Julius looked at Arturo.
Arturo had the sa expression as before, the one that ant he wanted to argue and had already recognized the argunt was over. He nodded once.
"But we need to think about how to slow down the now smaller mutant flows enough that the city doesn't fall while we do this." Julius gazed back at his brother. "Hold the defense. I'm going to respond to Orion positively on his demands and buy us the ti we need to prepare the ceremony. Give an hour to co and help you later."
"An hour," Arturo repeated, with the tone of soone accepting a deadline that both of them knew could shift with circumstances but that served as an anchor for the next sequence of decisions.
Selphira got to her feet with the careful economy of soone who had calculated exactly how much effort each movent could cost and was not going to spend more than necessary on any of them. She gestured to one of the attendants to bring Victor along, he was still on a stretcher, still surrounded by dical staff, still unconscious, and started walking slowly toward the castle.
"Use that diplomatic talent you've been building your whole life to buy us the ti we need," she said to Julius without turning around. "I need to go speak with Luna."
♢♢♢♢
The room in the castle's recovery wing had the specific quiet of a space where soone nearby is sleeping deeply.
Liora's breathing was the steady rhythm of a person who had spent everything they had and whose body had taken over the situation without asking permission. Her face in sleep had the unguarded quality that young people's faces had when they were genuinely resting, free of the accumulated tension that builds through waking hours, the expressions that got constructed over a day's worth of decisions all temporarily gone. She would probably need a full day to surface… Maybe more. Ren was different.
Luna had been watching him from the chair she had occupied for so ti without moving, hands folded in her lap, eyes on his face with the focused attention of soone looking for sothing they aren't sure is there. His parents had gone to prepare food. His other friends were still supporting the defense. In theory there was nothing left to worry about… the breathing was steady, the color in his face was normal, the dical assessnt had been clear.
But sothing about the way he was sleeping didn't look like ordinary rest. It looked like the silence of a system that had redirected all available resources toward a repair or restructuring that couldn't happen any other way, the kind of deep internal work that required the outside to be completely quiet while it ran. Less like recovery and more like reconstruction.
How long?
That was the question Luna had been turning over since they brought him here, and it had no answer because no one in the castle had any reference for what had just happened inside that boy. Whether they required him soon, in several ways, was obvious. When soon was going to be sothing nobody could tell her.
Larissa was standing by the window. She had been looking out for a while, then at Ren, then out again, the pendulum movent of soone working through a thought that the visible surroundings weren't helping resolve. The room was comfortable enough and there was nothing useful to do in it, which was its own particular problem for soone who processed things better when there was sothing useful to do. After a few more minutes she made the decision she had been considering.
"I'm going to find water," she said.
Luna nodded without speaking.
It wasn't that they needed water especially. It was the kind of reason a person gives themselves when what they actually need is a hallway and three minutes of movent to let a thought find an order it can't find while sitting still in the sa room.
Larissa closed the door carefully behind her.
The recovery wing corridor was long and relatively quiet. Her footsteps on the stone had that particular echo of castle architecture, the kind of construction that doesn't absorb sound but redistributes it with an uncomfortable honesty, so that every step announced itself twice. She walked without hurrying.
She thought about Ren sleeping with that non-ordinary silence. About everything Luna had uttered in the interior space, with an openness Larissa hadn't seen from her in any conversation with others present, the kind of openness that didn't co from a decision but from circumstances making the filters temporarily gone, and about the feeling it had left her with, of carrying sothing that wasn't hers to hold alone but that had nowhere to be put yet.
She thought about what they told Julius before they were brought back to the castle, described with just enough detail that the detail conspicuously missing was clearly the part that was going to matter most.
She thought about Luna.
She turned the corner toward the room where the water jugs were kept and found Selphira walking in the opposite direction.
Both of them stopped.
Larissa assessed what she saw in the ti it took her to assess anything relevant. Selphira was standing with the posture of soone who refused to allow the body to show what the mana reported anyway, but the mana didn't lie to people with the sensitivity to read it, and Larissa had that sensitivity. The signature was real and present… responsive, but all of the basic structures... Its damage was different from any reading Larissa had taken of her before, in the limited exchanges they'd had at distance over the past few years.
It was like reading an ocean and finding that the floor was much closer to the surface than it should have been. Everything above the waterline was working. What lay underneath was another matter entirely.
The crystallization had not been costic.
Selphira gazed back at her with the direct, unfiltered attention Larissa had learned to recognize in adults who didn't consider the age of the person in front of them a reason to reduce the quality of their focus.
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