I stepped out the front entrance of the Whitesun Hotel scanning the area out of habit before anything else.

"Has anyone seen Sydney?"

A few heads turned. The people nearest to me exchanged glances, a small ripple of I-don’t-knows passing between them, a couple of shrugs. Nobody had anything useful. I kept moving, working my way through the people who were up and active, asking as I went, one of the guys hauling supplies hadn’t seen her, the woman near the east corner wasn’t sure, and then finally someone mentioned they’d seen her heading off down the road a while back, carrying a shovel.

That narrowed it down.

I followed the direction he pointed and, after a moment, stopped trying to track her with my eyes and used something more reliable instead. Dullahan’s senses weren’t a tool I reached for casually, there was always something slightly unsettling about the way they stretched your perception outward, made the world feel like it had more edges than it should. But Sydney carried a piece of Dullahan the same as I did, and that created a thread between us that, if I paid attention to it carefully enough, I could follow. It wasn’t sharp or immediate, more like a pull in a specific direction, a compass needle made of something I didn’t have a good word for.

I followed it.

The path took me further than I expected, away from the denser part of the settlement and toward a large office building that sat further along the street, broad and blocky, the kind of structure that had probably housed hundreds of people doing forgettable work before the world decided it had other plans. I was heading for the main entrance when I spotted a smaller side portal nearby, a gate opening into a parking area that led around to the back. I took it instead, the gravel crunching quietly under my feet as I came around to the rear of the building.

I stopped.

Sydney was there.

The backyard opened up behind the building into what had probably been a decorative green space once, a wide parcel of grass and soil, the kind of thing office buildings planted to give people somewhere to eat lunch and feel briefly like the outdoors existed. She was standing in the middle of it with a shovel, working at the earth with steady strokes. Digging down, lifting, turning.

Behind her, laid carefully on the grass, was something wrapped in white cloth.

I didn’t need to look closer to know what it was.

I stood at the edge of the yard for a moment without announcing myself, watching her work. Her expression was set hard, not angry exactly, just locked down, all the usual animation of her face pressed flat by whatever she was holding. She’d pushed her sleeves up. There was a thin sheen of sweat along her hairline. The shovel bit into the ground and she drove it deeper and kept at it.

I walked toward her.

"Sydney."

She paused for just a fraction of a second and then kept going.

"I’m a bit busy, Ryan," she said. She didn’t look up from the ground. "Come back later. I’ll make it worth your while, we can have some nice post-burial sexual activities." The small smirk came through even in her voice, even now.

I didn’t take the deflection.

I crossed the remaining distance and came to stand directly behind her, close enough that the edge of the joke lost whatever cover it had. She kept digging, maybe faster now, or maybe that was me reading into it and I reached out and closed my hand around her arm.

"Sydney."

The shovel stopped. She drove it into the earth and left it there, upright, and turned to face me.

"I’m fine, Ryan."

She was smiling. And I had known Sydney long enough, spent enough time in her orbit, to have catalogued every version of that smile, the real one, the teasing one, the sharp one she wore when she was enjoying herself at someone else’s expense. I knew the one she put on when she was deciding something, and the one she wore right after she’d already decided. I knew the smile that meant she was really happy and the one that was just a habit she kept because it was easier than not.

This one I hadn’t seen before.

It was bitter in a way that the others weren’t. Quiet in a way that didn’t suit her.

"Are you," I said.

It wasn’t really a question. She heard it the way it was meant.

Her eyes moved to the white-wrapped figure behind her, the gaze staying there for a moment before she pulled it back. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

"It had to be done," she said.

"It did," I said. "Christopher or her, there wasn’t a third option in that room. You made the only call you could."

"She didn’t deserve it though," she said. "She was being controlled. Gaspar was pulling her strings and she couldn’t do anything about it. If we’d just had more time—" She stopped. Pressed her lips together briefly. "We could have gotten her free of him eventually. That was possible. She wasn’t gone, she was just trapped."

"Perhaps—"

"We could have!" The words came fast and sharp, and she turned her eyes to me with something in them I wasn’t used to seeing there, her gaze trembling slightly. "We could have, right? That’s... that’s why you brought her with us, isn’t it? You believed she could be reached. She believed it too. She was glad to be out of his hands, Ryan, she was — " Her jaw tightened, the words catching. "She was happy."

I lifted my hand and brought it gently to her cheek.

She went still.

Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

Sydney, who moved through everything with an energy as if the world couldn’t quite touch her. Sydney, who turned pain into jokes and distance into charm and made it look so easy you could forget it was something she was doing purposefully.

Still human. Still here. Still feeling it, all of it, the same as the rest of us.

"You acted to protect your friend," I said, quietly. "If I had been in that room instead of you, I would have done the same thing."

She shook her head laughing. "No you wouldn’t. You would have found another way. You always find another way, some angle nobody else thought of, some option that shouldn’t exist but does because you looked for it long enough."

