The corridor outside Sefa's room was dark except for the ring's slow pulse, a blue-green tide washing up the wall in wavelengths Talla had known since before she could walk. She stood with one hand flat against the cool stone, her palm absorbing the rhythm, and she did not move.

The door was open. Zara's order. A leash disguised as a schedule, and Talla had voted against it, and the vote had not mattered.

Inside, the cot creaked. Once. Twice. A steady cadence, patient, almost lazy — the sound of a man who had nowhere to be and no intention of hurrying. Then Sefa's voice, low and frayed at the edges, the voice of a woman who read walls for a living and had never once been inside one.

"Harder."

Talla's fingers curled against the stone. She should walk. She had come down this corridor to walk past, to take the long way to the common room because the short way meant passing this door and she had wanted, in some small stubborn part of herself, to prove she could pass it without stopping.

She had stopped.

The cot creaked faster. A rhythm now, not a sound — a body driving into a body, the frame of the narrow bed taking the load and complaining about it. Beneath that, wet. The unmistakable slick of it, the sound of a cunt full of cock and working, and Talla closed her eyes because her body had decided to answer before her mind could stop it. Heat moved up the inside of her thighs, slow and traitorous, and settled low in her belly like something that had been waiting.

She opened her eyes and looked through the crack.

Malik was on top of her, one knee planted on the cot, the other foot braced against the floor, and his hips were moving in a long, unhurried stroke that went all the way in and almost all the way out. His back was to the door. Broad shoulders, dark skin gone slick with sweat, the muscles along his spine shifting under it with every thrust. His hands were on Sefa's hips, holding her down against the mattress, and Sefa — Sefa, who logged the walls, who had never once in six years written her own name into a page — had her head thrown back and her glasses knocked sideways on her face, one lens catching the blue pulse, and her mouth was open around sounds that were not words.

"Harder," she said again, through her teeth this time, and her nails came down his back. Four long furrows, red rising in their wake, and Malik made a sound low in his chest — not pain. Something closer to gratitude.

He gave it to her.

The rhythm broke open. His hips slammed into her, the slap of skin loud in the small room, and the cot shrieked on its frame, and Sefa's legs came up and locked around his waist, heels digging into the small of his back, pulling him in. Her glasses slid the rest of the way off and landed somewhere on the floor. She did not reach for them. She reached for him — both hands on his shoulders now, nails in, dragging, and she was saying something under her breath, a word Talla could not make out, over and over, in time with the thrusts.

Talla pressed her hand flat against the wall again. The stone was cool. Her palm was not. She could feel her own pulse in it, and the ring's pulse under it, and for a moment the two rhythms ran against each other like two currents in the same water.

She had read the walls. Every sister had. They all knew what the readings meant when they spiked — heat, duration, the particular blue that meant a body had come. Talla had read Lyra's room the morning after. She had read the numbers and understood them the way she understood the archive numbers, the eight-year countdown, the forty-one jars and the six that still lived. Data. The end of the world, in data.

This was not data.

This was a man's hips driving steady and deep between a woman's thighs, and the woman arching up to meet him, and the wet sound of it carrying out the open door into the corridor where Talla stood with her hand on the wall, and Talla understood, suddenly and with a clarity that felt like being struck, that the walls had never once recorded this. The walls recorded the spike. They did not record the sound. They did not record the way Sefa's mouth shaped a name — his name — and then lost it, and then found it again.

"Malik."

There it was.

He answered her. Not with words — with his body, driving in harder, and Talla watched his hips change angle, watched him find something, because Sefa's whole body jerked and her back came off the cot and her mouth went wide and silent, and the ring on the wall beside Talla's hand flared — one bright blue pulse, sharp as a struck match, and then another, and another, in time with the clench of the woman on the bed.

The walls were recording. Of course they were. They always recorded. Somewhere in Zara's quarters a display was lit with the numbers of this, and the matriarch was watching them climb, and Talla thought — with a hatred so clean and cold it surprised her — that her aunt would be pleased.

Malik's rhythm stuttered. His shoulders hunched. His head dropped forward between them, and Talla saw his jaw go tight from the side, saw the tendon stand up in his neck, and heard him breathe out — long, low, a sound pulled up from somewhere under the ribs. His hips drove in one last time and stayed there, buried to the root, and his whole body locked over hers.

Sefa's cunt clenched around him. Talla could not see it. She did not need to. She saw it in the way Sefa's thighs tightened around his waist, in the way her heels dug in and her hips lifted, in the way her hands slid from his shoulders down his back and gripped, and she heard the sound Sefa made — a thin, wrecked, satisfied sound, half a laugh, and her head fell back against the cot and her eyes closed and her mouth stayed open.

Malik came. Talla watched it move through him — the shudder that started at his hips and traveled up his spine and into his shoulders, the way his hands tightened on Sefa's hips hard enough to leave marks, the long exhale that emptied him. He was still inside her. He stayed inside her. And Sefa's body kept working around him, gripping, pulsing, refusing to let go, and her legs stayed locked around his waist, and she did not let him pull back.

"Don't," she said. Her voice was raw. "Not yet."

Malik's head lifted. He looked down at her — Talla could see the line of his profile now, the scar on his jaw, the sweat at his temple, the way his chest was still heaving. He did not say anything. He just stayed where he was, deep inside her, and one of his hands came off her hip and moved up, slow, and pushed the hair back off her forehead, and Sefa turned her face into his palm like a cat.

Talla's hand came off the wall. She took one step back, into the shadow where the corridor bent, where the ring's pulse did not quite reach.

She had come here to prove she could walk past. She had failed at that. But she had learned something else, standing there with her palm on the stone, and the something else was worse than the failure.

She had spent twenty-four years believing that the human was a resource. That was what the contract said. That was what Zara said, in the clipped voice she used for things that were true and things she needed to be true. A resource. A door. The last one, because the archive was dying and the males were dead and the clan would follow them into the dark unless someone opened a door, and the human had the key in his blood. Talla had voted against the contract because she thought it was a cage — for the girls, for the clan, for the human too, a cage with a lock the matriarch held. She had believed the problem with the contract was that it treated people like instruments.

She had been right. And she had been wrong in a way she had not seen until now.

The contract treated the human as an instrument. But the human was not behaving like one. He was on top of Sefa with his hand in her hair, staying inside her because she had asked him to, and Sefa — Sefa — had asked him to. Sefa, who had never asked anyone for anything. Sefa, who kept her room cold because it was the only thing her mother had left her, and who had read every wall in this ring for six years without once standing inside a room she read. Sefa had asked him to stay.

And he had.

Talla stood in the shadow and did the arithmetic she was good at, the arithmetic that had made her the one who counted the jars and the years and the cribs. Lyra, first. Sefa, second. Mira was already circling, hungry for her turn, and Korena was angry, and the matriarch had a schedule in her head that she had not shared. Four sisters left. Four more crossings, four more nights like this one, four more women walking into that room and coming out different. That was the plan. That was always the plan.

But the plan had assumed the human would stay a resource. A resource does not put his hand in your hair. A resource does not stay inside you because you asked him to. A resource does not hold your hips hard enough to bruise and then go still and breathe like he has just done something that mattered. Talla had watched him do all three, and she understood now that the contract had a flaw in it that no one had written down, because no one had known to write it down.

The flaw was this: he was not one door. He was becoming a bond. Each time he crossed a threshold in this ring, a thread got tied — to Lyra, to Sefa, and the threads did not dissolve when the night ended. They pulled. And Talla, standing in the dark with her own body still warm and her own pulse still wrong, could feel the shape of the thing that was coming.

