The bench scraped back against the stone, and Malik was already standing, Mira's wrist still in his grip. He didn't say anything. He just walked, and she came with him, her shorter legs taking two strides for every one of his, and neither of them spoke down the length of the common room, past the water line, under the arch where Lyra had stood a minute ago and wasn't standing now.

The nursery door was a seam in the wall that opened when he got close, and the blue glow inside spilled out across the corridor floor like something poured.

Twelve cribs. He counted them anyway, every time, the way you check a wallet you know is empty. Dome of a room, low ceiling, the cribs in a ring around a central column that pulsed slow and green-blue, and the light moved across the empty frames and made each one look occupied for half a second and then didn't.

Mira pulled her wrist free. She didn't run. She turned to face him with her back to the nearest crib and her chin up, and her sleep clothes were thin enough that he could see her breathing.

"You brought me here," she said. "Of all the rooms."

"You know why."

"Say it."

Malik stepped in. Close enough that she had to tilt her head back to keep his eyes, and the green light caught the underside of her jaw and the two small ridges above her brow that went darker when she was angry, which she was, which she'd been since the bench.

"You put your hand on my wrist in front of your sisters," he said. "You told me you weren't waiting for Zara. That's a claim. So I'm going to treat it like one."

"And if I said I only meant—"

"Then say that." He didn't move. "Say it now and I'll walk you back to the bench."

Mira's mouth opened. Closed. Her hands came up and flattened on his chest, and for a second he thought she was going to push him off, and instead her fingers curled into the fabric of his shirt and held.

"I've waited four years," she said, and her voice had gone rough at the edges. "Four years of listening to the walls. Of reading the pulse in the morning and knowing which sister it was and lying there in the dark with my hand between my legs like a child. And then you come, and she gets you first, and everyone in this ring acts like that's just arithmetic."

"It's not arithmetic to me."

"No," she said. "I noticed."

He turned her by the shoulder. Not rough — a hand on the bone, guiding, and she let herself be turned, and her palms came down flat on the cold rail of the crib frame, fingers wrapping the metal, and the metal was cold enough that she hissed through her teeth.

"You wanted claimed," he said, and his voice had dropped somewhere low and flat. "This is what that looks like."

He hooked his fingers in the waistband of her sleep shorts and pulled them down over her hips, and they caught at her knees and he left them there, bunched, and the cool air of the nursery moved across the backs of her thighs and she made a sound that wasn't a word.

"Tell me to stop," he said.

"Don't you dare."

He put his hand between her shoulder blades and pressed her down until her chest met the rail and her ass tipped up, and she was wet — he could see it in the green light, the shine on the inside of her thighs, and he hadn't touched her yet, and that told him everything about the four years.

He dragged two fingers through her, slow, from the top of her cunt all the way back, and she jolted against the crib and the frame rattled against the floor.

"That's what four years gets you," he said.

"Shut up—"

"Say it again."

"Shut up and fuck me."

He lined up and pushed in, and she was tight and slick and it took one long stroke to seat himself all the way, and Mira's whole back arched and she shoved her hips back into him like she was trying to get him deeper than he could go, and the crib frame scraped two feet across the floor with a sound like a nail dragged down a plate.

"Oh," she said. Just that. And then, "Oh, that's — that's what it is."

"What'd you think it was."

"I thought the walls were exaggerating."

He pulled back until just the head stayed in her and drove in again, and this time she screamed, short and sharp, and the sound went up into the dome and came back down off the curved ceiling, and every crib in the room sat there empty and listening.

He set a rhythm that wasn't kind. Long, deep strokes, all the way out and all the way back, his hips slapping against her ass, the wet sound of her cunt loud in the quiet of a room built for babies. Her knuckles went white on the rail. The metal creaked.

"Harder," she said.

"You don't get to ask yet."

"I'll ask whenever I—"

His palm cracked across her ass, and the sound bounced off the dome, and Mira's words turned into a noise that started as a yelp and finished as a moan, and her hips bucked back into him so hard he had to plant a foot to stay in her.

"Again," she said, breathless. "Do it again."

He did it again. Other cheek. The crack of it, the red bloom of his handprint rising on lavender skin, and she cried out and ground back against him and her cunt clenched around his cock so hard he had to stop moving for a second and just breathe.

"You wanted claimed," he said, low, against the back of her neck. "So I'm going to tell you what claiming means. It means I'm going to breed every one of you. Lyra, Sefa, you, all five, one at a time, in this room if that's what it takes. And when the cribs are full I'm not leaving."

Mira's head came up. "You can't promise—"

"I'm not promising. I'm telling you." He thrust in hard on the last word, and she lost the rest of the sentence.

"Say it back," he said.

"Breed me."

"Say the rest."

"Breed me and stay," she gasped, and her voice broke in the middle of it, and he felt her cunt spasm around him, and she came like that, bent over a crib, both hands locked on cold metal, her whole body shaking through it while he kept driving into her, not slowing, not letting her ride it out easy.

He fucked her through it and past it. The green light flickered across the twelve empty frames, fast now, matching the pulse of her, matching the pulse of him, and the central column had gone from slow to bright, and Malik saw it in the corner of his eye and didn't care.

