided into pieces. The shadow of Cassia's own hand, wrapped around the sphere, became longer than the hand, longer than the arm, longer than the room, and reached across the counter and up the wall and across the ceiling, and at the far end of the shadow there was a shape she could not quite see.
Mira, she said. Her voice came out rough. Her voice came out the way it always came out when she was afraid, which was to say, the way it came out when she was most herself.
The shape in the shadow turned.
Cassia.
This time it was not a voice. It was a presence. It was the feeling of Mira standing just behind her left shoulder, close enough that Cassia could feel the warmth of her, close enough that she could smell her, which was impossible, because Mira had not been in this apartment in two years, and the soap Mira had used was no longer made, and yet the smell was there, lavender and something sharper beneath it, the smell of Mira's hair on a pillow, the smell of Mira after she had been crying, the smell of Mira at the moment of her leaving.
Cassia turned.
The kitchen was gone.
Not replaced. Gone. Cassia stood in a place that had no walls, no floor, no ceiling. The light was white, but not the white of snow or
...milk or paper. It was the white of listening. It was the white that comes after a bell has been struck and before the sound returns. It pressed against Cassia's skin the way deep water presses, not painful but present, and she could feel it in her molars and behind her eyes and in the hollow of her throat where her pulse lived.
The sphere was still in her hand.
She looked down at it. In this white, it no longer looked like moonlight. It looked like a held breath. It looked like the pause between two heartbeats. It looked like the space where a word should have been and wasn't.
Mira, Cassia said again, because the name was the only currency she trusted.
You came.
The voice arrived from everywhere and nowhere, and Mira stood in the white the way a candle stands in a room that is too large, small and impossibly steady. She was not as Cassia remembered her, and she was not different. She was thinner, or the light was thinner. Her hair moved when there was no wind to move it. Her eyes were the color of water seen through water.
I couldn't before, Cassia said. The words felt heavy in her mouth, heavy with every failed attempt and every locked door and every night she had lain awake in this apartment listening for a sound that never came. I tried. I have been trying.
I know.
Mira's voice had the quality of something heard through a long hallway, or through a year, or through the kind of distance that is not measured in miles. It was not unkind. It was not accusing. It was simply far.
Where are you? Cassia asked. The question came out rough, the way questions come out when they have been held too long in the chest.
Mira tilted her head. The gesture was so familiar, so precisely Mira, that Cassia's hands ached with it. Somewhere, Mira said, and the word somewhere seemed to spread and thin until it became a place of its own, a country with no borders. Somewhere the Pattern keeps its quiet things. Somewhere I have been learning to speak in its language, because it is the only language it will answer to.
Cassia stepped forward. The white gave under her foot the way snow gives, except it was not cold and it was not wet and it did not remember her weight afterward. Mira, she said. Tell me what to do.
Mira smiled. The smile was the worst thing Cassia had ever seen, because it was Mira's smile, exactly Mira's smile, the one that started on the left side of her mouth and then caught up on the right, except that it carried with it the knowledge of something Cassia did not yet know, and could not bear to learn, and had to learn anyway.
You are doing it, Mira said.
Cassia stopped. The sphere pulsed in her hand, warm now, warmer than it should have been, warm the way Mira's forehead had been warm the summer she was seven and had burned with a fever for three days and refused to let anyone but Cassia sit beside her. I don't understand.
You don't have to. Not yet. That is the mercy of the Pattern. It gives you what you need before it gives you what you need to understand.
The white shifted. Somewhere in it, far away or very close, a sound like a door closing. Somewhere else, the sound of rain on a window in a house that no longer existed. The sphere was brighter now, and Cassia realized that it was not the sphere that was bright, but Mira, and Mira was not bright because she was radiant, but because she was becoming less solid, her edges softening the way the edges of a photograph soften when you hold it too close to a lamp.
No, Cassia said. Don't.
I have to go back, Mira said. Her voice was quieter now, more distant, the reverberation in it fading like the last note of a bell. The broker will only let me stay this long. I traded for the time.
Traded what?
Mira looked at her then with an expression that Cassia would carry in her chest for the rest of her life, an expression that held love and apology and a terrible, gentle knowledge. The usual things, Mira said. The things I thought I couldn't live without. Turns out I can. Turns out they're lighter than I believed.
Cassia reached for her. Her hand passed through the space where Mira had been and met only the white, which was warm, which was the temperature of a hand held for a long time.
Listen to Yorin, Mira said, and her voice was almost gone, almost nothing, almost the memory of a voice. He knows more than he has told you. He has been waiting for you to be ready to hear it. You are ready now. Or you are close enough.
Mira.
Find me, Cassia. Please.
The white dissolved. It did not fade. It did not retreat. It opened, like a hand opening, like a door that had never been locked, like the eyes of someone waking from a long sleep. The kitchen came back around Cassia in pieces. First the counter under her palm, cool and real and smelling of lemon cleanser. Then the hum of the refrigerator, steady and indifferent. Then the small sounds of the building settling, the pipes, the neighbor's television two floors up, a dog barking three streets away, all the ordinary machinery of a world that continued to turn while she had been elsewhere.
The sphere was gone.
Her hand was closed around nothing. Her fingers ached with the memory of holding it. She opened her hand and looked at her palm, and there, faint as a watermark, as a mark left by something pressed against the skin for a long time, was a circle of light that was not quite a circle and not quite a light and not quite gone.
She closed her hand again.
The kettle sat on the stove, still cold. The apartment was dim, the kind of dim that meant she had been standing here longer than she thought, longer than the clock on the wall would later confirm. Her phone buzzed on the counter. A text from Yorin, three words, sent forty seconds ago.
Come to the office.
Cassia looked at the message. She looked at her hand. She looked at the place on the counter where the sphere had been, where there was nothing now, where there was only the faintest warmth, like a footprint left in snow that has not yet decided whether to melt.
She picked up her coat from the back of the chair. She did not put it on. She held it over her arm the way her mother used to, as a child, before they had learned to be careful in different cities. She checked the lock on the door. She checked it twice. She turned off the light in the kitchen and stood for a moment in the dark hallway of her own apartment, listening to the quiet, which was no longer quite so quiet, which now carried in it the faintest thread of something else, something patient, something that sounded, if she let herself hear it, if she allowed herself to believe, like her sister's breathing.
She opened the door.
The hallway smelled of other people's dinners, and dust, and the faint chemical sweetness of the cleaner the super used on Tuesdays. Cassia stepped into it and pulled the door shut behind her, and the lock caught with the small certain sound of a thing doing what it was made to do, and she walked toward the stairs, toward the street, toward Yorin, toward whatever came next, with the circle of light still printed on her palm and the word please still warm in the place where her sister had set it down.