What happens when he is taken away? The thought arrived whole, the way the important ones did. What happens when the contract ends, or Zara decides he has done his work, or the human colony recalls him, or some other clan — some other desperate clan with its own dying archive — makes a better offer? What happens to five women who have learned to want a thing they were only ever supposed to use?

The ring pulsed on the wall beside her. Slow. Blue. Steady. Recording everything.

Inside the room, the cot creaked once more — a small sound, the sound of a body shifting its weight — and Malik's voice came low through the door, the first words Talla had heard him speak all night, and they were not for the walls and not for the matriarch and not for the contract.

"You okay?"

Sefa laughed. It was a real laugh, cracked and quiet, and it did something to Talla's chest that she did not have a word for. "No," Sefa said. "I have no idea what I am."

"Good," Malik said. "Me neither."

Talla stepped back, fully into the shadow, and the dark of the corridor closed around her like the ring itself had decided to keep her. Her hand found the wall again — flat, palm down, the cool stone against her skin — and she held it there and did not move, and did not leave, and did not go in.

The blue pulse moved under her palm, steady as a heartbeat, and somewhere behind her in the dark of the ring the nursery sat with its twelve empty cribs, and the archive sat with its six living jars, and the matriarch sat with her schedule, and none of them knew what Talla knew now: that the human had already done the thing they were afraid of, and the thing they were afraid of was not that he would fail. It was that he would succeed. It was that he would tie thread after thread into five women who had never been taught how to hold one, and then, one day, the threads would pull tight, and something would have to give — and Talla did not know yet what it would be, but she knew, standing there with her hand on the wall and her body still warm from watching, that she would be in the room when it did.

The cot creaked once more. Sefa's hand slid across Malik's back, slow, palm flat, the way you touch something you are not ready to name. And Talla's breath held in the silence that followed, and the ring pulsed on, and recorded.

The scrape came first — bare feet on stone, quick and uncareful, the sound of someone who had never learned to walk quiet in a corridor that was built for listening. Talla's hand came off the wall. Her body turned before her mind had finished naming what it was hearing, and she stepped back into the seam where the ring's pulse thinned to nothing, and she watched the bend.

Mira came around it at a half-run.

She was still in her sleep tunic, the woven gray of it twisted at the hem where she'd pulled it on in the dark, and her blue hair was loose and unbrushed and hanging in her face. Her feet were bare. Her eyes were already fixed on the strip of light spilling from Sefa's open door — the blue-green wash of it laid across the corridor floor like something spilled — and she did not see Talla at all.

She slowed when she reached the light.

Then she stopped, and her nostrils flared, and Talla understood that Mira was smelling it. The ring was warm in that room. Warm and wet and full of human, and the smell would be coming out the door with the light — sex, and sweat, and the particular mineral salt of human skin, which was different from Xylari and always had been. Mira's whole face changed. Her mouth came open. Her pupils went wide and dark in the corridor's dim, and her tongue touched her upper lip, quick, the way you check your own mouth before you speak.

Inside the room, the cot gave a low complaint. A body shifting its weight. Then Sefa's voice, drowsy and ruined, saying something Talla could not make out, and Malik's answer, lower, a rumble more than a word.

Mira's hand came up and pressed flat against the doorframe.

"Mira."

The word came out of Talla before she had decided to say it. Quiet, but the corridor was quiet, and quiet was enough. Mira's head snapped sideways. For one second her face was the face of a girl caught at something — the flush climbing her neck, the guilt, the quick recalculation of whether she could pretend she had been walking past. Talla watched her decide against it. Mira had never been good at pretending. She was too hungry for it.

"You're watching too," Mira said.

"I was walking."

"You were standing." Mira's eyes went back to the door, and the hunger came back into them, and something else came with it — something Talla recognized, because it lived in her own chest and had lived there for a long time. "You were standing right there with your hand on the wall. I saw you."

"That's not—"

"How long?" Mira cut her off. "How long have you been standing there? Did you watch the whole thing?"

Talla did not answer. Down the corridor, the ring pulsed once, slow, and the light from Sefa's door breathed with it, brighter, then softer, and Mira's shadow stretched and shortened against the opposite wall like something alive.

"I heard it from the common room," Mira said. She was whispering now, which was worse than the half-run, worse than the bare feet — because a whisper meant she was going to stay. "I couldn't sleep. I was on the bench by the water line, and the walls started going, and I thought it was a malfunction, and then I felt it." She pressed her palm harder against the frame. "The whole ring went hot. I put my hand on the bench and it was warm. Not the light. The stone. Talla, the stone was warm."

"The walls record," Talla said. "You know that. You've read them since you were—"

"I've never felt one go warm under my hand."

Neither had I, Talla thought. Not until tonight. She kept it behind her teeth.

Mira turned back to the door. Her hand slid down the frame, slow, and her thumb hooked into the gap where the door met the jamb, and Talla saw her weight shift forward onto the balls of her feet. One step would do it. One step and she would be in the doorway, in the light, and Sefa would look up and see her, and Malik would turn, and the room that had been a room for two would become a room for four, and Zara's schedule would shatter on the floor like a dropped slate.

"Don't," Talla said.

"Why not?" Mira's voice cracked on it — not loud. Thin. A girl's voice. "It's my turn. Zara said it's my turn. She said day after tomorrow, or tomorrow, or whenever she decides, and she never decides, she just watches and counts and tells us nothing, and meanwhile Lyra gets the first night and Sefa gets the second and I'm standing in a corridor in my sleep clothes like a—"

She stopped. Her jaw worked.

"Like what?" Talla asked.

"Like a beggar at a door."

The words landed between them and sat there. Mira's eyes were wet and she did not wipe them, and her thumb was still hooked in the gap of the door, and the light from Sefa's room kept breathing over her face — brighter, softer, brighter — and somewhere behind it, low, the wet sound of a body moving in a bed that had no business holding two.

Talla took a step out of the shadow. Not toward the door. Toward her sister.

"How long have you been awake?" she asked.

"Since the second bell."

"That was four hours ago."

"I know." Mira laughed — one flat syllable, no humor in it. "I counted. I lay on my cot and I counted the pulses and I told myself each one was the last and I'd sleep, and then the pulse changed, and I knew." She finally looked at Talla, and the look was raw and unarmored and much younger than seventeen. "I've read the walls my whole life, Talla. Every morning. I know what the numbers mean when they spike. I know what the blue means. I've never heard it before."

"Neither had I."

Mira's mouth opened. Closed. The confession had gone into her like a splinter, slow, and Talla watched her work it. Talla heard it. Talla came down here and stood in the dark and listened. The calculation moved behind Mira's eyes — the same calculation Talla had done herself, an hour ago, standing in this same seam with her palm against this same stone. If she's here, then it's not just me. If she's here, then this is allowed to be true.

"What did it look like?" Mira whispered.

"Mira."

"Tell me. Please." Her hand came off the frame and caught Talla's wrist, and her grip was strong — stronger than it should have been, the grip of a girl who had spent her whole life being told to wait and had finally found the edge of the waiting. "You saw it. You were standing right there. Tell me what it looks like when he—"

Inside the room, the cot creaked. Both of them went still.

Footsteps. Bare feet on the floor, heavier than Mira's — a man's weight, moving slow across the small room. Then water, running somewhere behind the far wall, the hidden washroom's seam opening with a soft mineral sigh. Sefa's voice, still drowsy, still wrecked, saying, "There's a cloth on the shelf. Left side." And Malik's answer, indistinct, and then the sound of water cupped and poured.

Mira's grip on Talla's wrist did not loosen. Her eyes had gone somewhere else — not into the room, exactly, but into the sound of it. The ordinary sounds. A man washing himself in a woman's washroom. A woman lying on a cot watching him do it.

