The hospital staff recognised her by then. They’d see her walk through the front doors and silently usher her along, solemn faces on either side of her like statues to an ancient temple. She’d memorised the route, too, the shadows in each subsequent hallway growing as the walls rose higher and the windows shrank.

  There was a chair waiting for her now, usually tucked away in the room’s corner. She wouldn’t move it; she had little desire to get closer than she needed to. Just the ever-shrinking silhouette accented by the weakest trickle of moonlight was enough for her purposes.

  Crestana had come once again to see if this time she would feel anything different, or anything at all for that matter, but the endeavour once again proved futile. After years in a dysfunctional relationship, three brief visits while he was in a comatose state wouldn’t change anything.

  And then again, hatred might have let her appreciate her new home more. She was grateful to her aunt and her husband; taking on a wreck of a teenager so suddenly wouldn’t have been easy for anybody, let alone when a multi-national corporation came packaged with her.

  And yet, Crestana found it hard to accept them either, doubtless through no fault of their own. Perhaps the very concept of having a family at all was incompatible with her now. The damage was already done.

  So then why she came back time and time again, wanting something more than indifference from herself, was a mystery. Guilt and penance didn’t sustain her any longer, nor did grief or hatred. She knew that already.

  The desire to protect Iris and drag her out of the fight. No, she knew how selfish a wish that was and not a decision for her to make. If that was the reason she still felt so uneasy, then it was another, more pressing issue entirely.

  Answers still lay somewhere beneath the dust in this stale, still hospital room. It was just the thought that if she lifted a single finger to wipe away a few inches of that dust, then she couldn’t stop until she’d wiped away the entire room.

  A knock came from the entrance. Figuring visitor hours were over, she gathered her things before the door opened, and the nurse’s head poked through, looking more confused that Crestana would’ve expected.

  “There’s a uh…important person here to visit you,” they squeaked, looking like whatever presence stood behind them was only inches away from devouring them whole, but that presence pushed forward into the room before the nurse could get another word in.

  “Crestana?” a loosely familiar voice said. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “Oh, uh…no, it’s all right. Please.”

  “Thank you,” the lieutenant-general said as she slipped past the terrified nurse. She was better known to Crestana as Iris’s grandmother figure, but in the moment, ‘prospective commanding officer’ took precedent in her mind, and that brought with it all the stiffness and nerves of a job interview.

  Noticing there was nowhere to sit, she closed the door behind her and hung her coat on the handle.

  “How are you holding up?” she asked, though she wasn’t the one most grappling with the current crisis.

  “Nervous,” she admitted. “It’s not a good feeling.”

  “That makes two of us,” Elvera said, leaning against the doorframe and passing her eyes over Crestana’s father. Perhaps as befitting somebody who was looking at a former enemy, she refused to make any sort of comment. On one hand, it was an awkward discussion dodged. But on the other, it only reinforced Crestana’s feelings of indifference towards him.

  “I came to ask about the Beak you and Iris encountered in the catacombs. I would’ve asked somebody with more time, but since you’re so young, I figured a familiar face was more appropriate.”

  “Oh,” Crestana muttered. “Of course.”

  Other concerns at the time had overwritten her memories of the details, but a general gist she could deliver.

  “He looked professional,” she started.

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  “Professional?” she asked. “Like a mercenary?”

  “Maybe, but I meant he wore a suit, but you know that already.”

  “Could you tell me more about it?” she said. “Any details?”

  Crestana ran her fingers along the chin of her mask. Suits weren’t her strong suit, but being who she was, she knew more than the average person.

  “It was a business frock, the style older men wear. Shawl collar vest, shirt collar very high. The uh…the mask was high quality, but it wasn’t ornate, even by men’s standards.

  “You imagined they were an older male, then?” she asked.

  “Yes, I think so. At least their attire suggested such sensibilities.”

  Elvera nodded. “Anything about their magic?”

  That in particular she strained her memory of. Not only that, but trying to distil that sensation of the sixth sense into words was another demanding task.

  “Efficient,” she said. “Even for shadow magic, it was hard to spot. It felt as though if I lost concentration for even a moment, I’d lose them.”