"I'm close," he said.

"Inside."

"You sure."

"That's the whole point, you idiot—"

He drove in deep and held there and came, and it came out of him in long pulses that he felt all the way up his spine, and Mira went rigid against the crib and made a sound like she'd been hit, and her cunt milked him through it, drawing it out, and he stayed buried and let her have all of it.

When he pulled out, the wet drag of it made her gasp, and he stepped back and looked at her — bent over the frame, sleep shorts tangled at her knees, his cum starting to run down the inside of her thigh in the green light.

"Don't move," he said.

"I couldn't if I wanted to."

He turned her. Hands on her hips, lifting her off the rail and spinning her around to face him, and she came around loose-limbed and flushed and furious, and he pushed her back against the crib frame and hooked her knees up over his forearms and pushed back in before his own breathing had even settled.

Mira's head dropped back. "You're—"

"You said claimed."

"I said claimed, I didn't say—" He thrust and her voice went up an octave. "—twice."

"You're getting twice."

He fucked her against the crib facing him, and this was different — he could see her now, her face, the sweat at her hairline, her eyes half-shut and then all the way open and locked on his. Her hands came off the rail and grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him down into a kiss that was mostly teeth, and she bit his lip hard enough to taste copper, and he fucked her harder for it.

"That's it," she said against his mouth. "That's — don't stop, don't you stop—"

"I'm not stopping."

The frame was scraping the floor in rhythm now, the crib walking across the stone with every stroke, and somewhere behind them one of the empty frames tipped and clattered and neither of them turned to look.

He came again inside her, and this time she came with him, her legs locking around his hips, her heels digging into his lower back, and she buried her face in his shoulder and made a sound into his shirt that he felt in his chest more than heard.

He held her there while it finished. Then he set her down.

Mira's legs didn't hold. Her knees went, and she caught the rail with both hands and hung off it, and his cum ran down the inside of her thigh and dripped onto the stone floor between her feet, and she stood there bent and shaking and drenched, breathing like she'd run the whole ring.

"You," she said, when she had breath for it. "You absolute—"

"Bastard?"

"I was going to say human." She straightened, slowly, hand over hand up the rail, and pulled her shorts up with fingers that weren't entirely cooperating. "I thought I knew what it was. From the walls. The pulse and the heat and the duration, I've read it for years, I read Lyra's night and I thought, well, that's the walls being generous." She looked at him. "The walls undersold it."

Malik pulled his jeans up and fastened them and didn't answer.

Mira wiped her thigh with the heel of her hand, and looked at the wet on her palm, and then at the twelve cribs around them, and something in her face changed — the anger going out of it and leaving whatever was under the anger, which he couldn't read.

"You meant it," she said. "What you said. About staying."

"I don't say things I don't mean."

"Zara will have opinions about that."

"Zara has opinions about everything."

Mira laughed — one short breath of it, no joy in it. She gathered her hair back off her face and held it at the nape of her neck and looked past him at the door, and her nostrils moved, once.

"She's been standing out there since the second time," Mira said. "You know that."

Malik turned his head.

The seam of the nursery door was open a hand's width. Beyond it, in the corridor, the light was dimmer, and there was a shape in it — tall, still, arms crossed, the shoulder line of someone who had stopped walking a while ago and had not decided to come in.

Talla.

She didn't move. She didn't look away either.

"How long," Malik said. Not to Mira.

"Long enough," Talla said, through the gap. Her voice was flat and level and gave him nothing. "Come out here. We need to talk, and I'm not doing it standing in a nursery with the walls lit up like that."

Mira's voice came out raw and loud, pitched at the gap in the wall.

"Talla. Either come in or go home. I'm not talking to you through a crack in the wall like some kind of—" she gestured at the seam, at the sliver of corridor light, at the whole ridiculous arrangement, "—like some kind of spy."

Silence. Then the shape shifted, and the seam of the door didn't move, and Talla's voice came through flat as a blade laid on a table.

"You want me in there. With the walls lit up. Standing in the middle of what you just did."

"I want you to stop hovering in a hallway pretending you weren't watching."

Mira bent and pulled her shorts the rest of the way up, and her hands weren't steady, and she didn't bother hiding it. She ran both palms back through her hair, gathered it, wrung it once at the nape of her neck like she was wringing water out of it, and let it fall.

Malik stood where he was. Jeans up, shirt still untucked, the taste of copper on his lip where her teeth had caught him. He didn't move toward the door and he didn't move away from it. He watched the gap and let the two of them work.

"How long were you out there," he said.

"I told you."

"You told me long enough. That's a number that means you don't want to say the number."

A breath came through the gap. Almost a laugh. Talla's kind of laugh, which was mostly air.

"I came down the corridor when the column went bright," she said. "That was the first time. Then it went bright again, and I stayed."

"So the whole thing."

"The whole thing," she said. "Every wall in the ring is lit, in case you were wondering. The column doesn't do that for one room. It does it when a room is—" she stopped. Started over. "Veth is probably awake. Zara is definitely awake."

Mira's head came up. "Zara."

"She reads the column from her quarters. You know that. You've known that since you were eleven."

"Then she knows."