"He's still in there," Mira said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Sefa said don't. I heard her." A pause. "I heard her say don't, and he didn't, and then he asked her if she was okay. I heard that too."

Talla said nothing.

"Nobody's ever asked me if I was okay." Mira's voice was very small. "Not once. Not in my whole life. Zara asks if I've eaten. Veth asks if I've been scanned. Nobody's ever asked me that. "

The water stopped. The washroom seam sighed shut. In the room, the cot took weight again — two weights, settling, the frame complaining softly and then going quiet.

Mira's thumb stroked once across the inside of Talla's wrist. Then she let go.

"I'm not going to go in," she said.

"Good."

"I'm not." She said it again, as if Talla had argued. Her hands came up and pushed the loose blue hair back off her face, and she stood there in the corridor light with her sleep tunic twisted and her feet bare and her eyes still wet, and she looked at the open door the way you look at a thing you have decided not to take. "I'm going to go back to the common room and sit on the bench and wait for first bell. And when Zara tells me it's my turn, I'm going to walk into that room on my own feet, at the hour she names, with the door closed behind me. Not like this." She gestured at herself — the tunic, the bare feet, the corridor. "Not sneaking. Not begging."

"Mira—"

"I want it to be mine. "

That stopped Talla's mouth. She stood in the seam of shadow and light and looked at her youngest sister's face, and the thing she felt was not what she had expected to feel tonight. Not disgust. Not the cold clean hatred she'd felt for Zara's display in her quarters. Something closer to grief. Something closer to recognition. I want it to be mine. Talla had spent twenty-four years wanting things to be hers, and she had never once been allowed to have one, and she had made a whole life out of that arithmetic — the jars, the years, the cribs, the countdown — because counting was the only thing the ring had ever let her keep.

Mira turned to go.

Then she stopped, one step down the corridor, and looked back over her shoulder. The light from the open door caught one side of her face and left the other in the dark, and the ring pulsed, and she said, in a voice that was almost steady:

"You should go too, Talla. Before someone sees you standing there."

She walked away. Bare feet on stone, quiet this time — she had learned it in the space of forty steps — and Talla watched her go until the bend took her, and then the corridor was empty and the light from Sefa's door was still spilling across the floor, and the walls were still recording, and Talla stood alone in the dark with her sister's words sitting in her chest.

Inside the room, Malik said something. Low. Talla did not catch the words. But she caught Sefa's answer — a real laugh, quiet and cracked, the same laugh from before — and then the sounds went quiet, and the ring pulsed slow and blue around the two of them, and Talla finally took her hand off the wall and walked the long way back to her own room, past the nursery with its twelve empty cribs, past the archive door with its six living jars, past the matriarch's closed door at the end of the ring.

She did not stop at any of them.

Behind her, the corridor held its light, and the open door stayed open, and somewhere in the dark of the ring, a girl who had never been asked if she was okay sat on a bench by the water line and waited for first bell to come and make her turn real.

Talla was three steps from her own doorway when she heard the feet behind her.

Not Mira's — Mira had learned quiet, and Mira's feet had gone the other way, back toward the common room and the bench by the water line. These feet came fast and flat and did not care who heard them, and Talla knew the rhythm before she knew she knew it, the way you know a sister's cough through two walls.

She stopped. She did not turn.

"You walk loud," Talla said.

"I know." Lyra's voice was breathless, pitched low, the way it got when she'd been running somewhere she wasn't supposed to run. "I don't care."

Talla turned.

Lyra stood at the bend of the corridor, and the ring's pulse was behind her, that slow blue-green wash coming up the wall in its old tide, and it lit the blue of her hair from behind until the ends of it looked like something burning cold. She was still in the tunic she'd slept in — the same woven gray as Mira's, but Lyra's hung loose on her small frame, one shoulder of it slipped, and she had come out of her room without her sandals, without her belt, without even the little bone clasp she wore at her throat. Her feet were bare on the stone. Her chest was still lifting.

She had run the whole ring. Talla could see it — the flush climbing under the lavender of her throat, the way her breath hadn't caught up to her yet.

"You're supposed to be asleep," Talla said.

"I woke up." Lyra's eyes went past her, down the corridor, to the light spilling out of Sefa's open door. It lay across the floor in a long blue-green strip, brighter at the threshold, thinning as it reached the seam where Talla had stood. Lyra looked at it for a long time. "The walls woke me."

"The walls do that."

"Not like this." Lyra's hand came up and pressed flat against her own sternum, fingers spread, as if she could feel the ring through her own ribs. "I was asleep and the wall beside my bed went warm. Not bright. Warm. I put my hand on it and it was the temperature of a body." She swallowed. "I've slept against that wall my whole life, Talla. It's never been warm."

Talla said nothing.

"So I got up." Lyra's voice was very quiet now, and very even, and that was the thing about her that Talla had always found hardest to look at — the way the youngest of them could go still and careful when the moment was bad. "And I walked. And I passed Sefa's door." She nodded toward the light. "It's open."

"It's open," Talla said.

"Zara's order."

Lyra's eyes came back to her, and Talla felt it land — the violet of them, wide and steady in the corridor's dim, and there was no accusation in them yet. Only the question. Only the waiting. Lyra's bare toes curled against the stone, once, and Talla saw her decide not to ask the obvious thing, and then saw her ask it anyway, because she was eighteen and she had never learned to hold a thing back.

"You were standing here."

"I was walking."

"Talla." Lyra's mouth pressed thin. "Your hand."

Talla looked down. Her right palm was still red, still creased from the wall — the pulse-lines of the stone printed into her skin in faint blue-green bands, the way they printed into anyone who leaned there long enough. She flexed her fingers. The marks stayed.

"It's from the wall," Talla said.

"I know what it's from."

Lyra took a step closer. Then another. She was small enough that she had to tip her head back to hold Talla's eyes, and she did, and the ring kept pulsing behind her, and somewhere down the corridor the light from Sefa's door breathed brighter and then softer, brighter and then softer, the way it had been breathing for an hour.

"How long were you there?" Lyra asked.

"Does it matter?"

"Yes."

Talla looked at her sister's face — the softness still in the jaw, the mouth still a girl's mouth, the hair still that impossible living blue that had made the whole ring turn when she was born. Eighteen years old. The last of them. The one who had walked into a room and chosen a human out of every scan the clan had ever run, and had come out of that room with the first thing she had ever wanted for herself, and had said so out loud, to Talla, in the dark of the nursery with the twelve empty cribs around them.

And Talla had spent the whole night since then standing in corridors, watching.

"Long enough," Talla said.

Lyra's face did not change. That was the worst of it. She did not flinch, did not look away, did not do any of the things a girl of eighteen was supposed to do when she heard her sister say she had stood in the dark and watched a man fuck another woman through an open door. She just stood there with her bare feet on the cold stone and her arms loose at her sides and her eyes on Talla's, and the question in them got quieter and heavier at the same time.

"You watched the whole thing," Lyra said. Not a question this time.

"Yes."

"And Mira."

Talla's jaw tightened before she could stop it. "How do you—"

"I passed the common room." Lyra's mouth moved — almost a smile, almost nothing. "She was on the bench by the water line. Sitting on her hands. She looked at me like I'd caught her stealing." A pause. "She has that look. She's had it her whole life. She gets it every time she wants something she's been told to wait for."

"She didn't go in."

"I know she didn't go in." Lyra's voice stayed even. "Her feet were still clean. If she'd gone in, she'd have come out — " She stopped. Her throat worked. "She'd have come out with something on her."

The two of them stood in the corridor with the light between them, and the ring pulsed, and neither of them said anything for a while. Down the way, in Sefa's room, the water had stopped. The cot had gone quiet. There was only the low mineral hum of the ring itself, that sound the walls made when they were recording something steady — the sound Talla had fallen asleep to her whole life and had never once heard from outside a room she was not in.

