LOGIN"That's my mother," James said. "My birth mother. I never knew her. I was given up when I was six weeks old.""You were adopted," Yuna said."By a family in Ohio. Good people. They raised me as James Reyes, which is the name on every school record, every piece of paper that exists about me anywhere official." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Walker was her name. My birth mother's. I found it three years ago when I finally got access to my adoption file, and I started using it unofficially. Socially. It felt like the only piece of her I got to keep."Noah, standing slightly behind Yuna, spoke carefully. "So your university records under Reyes would show everything normal.""They would," James said. "I never changed it legally. I just introduce myself as Walker because it's easier than explaining why a stranger should care about my adoption story." He looked at Camille. "I should have told you sooner. I didn't think it mattered. I didn't think anyone would go digging into my transcripts
"You can't go alone," Yuna said the next morning, standing in the doorway while Camille pulled on her coat with hands that would not quite stop shaking."I'm not going alone," Camille said. "You'll all be three streets away. That's not alone. That's careful." She looked at herself in the small mirror by the door, smoothing her hair, trying to look like a person who had slept the night before. "If I bring you with me and he really is innocent, I'll never know if he was being honest with me or performing for an audience he could see. I need this to be just us."Noah stood by the window, arms crossed, clearly unhappy but not arguing anymore. He'd said everything he was going to say the night before, about Julia and about how someone deciding to face something alone was exactly the kind of decision that got people hurt. Camille had listened to all of it and made the same choice anyway."Two hours," Yuna said. "The Bradbury Building. If you're not out and texting me by then, we're coming i
Yuna told her everything.She told her about the gap in the university records, the real James Walker living quietly in Ohio with a beard and a construction job and no idea his name had been borrowed. She told her about the photograph, the silver haired woman standing outside an airfield like she owned the ground beneath her. She told her what Margaret had confessed, thirty years old and still sharp enough to cut, about a woman named Vivienne who had wanted the Binding for herself and died trying to take it. She told her about the name on Julia's old list, circled twice, tied to Richard Caine.Camille sat very still through all of it, her knees pulled up to her chest, her face unreadable in the lamp light."Sable," she said, when Yuna finally finished. "That's her name. The one who might be behind all of this.""If she's really Vivienne's daughter," Yuna said. "We don't know that for certain yet. We only know the name was on Julia's list, and that Julia flagged her as someone connecte
"You knew the name and you never told me," Yuna said.Rebecca stood in the corner of Andrew's study, arms wrapped around herself, looking smaller than Yuna had ever seen her look. It was almost midnight now. Nobody had gone home."I didn't know it mattered," Rebecca said. "Julia gave me an old contact list years ago, before she died. Names, addresses, people who used to move in Caine's circles before he settled down. Reeve Holdings was on that list. I never connected it to anything, because I never connected it to a person.""You have the list," Andrew said. "Now.""At my apartment." Rebecca pulled out her phone with shaking hands. "I can send you a photo of it right now."While she typed, Margaret sat very still in her chair, staring at nothing."Her daughter's name," Margaret said quietly, as if she were pulling the memory up from somewhere she had buried it a long time ago. "I heard it once, years after Vivienne died. Someone mentioned it in passing, someone who did not know I woul
"That's not possible," Yuna said."I know what I saw," Margaret said, still staring at the screen, at the silver haired woman standing outside the airfield like she had nowhere better to be. "I know what I watched happen to her. There is no version of this where she is standing in a parking lot two hours from here."Andrew leaned forward. "Margaret. Who was she."Margaret sat down slowly in the chair across from the desk, her coat still buttoned, her hands folded in her lap in a way that looked less like composure and more like she needed something to hold onto."Her name was Vivienne," she said. "She was part of the royal line, a generation before Yuna's mother. A cousin, several times removed, but close enough in blood that she carried some of the gift, though never enough to anchor the Binding herself." Margaret's eyes did not leave the photograph. "She believed leadership should go to whoever was strong enough to hold it, not whoever was born into it. Richard Caine agreed with her
"Say that again," Yuna said, her phone pressed hard against her ear."There's no record of a James Walker at Boston University's architecture program for the last four years," Noah said. His voice was flat, the way it got when he was trying not to sound alarmed. "My father checked twice."Yuna stood outside the library, the evening cold pressing through her jacket. Through the glass doors she could see Camille and James at their usual table, heads bent over different books, close enough that their shoulders almost touched."Maybe he transferred under a different program name," she said. "Maybe the records take time to update.""Maybe," Noah said. "My father is still digging. But Yuna, there's something else. There's a James Walker who graduated from a high school in Ohio eleven years ago. Same name, right age. But when my father pulled the photo from the yearbook—""It's not him.""It's not him."Yuna closed her eyes. Inside, Camille said something and James laughed, a real laugh, his
"You cannot be serious right now."Camille stood in the middle of their dorm room, hands on her hips, staring at Yuna like she had grown a second head. Which, given recent events, wasn't entirely impossible."I'm telling you the truth," Yuna said, sitting on her bed with her knees pulled to her che
"This is completely unacceptable!"A woman's shrill voice cut through the murmur of the crowd as Noah and Yuna approached the main field. Students were packed together in tight rows, teachers positioned at the edges like sentries. On a raised platform at the front stood Mr. Jack Peterson, the schoo
"What are you doing here?"The voice was cold, sharp, and very human. Yuna opened her eyes, gasping for air, and found herself staring up at Noah Phillips.He stood over her, shirtless, his chest rising and falling rapidly. His dark hair was messy, his jaw tight with barely controlled anger. But it
"She really thought she was all that?"The words hit Yuna before she even saw who said them. She pushed through the main doors of Sterlinggate University, her backpack slung over one shoulder, and immediately felt the weight of a hundred stares. Students clustered in groups along the hallway, their