"She knows something happened in the nursery," Talla said. "She'll know what by first bell."

Malik looked around the room. The central column had settled back to its slow pulse, green-blue, steady as a resting heart. One crib had walked two feet out of its ring and stood crooked, its frame scraped bright where it had dragged across the stone. The other eleven sat where they'd always sat, empty, and the light moved over them one at a time, patient, like it was counting.

He crossed to the crooked crib and put a hand on the rail and pushed it back into line. The scrape of it was loud. Nobody said anything while he did it.

"There," he said. "Now it looks like nothing happened."

"It doesn't," Mira said. "The walls—"

"I know what the walls do." He turned around. "I'm talking about the room. The room should look like what it is. It's a room for children. It shouldn't look like a fight happened in it."

Mira stared at him. Then she looked at Talla's silhouette in the gap, and something passed between the two of them that he wasn't part of, the way sisters have a language that doesn't need words and doesn't include outsiders.

"Fine," Mira said. "Come in or don't, but pick one, because I'm not going to stand here dripping on the floor while you decide."

The gap didn't move.

"Mira."

"What."

"You called me a spy."

"You were spying."

"I was watching." Talla's voice went quieter, and the quiet was worse than the flatness. "There's a difference, and you know there's a difference, because you've done it too. Every one of us has stood in that corridor. You think you're the only one who's ever listened to the walls and put her hand between her legs and hated herself after?"

Mira's jaw worked. She didn't answer.

"Four years," Talla said. "You said four years out loud in there and I heard it through the door. You think I don't know how long it's been? I was nineteen when I started counting. That's five for me. I'm the eldest. I've been counting longest."

Malik leaned his shoulder against the central column. The pulse of it was warm through his shirt, faintly, like standing near an animal that was asleep.

"You two can do this in the hall," he said. "Or you can do it in here. But the column's already told Zara whatever it's going to tell her, and standing in a doorway arguing about it doesn't change the log."

"He's right," Mira said, and the words came out like they cost her.

"I know he's right."

"Then come in."

The gap held. Malik watched it. He'd learned the ring's seams by now — the way they opened for whoever was close enough and warm enough, the way they'd close on their own if nobody moved. This one had been open a while. The light spilling through it had gone from a hard sliver to something softer, which meant the corridor beyond had dimmed down for the sleep cycle, and Talla had been standing in the dark on the other side of it long enough that the dark had gotten used to her.

Then the seam widened. Not much. A hand's width more. And Talla came through it sideways, the way you enter a room you don't want to be seen entering, and stopped just inside with her back close to the wall.

She was taller than Mira by half a head and built like Zara's side of the family — long bones, flat shoulders, the same severe cut to her hair, though hers was longer at the nape and had come loose from whatever she'd pinned it with. Bare feet. A wrap pulled on over sleep clothes, tied loose, one corner hanging. She looked at the cribs first. All twelve. Then she looked at the crooked one, now straight, and her mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile.

"You fixed the crib," she said.

"It was out of line."

"It's going to be out of line again." She looked at Mira. "Every time. You understand that. Every time one of us comes in here, this room is going to look like a fight happened in it, until it doesn't. Until there's something in the cribs that makes the noise worth it."

"I know what the room's for," Mira said.

"Do you? Because you just took your turn without asking Zara, in the nursery, on the night Lyra's log is still warm, and the column is lit across the whole ring, and by first bell every sister in this clan is going to know exactly what you did and exactly where you did it." Talla folded her arms. "So I'm asking. Do you know what the room is for."

Mira's chin came up. The ridges above her brow went dark.

"It's for the thing we've been told our whole lives we can't have," she said. "It's for the twelve cribs. It's for the clan. And it's also for me. Both. I'm allowed both."

"Zara doesn't think you're allowed both."

"Zara thinks we're allowed duty." Mira's voice climbed, then caught itself, and she pulled it back down. "Zara thinks we're supposed to lie down and be measured and get up and eat breakfast and wait to be told. She put Sefa in a chair across from his door like a leash on a hook. She schedules us, Talla. She schedules us like the archive. Like the jars."

"She's trying to keep us alive."

"She's trying to keep us in line."

"Those are the same thing to her."

Malik pushed off the column. Both of them looked at him.

"You want to fight about Zara," he said, "do it somewhere that isn't a room full of empty beds. I'll be in the common room."

"No." Talla's hand came up, flat, stop. "No, you stay. I came down here to talk to you, not to her."

"Then talk."

"Not standing in the nursery with the walls lit up like that," she said, and jerked her chin at the column. "Look at it. It's still going. It's been going since before I got here. The walls don't know the difference between one sister and five. It reads a room and it logs a room and it doesn't care what the room is for."

Malik looked at the column. It pulsed slow, green-blue, patient. Warm against his back a minute ago. It had counted him and Mira the way it had counted him and Lyra and him and Sefa, and it would count whoever came next, and every pulse of it went up to Zara's quarters and got read and filed and turned into a schedule.

"So where do you want to talk," he said.

"My room."

Mira made a sound. Short. Disgusted.

