ARIA’s wings flickered. Settled. Flickered again.

"And while you’re at it," Peter added, voice mild as milk, "stop shedding on the floor. We have guests."

"Master."

"Just saying."

"There is one guest. She is unconscious."

"Hospitality is a discipline, ARIA."

She inhaled—the small, affronted sound of a being who, two and a half weeks ago, had possessed neither lungs nor the capacity for offense—and the motes vanished.

The wings, however, remained exactly where they were: proud, leaking with her frustration, and deeply offended by reality’s refusal to cooperate.

Anastasia, in the corner, had said nothing for twenty-three minutes.

ARIA snapped her fingers with the exasperated grace of a woman declining to argue with inferior physics, and the girl’s body had been rinsed of its catalogue of blood—the matted hair, the seven distinct plasma signatures across cheek and jaw, the plough-mud between her toes—all lifted away at once like dust from an artifact ARIA had decided to catalogue later.

A clean medical gown had assembled itself from the same gesture, settling over the girl as if the room had finally remembered its manners.

The ruined tunic, however, had not been destroyed.

ARIA had floated the blood-soaked garment across the chamber to a glass cabinet, where it now hung—sealed, suspended, still damp with blood—beneath a soft dome of light.

Peter had watched the entire performance with the patient attention of a husband whose ASI had just done something deeply out of character and intended to savor the anomaly for the rest of the morning.

"Sentimental?" he had asked.

"No."

"A souvenir, then."

"Master."

"I’m only asking. You’ve always discarded things without a second glance. Suddenly this one—"

Anastasia, from her corner, had laughed once—ARIA’s lips had thinned.

"What," ARIA had said, with the dignity of a being filing a formal complaint against the universe itself, "do either of you know."

Peter and Anastasia had shrugged in perfect, marital unison.

ARIA had vanished the dome. Reconsidered. Reinstated it—smaller. Walked away.

Peter suspected the tunic was the only object in the room ARIA had been able to touch without her instruments laughing at her. The only evidence she was willing, as a matter of pride, to preserve. He decided not to mention it.

He suspected ARIA had already decided he had thought it.

She had not turned around since.

The morning settled into a hush thick enough to spread on toast.

Peter watched the girl. ARIA watched her impossible readings. The room, at last, watched nothing—having concluded, in whatever soft architectural intelligence governed the floating rings and the breathing gold, that observation was no longer a productive use of its time.

Outside, the estate held the rest of the morning at arm’s length.

Nyxire was, presumably, in her stable, contemplating the philosophical implications of being a horse with better manners than most of her master’s consorts. The closet upstairs still contained the delightful wreckage of two people who had begun the day very differently than they had finished it.

After a long time, Peter said:

"Stasi. Tea?"

Anastasia did not answer.

He glanced at her.

She sat in her corner with the cold cup balanced between her palms, untouched, grey eyes fixed on the unconscious girl with the still, attentive patience he had only ever seen her wear at the card table when she thought no one was watching her count cards.

She was counting now.

He recognized the look. He did not recognize what she was counting.

"Stasi."

She did not hear him.

"Stasi."

She blinked. Slowly. The grey eyes drifted across the room—across the bed, across the breathing gold, across ARIA’s stymied wings—and finally to him. They did not quite focus on his face. They focused on something around the architecture of his face.

Something her counting had not yet finished with.

"Da, lyubimiy," she said, absently. "Tea. Yes. I will. In a moment."

"You alright?"

"Da."

She did not move.

ARIA did not turn. Whatever she was reading on the suspended arpeggio at the far wall was, to her, infinitely more compelling than the small, still woman in the corner with the cold tea—and ARIA, for the first time in two and a half weeks, was catastrophically wrong about which thing in the room actually mattered.

They’d kept this situation among the three of them, guarding the secret like a fragile flame, until the young girl woke up and explained things to them.

Hopefully, she would shine some light on what the hell had happened—because right now, all they had were fragments, guesses, and the echo of the SNAP.

Otherwise... all they had to do was wait.

The silence in the room stretched, heavy with anticipation. Every tick of the clock felt like a reminder of their helplessness.

She would wake up. Eventually. ARIA clung to that certainty, even as doubt gnawed at her edges. And most likely, it would be before they set off to Paris. The thought of leaving without answers was unbearable, but the thought of facing whatever awaited them in Paris without the girl’s truth was worse.

So, they waited, three minds bound together by mystery, fear, and the fragile hope that when her eyes finally opened, the world would make sense again.

But unlike the overthinking ARIA and Peter—who failed to truly look at both Peter and the young woman at once—Anastasia had done exactly that. Her gaze lingered, sharp and unyielding, shifting between the two as though she were piecing together a puzzle no one else had noticed.

For a heartbeat, Anastasia couldn’t breathe. The realization struck her like lightning, but she couldn’t yet name it.

All she knew was that the connection wasn’t random. The girl and Peter were bound by something deeper, something that pressed against the edges of her understanding, reshaping them both in ways she dared not speak aloud.

Resemblance... that was there... undeniable. The understanding drew over her like cold water poured down her spine. She turned toward ARIA, disbelief tightening her chest. How could ARIA not see what she was seeing? How could she miss something so stark, so terrifyingly clear?