  “Safe to say they were experienced, then,” Elvera muttered to herself, lost in her own thoughts. “Beaks who still practice shadow magic are few and far between, but it isn’t like we keep a national registry. One thing I can almost say with certainty is that nobody like that works for Bankson Private Security.”

  “Nor would they work for disgruntled refugees,” Crestana added, to which Elvera agreed. “At least, it’s unlikely.”

  “Still, it’s all speculation. But thank you; you’ve been a big help.”

  Something in Crestana told her that those words were a mere courtesy; if the lieutenant-general had gleaned anything useful in that conversation, it had flown over her head entirely.

  Elvera made to leave, but Crestana this time was the one to intrude.

  “How’s Iris doing?” she said, suddenly feeling constrained to the chair, while Elvera seemed like a world away.

  “In the Queen’s realm with Evalyn. They’ll be gone for the next week.”

  “That long,” Crestana muttered, shrinking into herself.

  “For them, it’ll only be seventy minutes. If you’re going to feel sorry for anyone, feel sorry for yourself.”

  Perhaps that was true, but it wasn’t the time that scared her the most. She’d been without Iris for longer, and almost every time, it felt the same. It painted everything she did with a feeling of pointlessness that she could never shake, the same feeling of being constrained to her chair in that moment, watching what felt like a chance at certainty slip from her fingers.

  “I want to be useful to you,” she said. Perhaps for somebody of her stature, it was too much to ask already, but apparently, Elvera felt the same way.

  “You’ve already put yourself in harm’s way,” the lieutenant-general said. “And when I visited your home asking after you, and your aunt and uncle had no clue what I was there for, that already told me everything I needed to know.”

  Crestana didn’t know how she was supposed to answer, if at all. She’d laid her feelings bare without knowing how or why she felt them.

  “Why do you want to be useful to me?” she asked, throwing Crestana a lifeline. “Being a good friend to Iris is all that I would ever want from you, politics and magic aside. Iris feels the same.”

  Elvera’s eyes drifted back to Crestana’s father once again. “And I’m sure you’ve had every opportunity to kill or cry over this man here, and yet you sit in the far corner. You’re clearly a shade different from Evalyn.”

  So what was it? What had changed?

  What had she learned to fear the most?

  “It’s surreal, isn’t it?” she muttered. “All this.”

  “All this?” Elvera asked, and Crestana simply nodded.

  “This,” she repeated. “Where I am now. One parent dead, another in a comatose. A tree in the city that’s destroyed hundreds of lives and a Queen dead because maybe…if I’d done something different, I could’ve changed the outcome.”

  Elvera didn’t speak, but her piercing eyes, like a cat in the dark, watched her intently. Crestana continued with a strange well of confidence, a close cousin to reckless abandon, that urged her to look directly into them as she spoke.

  “Do you think I deserve any of this?” she said. “Me? Who for so many years barely lifted a finger for even herself? They told me in school to be fair, to treat people how you want to be treated, like there’s some scale that measures your deeds and rewards you for them. But no. There isn’t.”

  The world wasn’t cruel. It simply was. It didn’t owe her anything, and if circumstances aligned, it would strip her of everything because that was how things were. Not for reason or fairness or justice or even evil.

  “I want control,” she finally said, the words coming from her mouth like a toxin, the words of a villain in the third act of a stage play. “I want power. I want responsibility. If I’m meant for more misfortune, I want it to be because I earned it, because I couldn’t stop it.”

  “Do you feel powerless, Crestana?” Elvera asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you feel cheated? Like you deserve more?”

  “No.”

  Elvera hung her head, sighing through her nose as she kept a small smirk almost out of view. “Then maybe we can make something of you,” she said. “This is a crisis I wouldn’t want to train anybody on, but unfortunately we need every ally we can get.”

  She took her coat and opened the door, folding it over her forearm. “If we need you, I’ll make sure you hear about it. Would you like me to walk you out?”

  Crestana hesitated, still feeling as though she were sewn down to the chair. She’d lifted one finger stroke’s worth of dust from the windowsill, but the rest of the room still felt unbelievably daunting.

  Newfound responsibility, but with that responsibility came power. Power over herself to move even the smallest grain of sand that made up the world she lived in.

  “Yes, please,” she said, taking her first step.

  And for the first time in a long time, the air felt clear.