Lyra's hand came up and pushed the loose shoulder of her tunic back into place, slow, deliberate, and Talla watched her do it, and understood that Lyra was buying herself time. That she had come down this corridor running, and had stopped at the sight of Talla's face, and was now standing still because she needed to decide what to do with what she was already sure of.

"Say it," Talla said.

"I don't want to say it."

"Say it anyway."

Lyra's eyes closed. One breath in through her nose, one out through her mouth, and when she opened them again the steadiness was gone and something rawer was underneath it — something that looked, for a second, like the face she'd had in the nursery, standing in front of her mother's crib with her hand on the rail.

"It was him," Lyra said. "It was all of it."

Talla did not answer.

Lyra looked down at her own hands. She turned them over, palms up, and studied them the way you study something that belongs to someone else — the long pale-violet fingers, the small creases at the base of each thumb, the nails bitten down on the right hand and not the left. She had bitten her nails since she was six. She had never once managed to stop. Talla had watched the matriarch scold her for it, watched Veth bandage the cuticles, watched three different sisters try to paint over the habit with lacquer that Lyra peeled off within a day.

She did not lift them.

She just stood there with her palms open in the blue-green light of the corridor, and her bare feet on the cold stone, and the ring pulsing on around the two of them, and the open door ten steps away with a man and a woman quiet on the other side of it — and she did not lift her hands, and she did not lift her eyes, and Talla stood across from her in the seam of the dark and waited for whatever was going to come out of her sister's mouth next, because she had watched Lyra choose a human out of every scan the clan had ever run, and she had watched Lyra come out of that room with the first thing she had ever wanted for herself, and she knew — standing there with the wall's pulse-marks still printed red into her palm — that whatever Lyra said next would be the truest thing anyone in this ring had said all night.

Talla watched her sister's hands, and the corridor held its breath around them, and somewhere behind the wall the ring's hum kept its even meter, recording nothing, recording the two of them standing there, and Talla understood that the walls were reading this too — the warmth of two bodies in a corridor, the pulse of a sister's pulse — and that by morning Zara would know that Lyra had come to her, and that Talla had not turned her away.

"You're bleeding," Talla said.

Lyra looked down. There was a thin line of dark at the edge of her right thumbnail, where the skin had split, and a bead of something darker than lavender welling up along the cuticle. She hadn't noticed. She had been biting them again, in the dark, on the way down the corridor, and one had finally gone through.

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing." Talla reached for her hand, and Lyra let her take it — that was the surprise, the way she let her take it, without pulling back, without the flinch Talla had been braced for. Talla turned the small hand over in her own and looked at the split cuticle, the bitten nail, the little crescent of blood. "You'll get it on your tunic."

"I don't care about the tunic."

"You will." Talla pressed her thumb against the cut, the way you'd press a cloth against a wound, and Lyra's fingers curled around hers, small and cold, and neither of them let go. "It's the only one you have that's still gray. Mira's already dyed hers."

"Mira can have mine."

Talla almost laughed. It came up her throat and died there, because Lyra's face was still down, still turned toward their joined hands, and there was nothing funny in it. The ring pulsed once, slow, and the light moved across the top of Lyra's hair, and Talla saw the way the blue of it had gone flat at the roots — no shimmer, no living ripple, just hair, just the girl's hair with the sweat dried into it and the ends still damp from wherever she'd been.

"How long were you in the common room with her?" Talla asked.

"I didn't stay."

"You stopped."

"I stopped long enough to see her face." Lyra's voice was very small. "She was on the bench, Talla. Her hands were under her. She was sitting on them like she was afraid of what they'd do if she didn't." A pause. "She didn't say anything to me. She just looked, and I looked, and then I came here."

"Why here?"

Lyra lifted her head then. Not all the way — she still had her chin down, still had her eyes on the seam of Talla's collar, but she lifted it enough that the light caught the wet at the corner of her left eye, and Talla saw that it wasn't a tear. It was just the light. Just the ring's blue-green catching in the corner of a violet eye and making it look wet.

"Because you were the one standing in the corridor," Lyra said. "You were the one with the wall on your hand. You were the one who watched."

"I didn't — "

"Don't." Lyra's fingers tightened around Talla's, hard, the bitten nail digging in. "Don't do that thing you do. Don't make it smaller than it was."

Talla stopped. The wall's pulse-marks on her palm had begun to fade at the edges, going from red to a dull rose, the way they always did, and she looked at them and then at her sister's face and did not say the thing she had been about to say, which was that she had only watched because she had needed to know what the clan was doing to the youngest of them, and had needed to know it in her own eyes and not through the walls.

"I watched," Talla said. "You're right. I watched the whole thing."

Lyra let out a breath she had been holding since the bend of the corridor.

"And?"

"And nothing." Talla shook her head, slow. "There's no and. I stood there and I watched Sefa take him into her room and I watched the door stay open because the matriarch told her to, and I watched the walls go bright and I watched them go steady, and I stood there until my palm hurt, and then I walked away and you found me."

"You could have knocked."

"I could have."

"You could have gone in."

"No." Talla said it flat, and it landed between them, and Lyra's face did something complicated — relief and hurt in the same small movement of her mouth. "I could not have gone in. That's not what the door was for."

Lyra looked at the open door again. The light had changed while they'd been talking — dimmer now, softer, the way it went when the ring had finished reading a room and was settling back into its resting pulse. Sefa's voice hadn't come through the corridor for a while. There was a low sound from inside, not words, just the sound of a body shifting on a cot, and then nothing, and then the low mineral hum of the walls going on with their work.

"She said his name," Lyra said.

"What?"

"In the room. When I passed. I heard her say his name." Lyra's voice had gone careful, the way it did when she was working something out. "Not loud. Just — she said it. Like it was the only word she had."

Talla said nothing.

"I've read her logs." Lyra's eyes came back to her sister's. "For six years, Talla. Every night. Every wall. Every heat and every pulse and every duration. And I have never once read Sefa's name on a wall, because she was never in a room. She was only ever outside them, reading." A pause. "She was never in a room, and now she's in one, and the door is open, and she said his name."

"Lyra."

"I'm not angry." Lyra said it fast, before Talla could get the rest of it out. "I want you to hear me say it. I am not angry. I don't know what I am. I came down this corridor to be angry and I got here and I looked at your hand and I couldn't find it." Her small shoulders rose and fell. "I can't find the angry part."

Talla looked at her for a long moment. The ring's pulse moved across the wall behind Lyra's head, and the light went from blue to green and back, and the corridor was quiet except for the low hum and the sound of two sisters breathing in the same small space.

"You don't have to find it," Talla said.

"I think I do." Lyra's mouth tried for the smile again and didn't make it. "Zara will want me to have it. She'll want me to be angry so she can tell me to put it down. That's how she does it. She hands you a thing and then she takes it away and calls it a lesson."

"You've noticed."

"I've had eighteen years."

Talla let go of her hand. Lyra's fingers stayed curled for a second, reaching, and then dropped to her side, and the two of them stood apart again, the way they had started, with the light between them and the open door ten steps off and the corridor running away in both directions like a held breath.

"Go back to bed," Talla said.

"In a minute."

"Lyra — "

"In a minute." Lyra turned her head and looked down the corridor, past the open door, toward the common room and the bench by the water line, where Mira was still sitting on her hands, and Talla watched her sister look at the light and the dark and the long empty walk back, and knew, without being told, that Lyra was not going to go back to bed at all.

Talla reached out and took her sister's hand.

