She gestured, and Sofia and Dane filed in, presenting themselves with the particular awkwardness of people trying to look like sothing they weren’t in front of soone perceptive enough to notice the performance.
"Sofia," Sofia said, extending her hand.
"I’ve been assisting Dr. Buchanan at the dig site."
"Dane," Dane said.
"Surveying consultant."
Kate shook their hands with polite attention, her gray eyes reading them both in the way of soone who’d spent decades in corporate environnts where reading people was a survival skill.
"And?" Kate looked past them at the corridor.
"There’s soone else."
Martha turned.
Jolthar was standing in the doorway.
He’d stopped there naturally, in the threshold between corridor and room, and his eyes were fixed on Kate with an expression that had stopped all his usual careful observation. He wasn’t processing the new woman. He was just looking.
Kate looked back at him with a small, polite frown, the expression of soone who didn’t recognize a person but was trying to be courteous about it.
"Hello. I don’t think we’ve t."
Jolthar said nothing.
The silence lasted perhaps four seconds, which was long enough to beco noticeable. Martha watched him from across the room with a slight tension she couldn’t fully explain.
He was staring at Kate the way soone stared at a photograph of a person they’d loved—recognition of essential qualities rather than physical specifics. His jaw was slightly tight. His deep black eyes had seed to vibrate a little, as if struggling to contain so strong emotion.
Then he blinked, and the expression was gone.
Replaced by sothing controlled and neutral.
"Forgive ," he said. He stepped into the room and inclined his head toward Kate in a gesture that was courteous but carried a formality that belonged to a different era.
"I’m glad you weren’t seriously hurt."
Kate studied him for a mont with raised eyebrows, then looked at Martha.
"Friend of yours?"
"He helped at the site," Martha said, which was true.
"I’ll explain more later."
Kate accepted this with the particular patience of soone who had fifteen years of experience with Martha’s habit of bringing ho strays from excavation sites, human and otherwise.
"Well. Thank you for looking after her. She’s terrible at looking after herself."
"I’ve noticed," Jolthar said.
Martha gave him a sharp look. He t it with absolute innocence.
The conversation moved to practicalities after that. The accident, the hospital assessnt, the discharge tiline, and arrangents for Kate to rest at ho.
Sofia and Dane took positions near the window, trying to be professionally invisible, watching Jolthar with the focused attention of people who’d been told to wait and were not good at waiting.
After twenty minutes, Martha stepped out to speak with the attending physician, and Kate requested water from the small service station down the corridor, which Dane volunteered to fetch with the eagerness of soone grateful for a task.
Sofia stayed, watching Jolthar from across the room.
He’d taken a position near the doorway again. Standing with that absolute stillness, his eyes moving between Kate and the corridor where Martha had disappeared.
Sofia crossed her arms. Her voice was low enough not to carry.
"You know who she is, Kate Buchanan."
It wasn’t a question.
Jolthar didn’t look at her.
"No," he said simply.
"But she reminds you of soone."
He remained silent.
Sofia studied his profile for a mont. The controlled expression, the tight jaw, the eyes that kept moving to Kate with a quality she couldn’t quite categorize.
Although he looked like he was not thinking anything, inside his mind, there were all sorts of thoughts running havoc. Because of the woman he just saw, Kate Buchanan.
She looked just like Magdalyna, with exact facial features and body too. She reminded of how Magdalyna looked when she first t him.
He didn’t say anything; he just went out of the room.
*
When Kate had dozed off under mild sedation prescribed by the attending physician, and Martha was filling out paperwork at the nursing station, and Dane had returned with water to find his services no longer needed, the two of them drifted into the corridor.
Jolthar sat on a bench outside Kate’s room.
His forearms rested on his knees. His eyes were focused on the middle distance, on nothing visible to anyone else.
The hospital moved around him, nurses with tablets, orderlies with equipnt, visitors navigating with the particular distracted urgency of people worried about soone they loved.
He was completely still in the middle of all of it.
Sofia and Dane stood perhaps ten feet away, leaning against the corridor wall.
They didn’t speak. There was an unspoken agreent between them that this wasn’t a mont for their questions, their theories, or their carefully prepared argunts about the resistance and the Council and the need for his help.
They just watched him.
Because the being sitting on that hospital bench wasn’t wearing the weight of three hundred years in any visible way—no dramatic grief, no overwhelming disorientation, no rage at his imprisonnt. He wore it the way old stone wore weather.
It had shaped him, but it wasn’t crushing him.
What was visible was sothing quieter.
He was thinking about two won sleeping in rooms around him.
Martha Buchanan, who’d heard him calling through three centuries of divine sealing and had co. Who’d stood in front of a crumbling wall without fear and spoken his na with a mouth that didn’t consciously rember knowing it. Who’d made tea for the bones of a mory she couldn’t access and called it academic interest in pre-Divergence settlents.
Rosaine, not Rosaine. The woman who had loved him unconditionally is living a new life, with no mory of him.
She was happy.
He’d seen that clearly in the first minutes of watching her with Kate. The kind of happiness that was structural rather than circumstantial, built into the architecture of a life rather than found in individual monts. She had work she loved, a person she loved, and a ho she was clearly eager to return to.
She’d died waiting for him to co ho.
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