Chapter 17: He Laughs at Funerals

Zephyr's POV

I didn't plan to follow her.

I want to be clear about that. I had actual places to be. Ryker had called a security meeting for the morning and I had skipped it, which was going to produce consequences I would deal with later, and I was supposed to be in the east training yard by ten. I had intentions. A schedule, loosely defined.

Then I came around the corner on the third floor and she was there, twenty feet ahead of me, carrying her bucket and her mop and walking with her head slightly down the way she always did, like she was trying to take up less space than she actually needed.

I stopped walking.

She turned the corner.

I followed her.

That was forty minutes ago.

She had no idea. Which was, genuinely, concerning. She was smarter than she let on, I had gathered that much from watching her from a distance, and her instincts were decent. But I had spent years being trained by people for whom invisibility was a survival skill, and those years showed. I could move through a crowded room and leave no impression. I could stand in a shadow and become part of it.

She moved through the fourth floor corridor and stopped outside a sitting room, propped her mop against the wall, and went inside with her cloth.

I stayed in the corridor and waited.

Through the open door I could hear her working. The soft sound of the cloth against wood. A pause. Then a sound I didn't expect.

A sigh. Long and deeply irritated.

"Seriously," she muttered, to no one. "How is this table already dirty again. Nobody even uses this room."

I leaned slightly toward the doorway.

She was scrubbing the side table near the window with the focused aggression of someone who had a lot of feelings and had decided to aim them at furniture. Her cloth moved in hard circles. She stopped, looked at the table, and made a face that suggested the table had personally disappointed her.

"Unbelievable," she told it.

The table did not respond.

She went back to scrubbing.

I pressed my back against the corridor wall and looked at the ceiling and felt something happen in my face that took me a moment to identify because it had been so long. The corners of my mouth. Pulling up.

I was smiling.

I was standing in a corridor having followed someone for forty minutes without their knowledge and I was smiling because she was arguing with a side table and losing, and it was the first time anything had felt funny in weeks. Maybe longer. The Sylvan soul had a way of making everything feel gray and purposeful and stripped of anything that didn't serve the mission, and I had been living inside that grayness for so long I had forgotten what it felt like when something cut through it.

This cut through it.

She moved to the window next, stretching up on her toes to reach the upper frame, muttering something under her breath about whoever designed tall windows clearly never having to clean them. She lost her balance slightly, caught herself on the sill, looked around fast to check if anyone had seen, and then went back to cleaning with her chin slightly higher than before.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep the smile from getting out of control.

The Sylvan soul stirred.

It came in the way it always did, slow and cold, sliding up from the base of my skull like water rising. It noticed my mood the way a predator noticed movement, immediately and with full attention.

Distracted. Compromised. This is exactly what she does, what she will keep doing, what you cannot afford.

"Quiet," I said, very softly.

She'll pull you apart from the inside. You know this.

"I said quiet."

The pressure built. Not pain yet, just weight, the Sylvan soul leaning against the inside of my head to remind me it was there and it was patient and it was not going away.

I breathed slowly and held my ground.

She came back out into the corridor, picked up her mop, and started on the floor. I moved back without a sound, keeping the distance, keeping to the shadow near the wall.

She mopped three sections of the corridor. Stopped at a stubborn mark on the stone floor and attacked it with specific, focused energy. Lost the battle. Moved on with an expression that suggested she was cataloguing the mark for future reckoning.

I followed her around the next corner.

And the one after that.

At the fifth floor landing she paused to switch out her cloth. While she was crouched over her bucket I had a clear view of her face, unguarded, not performing anything for anyone. Just tired. A little sad around the eyes, the kind of sad that had been there long enough to stop feeling urgent.

The bond ached in my chest.

The Sylvan soul pushed.

I held both at the same distance and watched her stand up and keep walking.

She went down the service hallway. Long and narrow, used mostly by staff, with small windows at the far end. She was almost at the end of it when she slowed down.

Then she stopped.

She didn't turn around.

I went completely still.

Her shoulders were straight. Her head came up slightly. She stood there for one second, two, three.

"You've been following me since the third floor." Her voice was quiet. Steady. Not scared. "Either say something or go away."

I didn't move.

A pause. Shorter this time.

"Which one are you?"

I stepped out of the shadow.

She turned around.

We were six feet apart. Close enough that I could see her eyes clearly for the first time, not from a distance, not in a crowded room, not through the chaos of that first day in the main hall. Close enough that nothing was blurred or softened.

She looked at me. I looked at her.

The bond did not hum. It did not pull gently or ache quietly or whisper at the edges.

It detonated.

Like something had been held underwater for a very long time and finally broke the surface, the force of it moved through my entire chest in one single wave, hot and absolute and nothing like anything the Sylvan soul had ever made me feel.

Her lips parted.

My lungs forgot their job.

We both stopped breathing.