"Your room," she said. "You want him in your room. On the night I—"

"On the night you jumped the line," Talla said, "yes. My room. Because my room is the one place in this ring where the walls don't read. You didn't know that, did you."

Mira went still.

"What?"

"My room. It's dead. It's been dead since I was born. Zara says it's a flaw in the ring — an old panel, a bad seam, the bioluminescence never took there." Talla's voice stayed level. "She says it's why she gave it to me. The eldest gets the dead room. It's a courtesy. It's also the reason I've been able to do anything in my life without her knowing."

Malik watched Mira's face. The anger was still there, but something else had come up under it — a kind of hunger, quick and ugly, the look of someone who has just found out a locked door was never locked.

"Why are you telling me that," Mira said.

"Because you're going to need somewhere to go," Talla said, "when Zara finds out what you did tonight, and the nursery isn't it, and the common room isn't it, and his room is the first place she'll look." She turned to Malik. "Come on. Before the column settles and she decides to walk down here herself."

Malik didn't move yet.

"Sefa knows about the dead room?"

"Sefa's the reader. Of course Sefa knows. Sefa has known since she was sixteen and never logged it." Talla's mouth did the almost-smile again. "That's the thing about this clan, human. Everyone's carrying something they didn't log. You're just the first thing we've all been carrying at once."

She turned and went back through the seam, and this time she didn't go sideways. She walked straight through it, shoulders square, and the door stayed open behind her.

Mira stood in the middle of the nursery with her hands at her sides.

"Go," she said. "She's right. Zara will come down here."

"What about you."

"I live here. I've got a room and a cot and a sister across the hall who already hates me, and I'm not going to give Talla the satisfaction of watching me follow you out of a nursery like a—" She stopped. Breathed. "Go."

"Mira."

"Go."

He went. Through the seam, into the corridor, and the door closed behind him on its own, and the last thing he saw through the narrowing gap was Mira standing alone in the green light, one hand on the rail of the crib he'd pushed back into line, her head down, her hair hanging over her face, and eleven other cribs around her, empty, counting the light.

Talla was four steps down the corridor, waiting, arms folded, watching the door close.

"She'll be fine," she said.

"You don't know that."

"I know her better than you do." She started walking. "Come on. It's the second seam on the left past the water line. The one that looks like a service panel."

He followed her past the water line. The common room was dark behind them now, the trough gone matte, the benches just shapes. Talla walked like she owned the corridor, which she did in the way the eldest owns anything — not by rank but by having been in it longest, by knowing which stones rang hollow and which seams stuck in the cold cycle.

Malik counted the seams as he passed. First: the seam to his own room, closed, the pulse behind it steady. Second on the left — a panel no taller than his shoulder, the color of the wall around it except for a hairline of darker blue where the bioluminescence hadn't taken.

It looked like a service panel. It looked like a place where the ring kept its water lines and its waste pipes, the unglamorous guts of the place, the part nobody logged.

Talla stopped in front of it. She didn't turn around.

"You're going to want to ask me something," she said. "Ask it before we go in, because once we're in there I'm not going to want to stand in a doorway talking."

"Why me."

"That's not the question."

"It's my question."

She turned then. Flat shoulders against the panel, arms folded, and in the dim corridor light her face was all planes — Zara's jaw on a younger skull, the same severity, and under it something the matriarch had worn down to nothing years ago and Talla hadn't yet.

"Because you fixed the crib," she said.

Malik didn't answer.

"You came in here to breed my sister against a piece of furniture," she said, "and when it was done you put the furniture back where it belonged. You didn't have to. The walls already logged it. Zara already knew. There was nothing to hide and nothing to gain, and you still walked over there and pushed it back into line." She watched him. "Nobody in this ring does anything that isn't logged or counted. Not for six years. Not since the archive started failing. And you did a thing that didn't matter to anyone and you did it anyway."

"It mattered to the room."

"Yes," she said. "That's what I mean."

She turned back to the panel and put her palm flat on it, and for a second nothing happened — no glow, no seam opening, no response at all, which was the first time since he'd come to the ring that a wall had ignored a hand. Then she pushed, and the panel swung inward on a hinge, and the corridor's blue light fell through the gap and died a foot inside, swallowed, like water going into sand.

Beyond it was dark. Real dark. The kind he hadn't seen since the station, since the windowless berths in the construction barracks on the dock side, the kind of dark that didn't pulse or breathe or count anything.

"After you," Talla said.

"It's your room."

"It's my room and you're the one who needs to see it first. Go on."

He went.

Two steps in and the dark closed over him like a hand, and behind him the panel swung shut and cut the corridor light off entirely, and there was a moment — one long moment — where Malik Johnson stood in the dead center of a room he couldn't see, in a ring where every wall for six years had told every sister everything, and the walls said nothing at all.

The silence was the loudest thing in the room.

He'd gotten used to the pulse. That was the thing he hadn't known until it stopped. Somewhere in the last few days the slow green-blue throb of the ring had gotten under his skin the way a fan or a road gets under your sleep — invisible until it quits, and then the quitting is all you can hear. Here there was none of it. No glow. No warmth off the stone. Just air that was cooler than the corridor and smelled faintly of dust and old cloth and something dry, like paper left in a drawer.