Not the way she had a minute ago — the quick clinical press of a thumb over a split cuticle. She laced her fingers through Lyra's and closed her grip, and Lyra's small cold hand went stiff for half a heartbeat before it curled in and held.

"Come on," Talla said.

"Where?"

"Anywhere but this corridor."

She pulled, gently, and Lyra came. Bare feet on cold stone, two sets of them now, and they walked away from the light spilling out of Sefa's open door and toward the bend that led down the long arc of the ring.

They had to pass the door to get anywhere. There was no other way around the curve of the upper ring — the corridor ran one direction, a single long rib of the station, and Sefa's room sat in it like a swallowed stone. Talla felt Lyra's grip tighten as they came level with the threshold, and she felt her own do the same, and neither of them looked in.

But the light came out and laid itself across their bare feet.

It was warm. Not just bright — warm, the way Mira had said, the way Lyra had said, the temperature of a body, and it moved over the tops of their toes as they stepped through it and then fell behind them, and Talla felt it on the backs of her heels for three more steps before the corridor bent and took it away.

The hum changed when they rounded the bend. On the other side of it the ring's pulse was thinner — the walls here were older, and the station's own systems bled through them, a faint gray murmur under the blue. Talla walked with her sister's hand in hers and listened to the two of them breathe, and neither of them said anything for a while.

The common room opened off the corridor's inner curve through a wide unlit arch, and Talla smelled it before she saw it — water on stone, the mineral coolness of the line that ran along the far wall, the faint green of the moss that grew where the condensation collected. It was the room the whole clan used when they could not sleep. It had benches instead of chairs, because Xylari did not sit up straight, and the benches faced the water line, which was a channel cut into the floor and fed by a slow drip from the ceiling, and the drip had a sound like a metronome gone soft.

Mira was on the second bench.

She had her feet tucked up under her and her hands buried under her thighs and her sleep tunic pulled down over her knees, and she was staring at the water line the way you stare at a thing that has no answers in it. She had not turned on any lamp. The only light came from the ring's pulse and the faint glow off the channel, and it made her blue hair look almost gray and her face look older than seventeen.

Talla stopped in the arch and did not let go of Lyra's hand.

"Mira," she said.

Mira's head came up. Her eyes went to Talla first, then dropped to the joined hands, and something moved across her face — quick, unguarded, gone before it could be named. She pulled her hands out from under her thighs and set them on her knees, palms down, as if she had been caught at something and wanted them visible.

"I told you I was coming back here," she said.

"You did."

"I've been here the whole time."

"I know."

Lyra's fingers flexed inside Talla's grip. Talla felt the small hand make a decision — tighten once, then hold — and then Lyra stepped past her into the room, and Talla let her hand go only when the distance made it necessary.

Lyra crossed to the bench and sat down on the end of it, not close to Mira, not far. A length of empty stone between them, exactly one arm's reach of nothing. She pulled her feet up the way Mira had hers, tucked her tunic over her knees, and looked at the water line.

Talla stayed in the arch.

The channel ran along the base of the far wall, a hand's width wide, cut into the floor stone and lined with something that kept the water moving. It came in from under the wall at one end and went out under the wall at the other, and it made a sound like someone breathing slow. Moss grew along the lip of it in soft green fingers. Talla had sat on these benches ten thousand times. She had watched the moss grow and the water move and the ring pulse, and she had never once, in twenty-four years, sat on them with both her youngest sisters at the same time, in the dark, without a word being said.

She crossed the room and sat down on Mira's other side.

That put Mira between them. Talla had not planned it that way. She simply went to the nearest open end of the bench, and the nearest open end was on Mira's far side, and so she sat, and the three of them were arranged along the stone like beads on a wire — Lyra, then the empty arm's reach, then Mira, then Talla — and the water went on moving under the wall.

"You're both barefoot," Mira said.

"So are you," Lyra said.

"I was first."

Lyra's mouth moved. It was not quite a smile. "You were first."

Mira looked at her hands. She turned them over, palms up, and looked at them the way Lyra had looked at hers in the corridor — as if they belonged to somebody else. Then she put them back down on her knees.

"How long were you standing there?" she asked Talla, without looking up.

"Long enough."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer you're getting."

Mira's jaw worked. "You said the same thing to me out there. In the corridor. You said long enough and then you — " She stopped. Started again. "You never told me what it looked like."

"No."

"Why not?"

Talla looked at the water. It moved the way it always moved, steady, indifferent, carrying the ring's condensation out from under the wall and into whatever ran beneath the station's bones. She had asked herself the same question in the corridor while Lyra stood across from her with her palms open. She had not had an answer then. She was not sure she had one now.

"Because it wasn't mine to give you," she said finally.

Mira's head came up. Her eyes were wet again, and she did not wipe them this time either. "That doesn't make any sense."

"It makes the only sense there is." Talla turned to face her. "You want me to tell you what it looked like so you can have it without walking through the door. That's what you were doing in the corridor. That's what you're doing now. You want the thing without the cost of the thing."

"That's not — "

"It is." Talla's voice stayed level. "I know because I did it. I stood in that seam for an hour and told myself I was there to count. To observe. To do the arithmetic. And I was not. I was there because I wanted it and I could not admit I wanted it, so I made myself into a witness instead of a woman."

The room went quiet. The water breathed under the wall.

Lyra had not moved. She sat at the end of the bench with her knees drawn up and her hands loose on her shins, and her eyes were on Talla now, steady, and there was something in them that Talla could not read.

"So what did you want?" Mira asked. Her voice had gone small.

"I don't know yet."

"That's — "

"Mira." Lyra said it quietly, and Mira's mouth shut. The two of them looked at each other across the empty arm's reach of stone, and something passed between them that Talla was not part of — a thing that had been building between the five of them since the night Lyra walked into a room and chose a human, and would keep building long after tonight.

Mira looked away first.

"I sat on my hands," she said. "In the corridor. When I got there. I put my hands under my thighs and I sat on them so I wouldn't — so I wouldn't do anything."

"I saw," Talla said.

"You saw."

"I was standing in the seam. You walked past me. You didn't see me because you were looking at the light, and I was in the dark, and I let you not see me."

Mira's face did something complicated. "Why?"

"Because I wanted to know what you would do."

"And?"

"And you didn't go in."

Mira's hands came off her knees and went back under her thighs, pressing down, the same way they had been when Talla found her. She held them there and looked at the water, and the ring pulsed once, slow, and the moss along the channel lip caught the light and let it go.

"I wanted to," she said. "I wanted to so badly I could taste it."

"I know."

"You don't." Mira's voice cracked. "You don't know. You've never — you're Talla. You count things. You stand in corridors and do arithmetic. You don't — you don't burn. You never burned for anything in your whole life."

Talla was quiet for a moment.

Then she reached over and put her hand flat on Mira's knee.

Mira went still.

"I burned tonight," Talla said. "I stood in that seam for an hour with my palm on the wall and I burned, and I hated it, and I hated that I hated it, and I walked away from that door and I am still burning. So you can put your hands under your thighs and you can tell me I don't know, but you would be wrong."

Mira stared at the hand on her knee. Her breath had gone shallow. Under Talla's palm the muscle in her thigh was tight as a wire, and Talla felt it slowly, slowly ease, and then she felt Mira's own hand come up and cover hers, small and cold and shaking.

"I don't know what to do with it," Mira whispered.

"Neither do I."

"Zara said day after tomorrow."

"I know."

"She said it like it was a delivery. Like a thing being brought to the ring." Mira's grip tightened. "She said 'Mira's turn' the way she says the archive numbers. I heard her tell Veth. She said the words and she didn't even look up from the slate."

Talla said nothing. She had heard Zara say it too, in the corridor outside the cold room, with the archive door standing open and the six living jars glowing faintly inside, and she had said nothing then as well.

