She was wearing the sleeping gown from the night before. Her silver hair had not been combed. The thin straps of the gown had slipped further down her shoulders during whatever had brought her here.

Her feet were bare on the pale stone path. There was a small, dark smear at the corner of her mouth. The smear was blood. Her eyes were red.

Kenji’s heart stopped. He dropped the practice sword. The blade hit the mat behind him without his having registered the loss of it. He crossed the yard in four strides. He picked up the shirt he had set on the bench at the edge of the mat.

He wrapped it around her shoulders without explanation, because explanation was the second thing on the list and the first thing was to cover her.

He pulled her into his chest. The warmth of her against his bare skin was immediate. He registered, distantly, the cool of the stone under his feet, the heat of her cheek against his sternum, and the small, unsteady tremble at the line of her shoulders.

None of the registrations mattered. The tears mattered.

"What happened?" His voice was lower than he meant it to be.

He wiped the corner of her eye with his thumb. The smear of blood at the corner of her mouth pressed faintly against the back of his hand. Ayla’s small fist closed in the fabric over his chest.

"Why did you leave without telling me?"

"Ayla."

"You always wait."

"I went to bring you a coffee."

The lie was clean. He had not been going to bring her a coffee. He had been going to walk the lower corridor until the small, unsteady thing in his chest had settled.

The coffee was, however, an answer that would land in her ear without making her ask the harder question. It worked, partially. It did not address the second source of the tears.

Ayla tilted her head. Her gaze slipped past his shoulder. The gaze settled, with the careful slowness of a creature that had decided the next move would be a violent one, on Amanda.

Amanda had stood up. She had been studying the small girl in the gown for the length of the exchange, and the study had not been the study of a stranger.

The study had been the study of a woman reading a situation. Her eyes moved across Ayla’s face. Her eyes moved across the silver hair, the gold eyes, and the small dimples already deepening on cue.

Her eyes moved, finally, across the smear of blood at the corner of Ayla’s mouth. A thought passed behind Amanda’s expression.

The thought was not careful.

’What a beautiful girl. Lucky she is his sister, or I would have lost my lapdog.’

Ayla, against Kenji’s chest, went very still. Kenji felt the stillness. He did not understand what had caused it. He understood only that the stillness was the stillness of a thing that had been carrying tears a second ago and was no longer.

He held her tighter.

"Ayla. This is Amanda. We grew up together."

"Sister." Amanda’s voice carried a small, amused weight on the second syllable. "It is a pleasure."

The word sister sat in the air like a small, badly wrapped package. Ayla’s gaze did not leave Amanda’s face. Kenji bent his head to her ear.

"Why is there blood at your mouth?" he said, very low. "Tell me you did not."

"I was hungry."

"Ayla."

"Mm."

"You killed them."

"Mm."

He drew a slow breath.

"How many?"

"Fifty."

The number arrived in his head in stages. He filed the first ten without comment. The next twenty registered as the kind of mistake a man recovered from with a careful set of explanations.

The last twenty he could not file at all.

"Kill me," he said quietly. "Return to the moment before the first one."

"No."

"Ayla."

"No."

"There is no one left to guard the compound for you to eat anymore."

"There is one left."

"Left? Who?"

She glanced up at him. Her brows brushed his lips. He registered the brush and did not move his head. Her gaze slipped past his shoulder again and returned to Amanda, who was standing at the edge of the mat, curiously eavesdropping to understand the change in atmosphere.

Ayla’s eyes returned to him. He understood. The understanding arrived clean and quiet.

"Her," he questioned.

Ayla’s fist tightened in his shirt.

"You do not want me to?" Although she asked the question, she only accepted yes as the answer. Kenji understood it clearly from Ayla’s tone. He glanced back at Amanda guiltily.

He looked, for one long, careful second, at the woman he had carried in his heart for years and yearned to see during the three years.

The woman whose name had been the small, private name he had not allowed himself to speak aloud during any of his deaths.

The woman whose face had occupied the chamber in his chest where the pain had lived, and had occupied it so completely that the chamber had taken her shape.

The chamber was empty now. He had not noticed when it had emptied. He had noticed only this morning, in the space of the second laugh, that the pain he had been hiding for three years had not been there to hide.

The chamber had been emptied by something else. Someone else.

The someone else was, at this moment, holding a small fist in the fabric of his shirt and waiting for him to answer her question.

"She does not have a trait," he said.

He said it to Ayla. He said it to Amanda also, who heard it, who registered the answer as the strange, small statement it was, and who did not yet understand that the statement was the answer to a question she had not heard. Ayla blinked. 𝘧𝓇ℯ𝑒𝓌𝑒𝑏𝓃𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭.𝒸ℴ𝓂

"She has nothing for you," Kenji said quietly.

"That is fine. I do not care about the trait."

"Then what?"

Ayla pressed her forehead against his bare chest. Her voice came small.

"I want her brain."

Kenji closed his eyes. The small, clean astonishment from earlier in the morning returned. He had laughed without pain at Amanda’s rejection.

He had registered the empty chamber.

He had not, in the small, careful space between the registration and the present moment, considered what the emptying meant about who had taken the chamber’s place. The taking had a face.

The face was pressed against his sternum. The face had asked him a question. He flicked her forehead very gently with his thumb.

"You do not need to ask twice, you dummy."

Ayla froze. She tilted her head back to look at him. Her gold eyes were wide. The dimples had not yet appeared, because the dimples appeared only when she had decided on an expression, and she had not yet decided on this one.

"You are sure?"

"Quick."

The dimples appeared. The small smile that arrived under them sent a chill across the yard that the wind had not yet been responsible for.

Amanda, at the edge of the mat, registered the chill and did not yet have a word for it. She had a moment to register only the chill, and then to register the silver-haired girl in the sleeping gown moving forward across the stone with the slow, patient grace of a creature that had been waiting, the entirety of its short life, for permission.

Kenji did not look away. He watched. He had spent three years on a promise to come back to Amanda. He had come back to find the promise had emptied itself out of him while he had been gone.

He stood in the morning yard with his shirt around the shoulders of another girl, and he watched the other girl walk toward Amanda with the small fist still clenched at her side.

The chamber in his chest that had carried Amanda for three years registered, with a soft and unfamiliar warmth, that it had a new tenant.

He did not stop her.