A scrape. A match-strike kind of sound, and then a small flame caught low to his left, and Talla's face came up out of the dark behind it, lit from below, holding a stub of candle in a dish.

"There's no luminescence in here," she said. "Not in the walls, not in the floor. The ring can't see in. So we use fire, like the old ones did before the war, before the ring was grown." She set the dish on a ledge cut into the wall and the flame steadied, and the room came up around them a piece at a time.

It was small. Smaller than his own room, smaller than Sefa's cell. A cot along one wall, blanket folded at the foot. A shelf with a few objects — a smooth stone, a data slate gone dark, a cup, a knife with a bone handle laid flat like it was resting. A stool. A low table with a chipped bowl on it. No window. No seam but the one they'd come through. The walls were the same pale stone as the rest of the ring, but where every other surface in the clan's home had been alive, these were just rock, gray and inert, and the candlelight sat on them flat instead of sinking in.

"Zara gave you this," Malik said.

"Zara gave me this when I turned sixteen." Talla crossed to the cot and sat down on the edge of it, and the frame didn't creak, and she looked at him across the little room with the candle between them. "She told me the eldest gets the dead room. She told me it was a courtesy. I believed her for about a year."

"And then."

"And then I figured out that a room the walls can't read is the only thing in this ring worth more than the archive." She picked up the cup off the shelf and turned it in her hands, not drinking, just holding. "You want to know why I was in the corridor tonight. That's the answer. I was in the corridor because I can be. Because I'm the only one of us who can stand in a hallway and watch and know that whatever I do with it stays mine."

"You watched anyway."

"I watched anyway." She set the cup down. "Don't make it noble. I burned, human. I stood out there in the dark with my hand flat on the wall and I burned, and I'm not going to pretend I came down here to save Mira from a scolding."

Malik stayed standing. There was nowhere to sit but the cot, and the cot was hers, and the room was small enough that standing put him close to the candle and close to her, and the flame moved between them and made their shadows cross on the dead wall.

"Then why did you come down here," he said.

Talla looked up at him.

"Because I've been counting longest," she said. "Five years. I was nineteen when the archive started failing and Zara sat us all down and explained what we were for. I've read every log since. I know what Lyra's night looked like on the walls. I know what Sefa's looked like. I know what yours and Mira's looked like an hour ago, because the column went bright across the whole ring and every sister who was awake saw it and every sister who was asleep is going to find out at first bell." She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "And I know that none of it — none of it — is in the archive. Not one pulse of it. Because the walls record the ring and the ring is not the clan. The clan is what we do when nobody's reading."

"So you keep a room the ring can't see."

"I keep a room the ring can't see," she said, "and I've never brought anyone into it. Not one of my sisters. Not Zara. Six years. You're the first."

The candle guttered and stood back up.

"Why now," Malik said.

"Because tonight you did something the walls can't log and it wasn't in the nursery." She stood up off the cot and the two of them were close now, close enough that he could see the small scar at the corner of her eyebrow, old, faded, the kind you get as a kid and never remember getting. "You told Mira you weren't leaving. You said it with your cock in her and the column lit and every crib around you empty, and you meant it. I heard the whole thing through the seam. And I thought — here's a man who says a thing like that in a room like that, and nobody's writing it down."

"I meant it."

"I know you meant it. That's the problem."

She was standing in the middle of the dead room with the candle behind her and her arms at her sides, and for the first time since he'd met her the flatness was gone out of her voice and the thing underneath it was showing, and the thing underneath it was not calm. It was the same hunger he'd seen in Mira and the same hunger he'd seen in Sefa and the same hunger he'd seen in Lyra, and it had been sitting in this windowless room for six years with a wall that couldn't hear it, and it had never once gotten out.

"Zara scheduled Sefa," Talla said. "Zara scheduled Mira. She'll schedule me last, because I'm the eldest and the eldest goes last, and by the time it's my turn the cribs will be full or the archive will be empty and either way it won't matter what I wanted." She took one step toward him. "I'm not asking you to jump the line. I'm not Mira. I'm telling you what I've been carrying, because you're the first person in this ring who might actually be able to hear it."

Malik didn't move. The candle threw her shadow up the dead wall behind her, tall and still, and the room around them was so quiet he could hear the wick.

"Say what you're actually saying," he said.

Talla's mouth tightened, and then it did something he hadn't seen it do — it softened, just at the corner, and she looked at him the way you look at a door you've walked past for years and finally tried the handle on.

"I'm saying I want my turn," she said. "Not on Zara's schedule. Not on the log. In this room, where the walls can't read it, where it stays mine. And I'm saying I've been standing in that corridor for six years and nobody ever asked me what I wanted, so I'm going to say it out loud before I lose my nerve." She held his eyes. "I want you. On my terms. In the dark."

The room went still in a way the rest of the ring never did. No pulse under it. No hum. Just the candle and the two of them and the small sound of the wick drawing.

Malik looked at her. Talla, standing in the middle of a dead room with her arms at her sides and six years of not being asked sitting behind her face. The flatness was all the way off her now. What was under it was younger than she was.

"Say it again," he said.

"I want you."

"Not that part."

Her jaw worked once. "Nobody ever asked me."