"Sydney." I held her gaze. "Do you regret it?"

She looked at me. Really looked at me, for a long moment, and I watched something move through her face.

Then she shook her head. Slowly. Her lips were trembling, barely, just at the edges.

"That’s the worst part," she said, her voice coming out quieter than before. "I don’t. I don’t regret it. If I was standing there again right now, Christopher down there and Penny standing in front of him," She exhaled through her nose, something shaking loose in the sound of it. "I’d do it again. Every time. Does that make me — " She laughed, and it was a hollow, painful thing, nothing like her real laugh. "They’re right about me, aren’t they? I look at everything like it’s a game. I make the calculation and I don’t feel it the way I should. That’s not—" Her voice broke fractionally. "That’s not how a normal person—"

I closed the distance and kissed her.

She didn’t reciprocate fiercely how she normally would. She just received it. Stood there in the middle of the yard with the shovel in the ground and the white-wrapped figure behind her and let it land, let herself be still for one small moment inside of it.

I stayed there, close, for a few seconds before I pulled back.

A single tear ran down her left cheek.

I brought both hands up and cupped her face gently, tilting it toward mine, making sure she couldn’t look away or deflect or retreat into whatever version of herself she defaulted to when things got too real. She let me. That alone said something, Sydney, who always had a next move, who always had something to say or somewhere to redirect the energy, just letting me hold her face and look at her.

"You’re just Sydney," I said. I could feel a small smile pulling at my mouth and I didn’t try to stop it. "A little twisted in the head, I’ll give you that, I’m not going to pretend otherwise. A few screws loose, maybe more than a few. Sense of humor that would make a mortician uncomfortable." I held her eyes. "Appetite for chaos. More confidence than any one person has a reasonable right to carry around." I softened my voice. "And the strongest woman I have ever met in my life."

Her chin moved, just slightly. More tears came, quietly, tracing the same path down her cheeks, and she didn’t try to wipe them away or make a joke about it, which meant she really was letting herself be here right now, fully, without the armor.

"From the day I met you in that gymnasium," I said, "I watched you move through everything, every terrible thing, every impossible situation and I never once saw you break. Not the way I did. Not the way most people do." I let the words come carefully, not rushing them. "I broke. More than once. You saw it happen and you were still standing. That’s not because you don’t feel things, Sydney. That’s not what a hollow person looks like. A hollow person doesn’t stand over a grave they dug themselves for someone they tried to save. A hollow person doesn’t feel the weight of it the way you’re feeling it right now." I shook my head slightly. "That’s not heartless. That’s the furthest thing from it."

She was trembling very faintly under my hands. Barely perceptible, but there.

"And someone who would go that far for the people she loves, who would make that call in that moment so that Christopher could keep breathing—" I paused, feeling the truth of what I was about to say before I said it. "How could someone like that be heartless? How could someone who made me fall for her, completely and without warning, the first time I ever laid eyes on her, how could that person be anything close to heartless?"

Her breath caught.

I drew her in slowly, wrapping both arms around her, and she came without resistance, her head finding my chest and settling there, all the fierce, restless energy that usually animated her gone quiet for once. I brought one hand up to her hair and held her there, fingers moving gently through the black strands, and just let the silence sit around us.

"Penny wouldn’t have wanted it the other way," I said, after a moment, speaking softly into her hair. "She wasn’t the kind of person who would have been at peace knowing she stayed alive at the cost of someone else’s life. You knew that. Some part of you knew that when you made the call." I pressed my lips gently against the top of her head. "What matters is that we tried. You tried. You brought her out of his hands and gave her something better than what she had, even if it was only for a little while. That counts. That matters more than you’re letting it matter right now."

I felt the dampness spreading against my shirt where her face was pressed. Her hands had found the back of my shirt and her fingers were curled into it.

"And do you honestly think," I said, a quiet laugh moving through my chest, "that any of us are sitting somewhere thinking differently of you because of this? That any one of us looked at what you did and found something to hold against you?" I shook my head, my chin resting lightly against her hair. "We love you. That’s not a complicated thing, Sydney. It’s just true. You are family. You have been for longer than maybe you’ve let yourself believe."

I pulled her a little closer.

"And whatever I feel for you, it isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t shrinking. If anything—" I hugged her tighter against me. "The more time I spend with you, the more I learn about who you actually are underneath all that performance—" I felt something settle warm and certain in my chest. "The more I love you. That’s just the truth of it. Every hour. Every day. It just keeps going."

She didn’t say anything.

She just held on tighter, her fingers pressing harder into my back, and the tears came more freely now. I stayed exactly where I was, one hand in her hair, one arm firm and steady around her shoulders, and let her take as much time as she needed.

The yard was quiet around us. The shovel stood in the earth where she’d left it.