"I want it to be mine," Mira said. She was crying now, quietly, without any of the drama of it — just water coming down her face and her mouth staying steady. "That's all. I don't want to be a delivery. I want it to be mine. Like Lyra's was hers."

At the other end of the bench, Lyra moved.

She did not stand. She just came across the empty arm's reach of stone — a slow slide of bare feet and drawn-up knees — until the gap between them was closed and she was sitting shoulder to shoulder with Mira, and then she put her own hand on top of theirs, three hands stacked on Mira's knee, and the ring pulsed and the water breathed and none of them said anything for a while.

"It wasn't mine," Lyra said at last.

Mira looked at her.

"The first night." Lyra's voice was low. "I told Talla it was. I said it was the first thing I ever wanted for myself. And some of it was. But some of it I did because Zara had already decided, and because the archive is dying, and because the cribs are empty, and because I am the youngest and the youngest goes first, and I told myself the wanting and the being-told were the same thing because it was easier than knowing they weren't."

"Lyra — "

"I'm not saying I didn't want him." Lyra's hand stayed flat on theirs. "I'm saying it was mixed. Everything in this ring is mixed. You can't get one clean thing out of the matriarch's hand. She's held it too long."

Mira's breath went out of her in a long, uneven rush. She turned her hand over under theirs and laced her fingers through both — through Talla's and through Lyra's, all three of them knotted on her knee — and she looked at the water line and did not let go.

"Then what do I do," she said. "When it's my turn. What do I do so it's mine."

Talla looked at her sister's face — the wet tracks, the blue hair stuck to one cheek, the jaw that was trying so hard to hold — and then at Lyra's, which was quiet and open and had stopped being eighteen in the last hour, and she thought about the corridor and the open door and the warm light on her bare feet and the hand she had not let go of.

"You walk in on your own feet," Talla said, "at the hour you choose, not the hour she names. And you close the door behind you. And whatever happens in that room stays in that room, and the walls can read it and Zara can count it and it still won't be hers, because she wasn't inside it."

Mira's fingers tightened around hers.

"Will you be there," she said. "After. Outside. Like — like you were tonight."

Talla looked at her for a long moment. The water went on moving under the wall. The moss caught the blue and let it go.

"Yes," she said.

Lyra's hand shifted on top of theirs, and Talla felt her sister's thumb press once into the back of her knuckles — a small thing, a private thing, the way you press a bruise to remind yourself it's there.

The three of them sat on the bench with their hands knotted together on Mira's knee and watched the water line run, and the ring pulsed on around them, slow and blue and steady, reading the warmth of three bodies in the dark and logging it for the matriarch, and none of them got up to go to bed.

The drip from the ceiling counted the seconds. Somewhere past the arch, down the corridor, the light from Sefa's open door finally went out.

The light from Sefa's door went out, and for a long moment nothing moved on the bench. The water kept its slow run under the wall. Then a shadow crossed the arch — not the pulse, not a sister's long shape, but a small one, walking soft, and Talla's head came up before she had decided to lift it.

Sefa stood in the opening.

She had her hair down. That was the first thing — Sefa, who wore the hasty knot like armor, who had tied it back every morning for six years, stood in the arch with her blue hair loose and still damp at the ends, darkening the shoulders of her tunic. She had no glasses. Her eyes looked wrong without them, smaller, unarmored, and they went straight past Talla, straight past Mira, and stopped on Lyra at the end of the bench.

She did not say anything. She crossed the room instead — past the channel, past the moss, bare feet making no sound at all on the stone — and stopped in front of her youngest sister.

Lyra looked up at her. Her hands were still knotted with the others on Mira's knee, and she did not pull them free.

"Sefa," she said.

Sefa turned her hand over. Palm up. She did not reach for Lyra, did not touch her — just held the open hand in the air between them, low, at the height of Lyra's chest, and waited. The ring pulsed once. The moss caught it and let it go.

Lyra did not move.

"Sefa," Sefa said. Her own name, soft, the way you'd say it to a spooked animal. Just that. Just the one word, and Lyra's fingers came loose from Mira's knee one by one, and her hand came up, and she laid it in Sefa's palm.

Sefa closed her fingers. She pulled — not hard, just steady — and Lyra came up off the bench in one motion, tunic falling straight, blue hair swinging forward over her shoulder, and neither of them looked at Talla or Mira again.

They walked out through the arch.

Mira's hand stayed open on her knee where Lyra's had been. She stared at it. Talla watched her sister's face go through something fast and unnameable, and then Mira's mouth opened and Talla put her hand flat on Mira's thigh, and Mira shut it again without a sound.

The corridor was dark past the arch. The ring's pulse ran the wall in its old tide, blue-green, blue-green, and Sefa walked ahead of Lyra with her hand still holding hers, and Lyra followed without asking where. She had spent the whole night walking this corridor. She knew every seam of it. She had never once walked it behind Sefa.

They passed the bend where Talla had stood in the shadow. Sefa's bare feet made no sound. Lyra's made a soft slap, one-two, one-two, and she heard it and hated it and kept walking anyway.

"You weren't asleep," Lyra said.

"No."

"I heard you in the room."

"I know." Sefa's voice was quiet. Not frayed anymore. Something underneath the quiet that had not been there an hour ago. "The walls were warm under my hand. I lay there and put my palm on the stone and it was the temperature of a body. I couldn't sleep after that."

"That's what woke me," Lyra said.

"I know."

They passed the nursery door — the wide low arch with the pale curtain across it, the one that never closed, the one the whole ring walked past every day and tried not to look through. Sefa stopped in front of it. She did not push the curtain aside. She just stood, with Lyra's hand in hers, and looked at the weave of it, and did not move for a long moment.

Then she drew the curtain back with her free hand.

The nursery breathed out at them. Cool air, the mineral smell of the cribs, the faint sweet something the crib-straw gave off when it had gone a long time without a body in it. The walls in here pulsed slower than the corridor — the room's own rhythm, older, tied to the station's deeper systems — and the light moved over twelve empty cribs in twelve slow waves, and the cribs were wood and bone and pale woven rail, and every one of them was made up.

Lyra's breath caught. She had stood in this room a hundred times. She had stood in it last night, in the dark, with Talla, and said the truest thing she had ever said out loud. She had never once stood in it holding Sefa's hand.

Sefa stepped through the arch. She drew Lyra in after her, and the curtain fell behind them, and the corridor's noise went away.

"The first crib," Sefa said. "On the left. That's yours."

"I know which crib is mine."

"You know which crib your mother's was." Sefa's thumb moved once across the back of Lyra's knuckles — a small stroke, deliberate, the way you'd steady a hand before you wrote with it. "Those aren't the same thing."

Lyra looked at the first crib on the left. Her mother's. The rail was worn pale along the top where a hand had rested, over and over, in the years before the males died. It had been her mother's crib, and her mother's mother's before that, and it had been empty since before Lyra was born, and the whole clan knew it was the crib Lyra was meant to fill, and no one had ever said so out loud.

"Why did you bring me here," Lyra said.

Sefa let go of her hand.

She walked down the row instead — slow, the way you walk a thing you have only ever read about — and she touched each rail as she passed: one, two, three, four, five, six. Her fingers found the same worn place on each, the pale spot where a hand had rested, and she pressed it, and moved on. Seven. Eight. Nine. She stopped at the tenth.

"I read this room every night," she said. "Six years. Every wall in the ring, but this one most of all, because the matriarch wanted the readings on the nursery above everything else. She wanted to know if anything changed in here. If the walls got warmer. If the crib-straw breathed." Sefa's hand stayed on the rail. "Nothing ever changed. I logged the same numbers every night for six years. Temperature, humidity, the pulse-rate of the walls. The same three numbers, in the same order, and I wrote them down in the same hand, and I moved on."