He crossed the room in two strides and got his hands on her shoulders — not rough, both palms flat on the bone, the way you'd steady a ladder — and pulled her up off the cot and into him. Her arms stayed down. Her whole body came up rigid, spine locked, chin hard against his sternum, like a woman expecting to be pushed back down and braced for it.

He didn't push her down. He wrapped both arms around her back and closed them, and held.

She didn't move. Three breaths. Four. Her hands hung at her sides. The candle threw their shadow up the dead wall, one shape, and it didn't flicker because there was no draft in a room with no seams but the one.

Then her forehead found the hollow under his collarbone, and her shoulders dropped a quarter inch, and she stayed there.

"I've decided something," he said, low, into her hair. It smelled like the corridor — stone dust and old cloth and something under it that was just her.

"Don't."

"Since Sefa."

"Malik—"

"Since Sefa I decided I'm not leaving." His arms tightened across her back. "Not when the cribs are full. Not when the archive runs dry. Not when Zara decides I'm done. I told Mira that in the nursery and I meant it, and I'm telling you in here where nothing's writing it down, so you can believe it or not, but it's the same thing either way."

Talla's hands came up. Slowly. They found the front of his shirt and closed in the fabric, both fists, and held on like the room was tilting.

"You don't get to say that," she said into his chest. Her voice came out cracked down the middle. "You've been here a week. You don't know what this ring does to people who stay. You don't know what it did to Zara, or to Veth, or to—"

"I know what it did to you."

Her fists tightened.

"You've got a room the walls can't see and you've never brought anybody into it," he said. "Not one sister. Not Zara. Six years. That's not a flaw in the ring, Talla. That's you deciding every single day not to let anybody in, and tonight you opened the panel and walked me through it." He put his chin down on the top of her head. "So I'm telling you the thing you don't have a log for. I'm staying. That's it. That's the whole sentence."

The candle guttered. Just once, a long soft dip, like the room had exhaled, and then it stood back up and the flame steadied and neither of them moved.

Talla's breath came out of her in a rush — one long shudder that started somewhere under her ribs and went all the way down through her hands. Her grip on his shirt loosened, then caught again, then loosened, like she couldn't decide whether to hold on or let go and settled on doing both.

"You're an idiot," she said.

"Maybe."

"You're standing in a dead room on the far side of the ring with the matriarch's niece hanging off your shirt, and the column's still lit, and by first bell every sister in this clan is going to know what Mira did tonight and none of them are going to know what you're doing right now, and you're telling me you're staying."

"That's right."

"Why."

"Because you asked."

She went quiet.

He could feel her breathing against his chest, slow now, the shudder worked out of it. Her hair was loose at the nape the way he'd seen it in the nursery, come out of whatever she'd pinned it with, and it brushed the back of his hand where it lay across her shoulder blade. The room was cool. Her body wasn't. Through the thin wrap and the sleep clothes under it she was running warm the way all of them ran warm, and the warmth came off her and sat against him and made the dead room less dead.

"Sit down," he said.

"I don't want to sit down."

"Then don't." He didn't let go. "I'm not going anywhere. You can stand here as long as you want."

Talla laughed. It was the first real one he'd heard out of her — not the breath of air she'd used in the nursery, something lower and rougher that came up out of her chest and surprised her, because she cut it off halfway like she'd been caught doing it.

"That's the problem," she said. "That's exactly the problem. You keep saying things like that and I keep believing them."

"Good."

"It's not good. It's the opposite of good. You understand that, right? You understand you're the first variable this clan has had in nineteen years and every one of us is watching you and none of us are watching you the same way." She pulled back just far enough to look up at him, and her hands stayed fisted in his shirt, and the candlelight caught the small old scar at the corner of her eyebrow. "Lyra thinks you're hers. Sefa thinks you're a question she hasn't finished reading. Mira thinks you're a door she kicked open. Zara thinks you're a jar with a lid on it. And I—"

"You."

"I think you're the first thing that's ever been in this room."

Malik didn't say anything to that. He put one hand up the back of her neck, into her hair, and closed it there — not a grip, just weight, the way he'd hold a tool he didn't want to drop — and Talla's eyes closed.

She stood like that for a while. His hand in her hair. Her forehead back against his chest. The candle burning down a finger-width in the dish on the ledge.

"Zara's going to come looking," she said, eyes still closed.

"Let her."

"She'll find the nursery empty and Mira alone in it and she'll read the column and she'll know exactly what happened and where. She won't know about this room. She's never known about this room." Talla's voice had gone quiet and even, back toward the flatness, but it wasn't the same — it was the flatness of somebody thinking out loud, not the flatness of somebody hiding. "She'll assume you went back to your quarters. She'll send Sefa to check. Sefa will open your door and find your bed empty and she'll have to decide whether to log it."

"She won't log it."

"How do you know."

"Because she didn't log her own."

Talla opened her eyes and looked up at him.

"She told you that."

"She didn't tell me. I watched her do it." His hand stayed in her hair. "She wrote a page and then she wiped it and put the slate down and said it was hers. Whatever that means to a reader, it means she's got something now that isn't on the record. Same as you. Same as this room."

