Chapter 6

The symbols on the wall didn't look like family trees up close. They looked like scars.

Lyra stood in front of the glass case long after Kael had gone to find her water and something to change into, tracing the pattern with her eyes without letting herself get close enough to touch it. Each small symbol connected to the next with thin engraved lines, branching and rebranching, some names worn almost smooth like someone had run a thumb over them a thousand times. At the bottom, newer than the rest, cut clean and recent into metal that hadn't had time to dull yet, was a symbol she recognized without wanting to.

Her mother's name wasn't written anywhere on the wall. But there was a gap exactly where a name should have gone, a blank space left between two older branches like someone had deliberately cut it out.

"You're not supposed to be in here alone."

She turned. A woman stood in the doorway, maybe late forties, sharp eyed, dressed like someone who'd give an order and expect it followed without discussion. Something about her posture reminded Lyra of Kael, the same coiled stillness, like violence was a language she spoke fluently and chose not to use most days.

"Kael brought me."

"I know. That's the part that concerns me." The woman crossed the room, stopped a few feet off, studying Lyra with an expression that gave away nothing at all. "Seraphine Arden. I run this organization. You're the girl from the dorm room."

"I guess I am."

"You guess." A small, humorless sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Do you know how many people in this building think you should already be dead?"

Lyra's stomach dropped, though something in her refused to flinch outwardly. "Do you."

Seraphine didn't answer that right away. Her eyes flicked once to the wall, to the gap where a name should have been, then back to Lyra with something unreadable moving behind them.

"I think," she said slowly, "that you're a very complicated problem that showed up on the wrong night, in the wrong city, in front of the wrong son." She said the last word like it cost her something. "Get some rest. We'll talk more in the morning, when you're not covered in glass."

She left before Lyra could ask what she meant by wrong son, the door closing behind her with a soft click that felt louder than it should have.

Kael came back a few minutes later with a bottle of water and a folded gray shirt that was obviously his, too big through the shoulders, smelling faintly like leather and something metallic underneath. He didn't comment on the symbols or the fact that she'd clearly been studying them. He just handed her the shirt and sat down heavily on the bench across from her, elbows on his knees, looking at the floor like it owed him answers.

"Your mother," he said after a long second. "Seraphine talk to you about her."

"Not really. She mentioned a gap on the wall." Lyra nodded at the case. "Where a name should be."

Something moved across his face, gone before she could name it. "She'll tell you when she's ready. Pushing her won't make it faster."

"Everyone keeps saying that. When she's ready. When it's safe. When the timing's right." Her voice cracked harder than she meant it to. "I just watched something that used to be a person come apart into ash in my bedroom, Kael. I don't have a lot of patience left for when it's ready."

He didn't argue with that. He just sat with it, the two of them quiet in the stripped-down light of the records room, until she remembered something that made her stomach drop all over again.

"Ronan." She was already reaching for her phone, which had somehow survived the broken window and the fire escape and the run through the alley in her jacket pocket. "I need to call her. She doesn't know where I am. She's going to think—"

"Lyra."

"She's going to think I'm dead." Her hands had started shaking again, worse than before, fumbling the phone twice before she got the call pulled up. "She needs to hear my voice."

Kael didn't stop her. He watched, jaw tight, as the call connected and started to ring, once, twice, the sound thin and far away through the speaker.

It rang eight times before it went to voicemail.

Lyra's chest went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the broken window two miles away. Ronan always answered by the third ring. Always. It was a rule so old and so consistent that Lyra had never once had reason to question it, the kind of thing you only noticed the shape of once it broke.

She called again. Same eight rings. Same voicemail, Ronan's voice clipped and businesslike, you've reached Ronan Vale, leave a message.

"She's not picking up." Lyra looked up at Kael, and whatever composure she'd managed to hold onto through everything else tonight finally started slipping. "She never doesn't pick up."

Kael's expression had changed, gone from careful to something harder, something closer to the look he'd had right before he came through her window.

"Try her landline," he said. "The house should have one."

"I don't have the number memorized, I always just—" Lyra stopped, her own words catching up to her. "Kael. What if whatever got into my apartment isn't the only one. What if it already—"

"Don't." He said it fast, firm, already standing, already moving toward the door. "Don't finish that sentence. We don't know anything yet."

"Then let's find out." Her voice had gone thin and sharp at the same time. "Please. I need to know she's okay."

Kael looked at her for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that she couldn't fully read, and then he nodded once, short and decisive, already reaching for his jacket.

"Get your shoes," he said. "We're going to her house."

Behind them, through the thin wall separating the records room from the hallway, Lyra heard Seraphine's voice rise sharply, cut off mid-sentence, speaking to someone in a tone too low to make out the words.

But she caught one. Clear enough to freeze her where she stood.

Ronan.