Lyra said nothing. She stood just inside the arch with her hands at her sides, and the nursery's slow light moved over her bare feet.

"I never once stood in here," Sefa said. "Not once. I read it from the corridor. I read it from the doorway. I never crossed the threshold, because the reading only worked if I stayed outside it. The walls log the heat of bodies in a room, and if I was in the room, I was a body, and the numbers went wrong." She turned. Her face in the nursery light was younger than it had been in the corridor. "That's what I told myself. That's what I told Zara. It was true. It was also — "

She stopped.

"Also what," Lyra said.

"Also easier." Sefa's mouth moved, not quite a smile. "If I never went in, I never had to find out what the room did to a body. I could read the cribs and the straw and the pulse and never once stand where a mother stood. And then tonight I crossed a threshold I had no business crossing, and the walls went warm under my hand, and the numbers I've been writing my whole life finally meant something, and the first thing I thought, when it was over, was — this room. I have to bring her to this room."

Lyra's throat worked.

"Why me," she said.

Sefa came back down the row. Ten, nine, eight, seven — she touched each rail on the way, the same pale worn spot, and stopped in front of Lyra with the first crib at her back, her mother's crib, the rail pale along the top.

"Because you walked into a room and chose," Sefa said. "Out of every scan the clan ever ran. Every species we ever tested. You walked into a room and you chose him, and you came out of it with something that was yours, and you said so out loud, in this room, with the cribs around you. I read the walls of that room the next morning. I logged the numbers. I wrote them down in the same hand I've used for six years, and I knew — I knew, Lyra — that you had done the one thing I have never once done."

"Which is what."

"Crossed." Sefa's hand came up and found Lyra's again, palm to palm this time, fingers laced. "You crossed. You went in. You stopped being a reader and became a body in the room. And I have spent six years being a reader so I would never have to be a body in the room, and tonight I stopped, and I don't know what I am now, and you're the only one in this ring who does."

Lyra's fingers tightened. Her eyes had gone wet, and she did not wipe them, and Sefa did not look away.

"Say his name," Lyra said.

Sefa's face did something small and private.

"Malik," she said. Just that. Just the one word, quiet, in the nursery, with the cribs around them and the walls going slow and blue, and Lyra heard it land in the room the way the whole clan would hear it in the morning, in the readings, in the numbers, in the matriarch's slate.

"Good," Lyra said.

She let go of Sefa's hand and turned to the crib — her mother's crib, the first one on the left, the rail worn pale along the top — and she put both hands on the rail and looked down into it. The straw was fresh. It was always fresh. Someone in the ring changed it every month, and no one had ever asked who, and it had always been fresh, and the crib had always been empty, and Lyra had stood here at six years old and put her hand on the rail and been told to move along.

"I used to think it would be her," she said. "When I was small. I used to think my mother would come back and stand here with me and tell me which crib was mine. And then I got older and I understood she couldn't, and then I got older still and I understood that the crib was mine anyway, and it didn't matter whether she came back, because the crib was waiting and the crib had always been waiting and the whole ring knew it." She looked up at Sefa. "I chose him because of this crib. Not because of Zara. Not because of the archive. Because I stood here in the dark one night when I was fifteen and I put my hand on this rail and I decided that if there was a way to fill it, I would find it, and I would do it myself, and no one would do it for me."

Sefa crossed the small space between them. She stood at the side of the crib, opposite Lyra, both hands on the rail, and the two of them looked down at the fresh straw together, and the nursery's slow light moved over their faces.

"It's not going to be easy," Sefa said.

"I know."

"Zara will read every wall. She will log every pulse. She will know the hour you close the door and the hour you open it, and she will know what happened in between, and she will put it on her slate next to the archive numbers, and she will look at it in the morning and decide what it means."

"I know."

"And Mira is next. And then Korena. And then me, again, or Talla, or whoever Zara decides, and none of us get to keep him. That's the contract. That's what you signed when you chose him, even if no one showed you the page."

Lyra's hands stayed on the rail. She looked down at the straw, pale and fresh and waiting, and she did not lift her head.

"I know," she said. "I've known since the first night. I told him I didn't want to share him, and he told me that's not how it works, and he was right, and I've been carrying it ever since." She looked up. "But this crib is mine. And whatever Zara writes on her slate, and whatever the walls record, and whoever comes after me — this crib is mine. And I'm going to fill it. And when there's a body in it, and it's crying, and the whole ring can hear it, then I want you to be the one who reads the wall and writes it down. Not Zara. You."

Sefa's hands tightened on the rail.

"That's not how the readings work," she said. "The matriarch reads the nursery above all else. She's always read it."

"Then change it."

"Lyra — "

"You crossed a threshold tonight." Lyra's voice was low and steady and had stopped being eighteen. "You said so yourself. You stopped being a reader and became a body in the room. So read this room like a body in it. Read it like the woman who stood at this crib with me and put her hand on the rail. And when Zara asks what the walls said, tell her the truth, and make the truth ours."

Sefa looked at her for a long moment. The nursery's slow pulse moved across the crib rails, over the straw, over both their faces, and then Sefa let go of the rail and stepped around the crib, and she stopped in front of Lyra and put both hands on her sister's shoulders.

"All right," she said.

Lyra's breath went out of her. She leaned forward and put her forehead against Sefa's collarbone, and Sefa held her there, one hand coming up to the back of her head, fingers in the loose blue hair, and neither of them said anything for a while. The crib stood at their side, empty and made up and waiting, and the walls went slow and blue around them, and the ring's pulse ran on outside the curtain like it had run on all night and would run on all morning and did not care what any of them decided.

Outside, in the corridor, the first bell had not yet come. But the ring had begun to change its meter — a long slow swell, the way it did before the station's day cycle turned — and the light under the curtain had gone from blue to a paler green, and the two of them stood in the nursery with their foreheads touching and their hands on each other, and the cribs around them waited.

Sefa pulled back first. She smoothed Lyra's hair down with both hands, tucking the loose strands behind her small lavender ears, and looked at her face in the nursery light.

"Go back to your room," she said. "Before first bell. Before Zara comes."

"What about you."

"I have readings to log." Sefa's mouth moved, small and wry and exhausted. "I always have readings to log."

Lyra turned to the crib one more time. She put one hand flat on the rail — the pale worn spot, the place where a hand had rested a hundred years and more — and she held it there for a moment, and then she let go, and she walked to the arch, and she drew the curtain back, and she stepped out into the corridor.

Sefa stayed in the nursery. She stood at the side of the first crib with her hand on the rail and her damp hair loose on her shoulders, and she looked down at the straw, and the walls went slow and blue around her, and somewhere out in the ring the day cycle began to turn.

The curtain fell shut behind Lyra. It swung once, twice, and settled, and the nursery went quiet again, and the corridor outside it was empty, and the first pale green of morning moved up the wall like water finding its level.

The corridor emptied behind Lyra and stayed empty, and she walked it the way she had walked it an hour ago — bare feet, loose tunic, the ring's new pale-green light climbing the wall beside her like something waking up slow. She passed the bend where Talla had stood. She passed the seam where the shadow thinned to nothing. She did not stop at either.

She was almost to her own door when she heard it — not footsteps, not the walls. Water. The drip of the channel in the common room, and under the drip, a voice. Low. Male.

Lyra's feet stopped before her mind caught up.

She stood in the corridor with her hand on the jamb of her own room and listened, and the voice went on, unhurried, the way it had gone on all night through an open door — the same register, the same flat calm, only now there was no cot creaking under it and no Sefa making sounds that were not words. Just the voice, and the water, and a second voice answering it.