"That's a dangerous thing to be right about."

"I know."

She let go of his shirt with one hand and reached up and took his wrist — the one in her hair — and pulled it down and held it between both of hers, palm up, and looked at it. Callus across the base of the fingers. A pink scar across the pad of the thumb, old, from a nail gun he'd caught wrong on a job three colonies back. Dirt worked into the lines that wouldn't come out anymore.

"Your hands are ruined," she said.

"They're work hands."

"I know what they are." She turned his palm over and back. "I've read what they do to the walls. I've read it three times this week. Lyra's log. Sefa's log. And tonight the column." She let the hand go and it stayed where she'd put it, open between them. "The walls don't say anything about your hands. They say heat and duration and pulse. They say the column went bright. They don't say what it feels like to be in a room where you're the one deciding."

"And you want to decide."

"I've been deciding for six years," Talla said. "That's the whole thing. Every day, in this room, alone. I decide to get up. I decide to eat with them. I decide to watch Zara run the schedule and not say anything. I decide not to cross the corridor and stand in a doorway and ask for a turn like Mira did tonight." She looked at his open palm. "And then you fixed the crib."

"The crib was out of line."

"The crib was out of line," she said, "and you walked over and put it back, in a room that had already logged every stroke of what you did to my sister, and you did it because the room mattered to you. That's the thing I can't get past. Everything in this ring is for the clan or for Zara or for the archive, and you did a thing for the room."

Malik closed his hand around hers. Both of them, folded inside his one, and Talla looked down at it and didn't pull away.

"So here's what I'm going to say," he said. "Once. And then we can stand here or sit down or you can put me out the panel, whatever you want."

"Say it."

"You want your turn in the dark, on your terms, where the walls can't read it. Fine. That's yours. But I'm not going to take you in this room tonight because you're angry at Zara and you're scared of being last." He held her eyes. "If I come in here, it's because you want me. Not because the schedule's running out. Not because Mira jumped the line and you don't want to be the one who waited. You understand the difference."

Talla's chin came up. The ridges above her brow went dark the way Mira's had in the nursery, and for a second he thought he'd gotten it wrong.

Then her face did something else. It opened. Just at the eyes.

"You're the first person in this ring who's ever said a thing like that to me," she said. "Zara says 'you'll go last.' Veth says 'statistically.' Sefa says 'I logged it.' Mira says 'move.' Nobody says 'because you want me.' Nobody's ever asked."

"I'm asking."

"I know." Her hands turned in his and her fingers laced through his fingers and held. "That's why I opened the panel."

The candle dipped again, lower this time, and came back up thinner than before. The dish had maybe an hour left in it. The dead room sat around them gray and quiet, the cot along the wall with the blanket folded at the foot, the shelf with the stone and the cup and the knife laid flat like it was resting, the walls that had never once told anybody anything.

Talla stepped in. She closed the last of the distance and put her forehead against his jaw and her hands flat on his chest again, and she stayed there, and Malik put both arms back around her and held her up.

"I'm staying," he said again, into her hair.

Her hands curled into his shirt and gripped, hard, the way you grip a rail when the floor moves, and the candle guttered and the flame bent sideways and the two of them stood in the dark of a room the ring had never been able to hear, and the wick burned down.

He moved first. Not fast — he gave her the whole second to feel it coming, one hand sliding down her back to the base of her spine, the other closing over her shoulder, and then he bent and put his forearm under the backs of her knees and lifted her clean off the floor.

Talla's breath came out of her in a short, startled sound, and her arms locked around his neck on reflex, and her face ended up an inch from his, close enough that he could see her eyes go wide in the candlelight and then narrow, the way she caught herself being caught.

"Put me down."

"No."

"I can walk."

"I know." He crossed the little room in three strides, her weight warm against his chest, and set her down on the edge of the cot — not dropped, not dumped, lowered, one arm still behind her shoulders until her weight settled onto the frame. "I wanted to carry you."

Talla sat there with her hands still caught on the back of his neck, and she looked up at him standing over her, and the flatness was gone out of her face entirely now, replaced by something that hadn't been used in a long time and didn't quite fit yet.

"Nobody's carried me since I was a child," she said.

"Now somebody has."

He went down. Not onto the cot beside her — down onto the floor, both knees hitting the cold stone between her feet, and Talla's whole body went rigid, her knees snapping together on instinct, her hands dropping to his shoulders to hold him off.

"What are you—"

"I'm doing this my way," Malik said. He didn't move. He stayed kneeling between her thighs with his hands loose on her knees, not pushing, not prying, just there. "You said your terms, in the dark. So here's mine. I'm not going to fuck you first. I'm going to put my mouth on you until you can't hold your own knees together, and then we'll see what you still want to say."

The candle flame stood straight up behind her on the ledge, and her face was half lit and half shadow, and he watched her jaw work.

"That's not—" she started.

"That's exactly it." His thumbs moved, slow, on the inside of her knees, a small circle each, the way you'd gentle a horse. "You've spent six years deciding everything alone in this room. Tonight you don't decide anything. You tell me yes or you tell me no, and if it's yes, you lie back and take it."

"That's a lot of orders from a man on his knees."

