The lamp sat on the floor in the corner of the only room they had.

Her mother had put it there because the table was full and there was no shelf within reach. The light it gave was yellow and low, which left the ceiling in shadow.

Aestrith had been sick for three weeks.

Not the sort of sickness her mother’s soup could help. Not fever. Not her stomach. Not the kind that came from bad water or bad food, though her mother had tried every explanation before she stopped trying to explain it.

It felt as if something inside her was pressing outward. When she laid her hand flat on the floor, the floor seemed to push back harder than it should. She had stopped mentioning that part.

Her father had been watching her differently for the past four days.

It was not the attention of a father depressed over his daughter health, no. This was a different kind of attention. It had a stern impression to it, as if he had already moved past the situation and was looking at a decision.

She was lying on her side on the floor mat because the mat was closer to the lamp, and the lamp made the ceiling feel less oppressive. She had learned that staying still reduced the pain in her chest. So she had been still a great deal.

Her father came to her in the middle of the night.

She heard his feet before she saw him. His weight crossed the floor, and the second board gave its familiar creak, the same one she had heard since she was small enough to notice it. His shadow reached her before he did.

His hands closed on her arm. The grip was already tightening before she understood it. He was pulling her toward the door, and his mouth was forming words she did not catch, because the pressure in her chest went from cold and steady to a burning fire in the instant his hand locked down on her.

She did not choose what happened next.

The room warped all at once. The lamp lifted off the floor. The table tilted toward her, and then the table and everything on it slammed toward the walls. She felt the floor drive upward against her feet. She felt the ceiling tug at her hair. Her father was close enough for all of it to reach him too, and the force that came out of her struck him from every direction.

He crashed against the wall, then the floor, then the wall again. It kept repeating between his grunts and cries of pain and terror.

Then he made no more sound at all.

She was on her knees. The room returned to normal, objects falling down to where gravity put them. The lamp had crashed on the floor, and somehow the flame was still burning. The light was the same yellow light it had always been.

Her mother stood in the doorway.

She had been there long enough for her eyes to adjust. She looked at the crushed body in the wall, and the stains of blood everywhere. Then she looked at Aestrith. Her feet did not move. Her hands stayed at her sides. Her face warped in blankness, and nothing about her moved toward Aestrith.

Aestrith looked at her mother’s face long enough to understand what was not going to happen.

Then she got up and left.

The corridor. The staircase. The front door and the street.

She ran because standing still was not an option her body would allow. The slums at that hour smelled the same as always, with cook fires burned down, too many people in too little space, and the stench of dirt and excretion underfoot. She passed doors she had passed ten thousand times, and none of them cared to open to help a little girl.

She ran until the dirt beneath her feet stopped feeling like a path forward. Until the smell no longer reached her. Until the street stopped being a street at all.

Then she was somewhere else.

She was herself here. Her own age, her own body, the hands she recognized.

The space around her had light, but no visible source. It came from a direction rather than a point, the way light arrives before the sun can be seen. The ground under her feet was ground in the sense of an understood surface, and she could feel it adjusting her balance.

An orb was there.

She had no better word for it. It occupied space the way objects occupy space, not floating and not placed, but present in a position that made everything else relate to it.

The light in the room bent toward it slightly. Her body moved toward it without her choosing. Everything around it was oriented toward it, the way all physical things were always oriented toward other things.

She looked at it for a while.

She thought about her father’s hands closing on her arm. Her mother’s feet staying planted. The years between that slum street and Ashmark’s gate. She did not start listing them, because listing them would not help.

She thought about what the orb was doing now. The casting batches even and clean. The mine shaft walls steady while the water dropped. The section of the northeastern wall that was brought down.

She thought about the warehouse.

The lamp on the table still burning. Both of them looking at the same floor. Neither of them trying to perform for the other, because there was nothing left in that room that required performance. The moment had been exactly what it was, and neither of them had tried to turn it into something else.

She had shrugged that away.

She had been carrying it.

The light in the space warmed.

Then she was back in her body.

The ceiling was stone and low, and the citadel presence appeared through the walls as cold rather than through the eyes. One candle burned on the surface beside her. It was late. Only the building’s night sounds reached her, along with the distant movement of the watch through the outer corridors.

She was in pain. The background cost of something pushed too far, present throughout her body without one place she could point to.

She recognized it as the sort of pain that came after a limit had been crossed and the body was still figuring out the terms. She did not move. She looked around the room before she did anything else. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

He was in the chair beside her.

The ledger rested on his knee. It nearly always was with him, because he moved through rooms and the ledger moved with him. Charcoal was in his right hand, and his hand moved across the page. He had not looked up. He did not know she was awake.

She could see the page from where she lay. The sketch in the margin was detailed, more detailed than his usual production notes, or his foundry work, or his pistol diagrams, or his route maps.

She had been reading that since the streets of Ashmark, when she first watched him draw while he walked and understood that the complexity of the marks was a language.

By now the language was plain. And so was the way she watched him.

He was working through something that genuinely worried him, and whatever it was had been filling the margin with marks since before she woke.

He still did not look up.

She lay still and watched him.

The smile came to the corners of her mouth without her choosing it. She did not think about it. She kept watching him.