Mira.

Lyra's jaw set. She should go in. She had been told to go in — Sefa had smoothed her hair down and said before first bell, before Zara comes, and she had meant it, and Lyra had meant to do it. But her hand stayed on the jamb, and her feet stayed on the stone, and the two voices went on behind the arch of the common room, and she did not go in.

She turned instead and walked toward the arch, quiet, the way Mira had learned to walk tonight.

---

Malik had found the water line an hour before first bell, because he could not sleep and the room had stopped being a room. Sefa had gone out — he had heard her feet on the stone, heard the curtain somewhere down the corridor, heard nothing after that — and he had lain on the narrow cot with the wall going slow and blue beside his head and the smell of her still in the straw, and he had gotten up and put his jeans on and gone looking for the sound of moving water.

It was the only sound in the ring that was not the walls.

He had followed it down the corridor, past the wide unlit arch, and found the channel cut into the floor — a hand's width of water running along the base of the far wall, moss on the lip, benches facing it. He had sat on the end of the last bench with his elbows on his knees and watched it move, and he had been sitting there a while when the girl came in.

She came in fast, the way the young ones always did — no care for the stone, no care for who heard. Bare feet, sleep tunic twisted at the hem, blue hair loose and unbrushed and hanging in her face. She had stopped two steps into the room when she saw him. She had not said anything. She had stood there in the arch with her hands at her sides and her chest still lifting, and he had looked at her and waited, because he had learned in three days that the Xylari did not need to be asked.

She crossed the room and sat down on the bench beside him. Not the far end. Beside him. Close enough that her knee was a hand's width from his, and she pulled her feet up under her and put her hands on her knees and looked at the water, and neither of them said anything for a long time.

"You're not supposed to be out here," Mira said finally.

"Neither are you."

"I live here."

"So do I, now."

She turned her head and looked at him then — really looked, the way none of them had looked at him yet except Zara, and Zara's look had been a scale and this one was not. This one was a girl looking at a man in the green light of a station morning with her hands on her knees and her jaw set hard, and underneath the set jaw something else was moving, and Malik did not name it because he had never been a man who named things.

"Sefa said your name," Mira said.

"She said a lot of things."

"In the room. I heard it from the corridor." Mira's eyes did not leave his. "She said your name like it was the only word she had. I've read her logs my whole life. I've never once read her name on a wall." A pause. "She was never in a room. And now she's in one, and the door was open, and she said your name, and I heard it."

Malik looked back at the water. The channel ran out from under the wall and into the dark at the other end, and the moss on the lip caught the green and let it go, and he thought about Sefa's hand flat on his back in the dark and the sound she had made when he asked her if she was okay, and he did not say any of it.

"You've been sitting out here a while," he said.

"I was on the bench before you were."

"I know. You left before I came in."

Mira's mouth opened. Closed. She looked down at her own hands on her knees and turned them over and looked at the palms, the way Lyra had looked at hers in the corridor, as if they belonged to somebody else.

"Talla saw me," she said. "In the corridor. I was standing at Sefa's door with my hand on the frame, and Talla was in the seam, and she saw me. And then Lyra came, and the three of us sat on this bench, and Lyra put her hand on mine, and Talla put hers on top, and they told me — they told me I should walk in on my own feet when it's my turn. Not sneaking. Not begging." She looked up. "And I sat here after they left and I thought about it. And I decided."

"Decided what."

Mira's hands came off her knees and she turned on the bench to face him, and the move brought her knee against his thigh, and she did not pull it back.

"I decided I'm not going to wait for Zara to name the hour," she said.

Malik went still. Not the way a man goes still when he is afraid. The other way — the way a man goes still when he has heard something and is turning it over, checking it for the shape of what it actually is.

"Say that again," he said.

"I'm not going to wait." Mira's voice was level now, and lower than it had been, and the girl's pitch had gone out of it somewhere between the corridor and this bench. "Zara says day after tomorrow. Or tomorrow. Or whenever she decides, and she never decides, and she watches the walls and counts the numbers and tells us nothing. She said 'Mira's turn' the way she says the archive numbers. She said it to Veth and she didn't even look up from the slate." Her jaw worked once. "Lyra got the first night because she chose you. Sefa got the second night because Zara ordered her to watch you and she crossed a threshold she wasn't supposed to cross. And I'm standing in corridors in my sleep clothes with my hand on a doorframe, and Talla had to take my hand to stop me, and I have never once in my whole life been asked if I was okay."

She stopped. The water went on moving under the wall.

"So I'm asking myself," she said. "And the answer is I'm not going to wait for the matriarch to hand me my turn like a delivery."

Malik looked at her for a long moment. She was seventeen. He had known that before she sat down — Zara had said it in the clipped voice she used for facts — and he had not let himself do anything with the knowing, because seventeen was a number and the number was a wall and he did not climb walls he had no business climbing. But she was sitting on a bench beside him in the green light of a station morning with her knee against his thigh and her hands open in her lap, and she was talking like a woman who had decided something, and the deciding had nothing to do with the number.

"You know what the contract says," he said.

"I know what Zara says the contract says."

"The contract says I stay in the ring until the clan's done with me. That's what I signed. That's what the wrist unit says."

"The contract says you breed with us." Mira's eyes did not move off his. "It doesn't say when. It doesn't say who decides. It doesn't say the matriarch owns the hour."

"Mira."

"I read it." She said it flat. "I read the contract. Sefa logged it, so it's on the wall in the archive room, and I read the archive room walls every morning when I was small because they were the only ones with anything interesting on them, and I read the contract the day Zara brought it in, and I read it again last night after I left the corridor. It says you stay. It says you breed. It says the matriarch schedules the crossings." She paused. "It does not say the matriarch schedules me. I'm not in the contract. None of us are. The contract is between you and Zara and the clan. I'm just the girl she's planning to hand you to."

Malik's jaw tightened. He looked at the water. He thought about the wrist unit on his arm, the way it had clicked shut, the way the little blue light had come on and stayed on. He thought about the empty nursery with its twelve cribs. He thought about Lyra's face in the dark of his room the first night, saying this is the first thing I have ever wanted for myself, and about Sefa's hand flat on his back in the dark, and about the way the walls had gone warm under his palm when he had leaned against them waiting for her to come back from the washroom.

"You're telling me the contract's void," he said.

"I'm telling you the contract doesn't cover me." Mira leaned in, and her knee pressed harder against his thigh, and her voice dropped another register. "And I'm telling you I'm not asking Zara's permission. Not for the hour. Not for the door. Not for anything."

Malik turned his head and looked at her. She was close now — close enough that he could see the green of her eyes in the ring's light, close enough that he could smell her, the same mineral salt as the others and something under it, sharp and young and a little sour, the smell of a girl who had been awake all night and crying and thinking. She did not look away. She did not blink. She sat on the bench beside him with her hands open in her lap and her knee against his thigh and her chin up, and she waited for him to say something, and he did not say anything for a long time.

Then he reached down and picked up the cup he had left on the bench beside him — one of the ring's little clay cups, filled at the water line an hour ago, gone lukewarm in his hand — and he lifted it toward his mouth.

Mira's hand came down on his wrist.

Not hard. Not grabbing. Just flat, palm across the back of his wrist, fingers curling around the bone, and the cup stopped halfway to his mouth and hung there in the air between them, and the water in it tilted and caught the green light and did not spill.

Malik looked at her hand on his wrist. Then at her face.

"You're serious," he said.

Mira's fingers tightened once around the bone of his wrist, and she did not let go, and the water line ran on between them, out from under the wall and into the dark, and the moss on the lip caught the light and let it go.