"It's the only place I can give them from and still mean it." He held her eyes. "Yes or no."

Talla's knees stayed locked for one more breath. Two. Then, slowly, they came apart — not wide, just enough to make room for him, and she let go of his shoulders and put her hands back on the cot behind her hips and leaned back on them, and her chin came up.

"Yes," she said. "But if you make me say anything stupid, I'll put you out the panel."

"Noted."

He put his hands on her thighs and slid them up under the wrap, and the fabric was thin and worn and warm from her body, and underneath it she was wearing nothing but the sleep shorts he'd seen every sister in the ring wear, and he hooked his fingers in the waistband of both and pulled them down together.

Talla lifted her hips off the cot to help him, which she didn't have to do, and which told him more than anything she'd said all night.

He got the shorts and the wrap down past her knees and then off her ankles and dropped them on the floor beside him, and she was bare from the waist down on a cot in a room with no windows, and the candlelight laid itself across her thighs and the dark hair between them, and she watched him look and didn't cover herself.

Her legs were long and lean, the muscle hard under the skin from a lifetime of walking a ring, and there was an old scar on the outside of her left thigh, pale and puckered, the kind that came from a blade and not a fall. He didn't ask about it. He put his palm flat on it and felt her flinch, once, and then settle under his hand.

"Cold hands," she said.

"Work hands."

"I know what they are." Her voice had gone rough at the bottom. "Get on with it."

He leaned in. He put his mouth on the inside of her knee first — not where she wanted it, deliberately not where she wanted it — and kissed his way up the inside of her thigh, slow, an inch at a time, and Talla's breath came faster and her hands came off the cot and found the blanket at the foot of it and gripped.

"You're doing that on purpose," she said.

"Yes."

"Malik—"

He breathed on her. Just that. His mouth an inch from her cunt, warm air moving across wet skin, and Talla's whole body jerked like he'd touched her, and a sound came out of her that she immediately tried to swallow.

"Don't do that," he said against her thigh. "Don't hold it in. There's no wall in here. Nothing's reading it. Whatever you make, it stays in this room."

"That's not—" Her voice cracked. "That's not how I'm built."

"Then get built different tonight."

He put his tongue on her.

One long, flat stroke, bottom to top, slow, all the way up through her folds and over her clit, and Talla's hips came off the cot an inch and her fists knotted in the blanket and she made a noise — low, dragged out of her chest, nothing like the sounds he'd heard through the walls of this ring.

He did it again. Same speed. Same pressure. And then again, and again, until she stopped being surprised by it and started to want it, and her hips began to move on their own, small rocks against his mouth, and her thighs came up and closed on either side of his head.

He pushed them back open with both hands. Flat palms on the inside of her thighs, spreading her, holding her where he wanted her, and she let him do it — she let him do it, and that was the thing, that was the whole thing, a woman who had never let anybody in this room letting a man hold her open and put his mouth on her like it was his to do.

"Fuck," Talla said. Just that. The first crude word he'd ever heard out of her, and she said it like she was testing whether the room would take it.

The room took it. The room took everything.

He found her clit with his tongue and stayed there. Small, fast licks, the flat of it, no letup, and he slid two fingers into her while he did it — she was wet enough that they went in easy, and tight enough that she gasped around them — and he curled them up and found the spot and worked it while his tongue kept its rhythm, and Talla's back came off the cot.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's — where did you—"

He didn't answer. He sucked her clit between his lips and flicked it with his tongue, and her sentence died where it stood.

Her hands came off the blanket and into his hair. Both of them, fists closing on the short crop at the back of his head, and she pulled — hard enough to hurt, hard enough that he grunted against her — and pushed him down into her at the same time, her hips rolling up to meet his mouth, and she was riding his face now, unashamed, six years of a dead room coming out of her in the way she used him.

"Don't stop," she said. "Don't you dare stop, don't—"

He didn't stop. He added a third finger, worked her wider, and her cunt clenched down on his hand and her thighs started to shake on either side of his head, and he could feel it building in her — the long, slow climb of it, the way her breath went thin and her grip on his hair went white-knuckled and her hips lost their rhythm and just ground.

"Malik." His name, cracked in half. "Malik, I'm—"

He pulled his mouth off her.

Talla's whole body convulsed around the loss, and she made a sound like she'd been stabbed, and her heels dug into the cot and her hands yanked his head back down.

"No — no, don't you—"

"Say please."

"You—"

"Say it."

She fought it. He could feel her fighting it, the whole long length of her rigid on the cot, the pride and the habit and the six years of never asking, and he stayed there with his mouth an inch off her and his fingers still buried in her, not moving, waiting.

"Please," Talla said. It came out wrecked. "Please, Malik, please—"

He put his mouth back on her and he didn't tease her this time. He went at her hard and fast, tongue flat and then pointed, fingers curling deep, his other hand pressing down flat on her lower belly to hold her still, and Talla came apart under him with a sound that started as a moan and climbed into something higher and broke.

Her thighs snapped shut around his head. Her cunt clamped down on his fingers in waves, one after another, and her hips bucked off the cot and her heels dug in and her hands pulled his hair so hard his scalp burned, and she held him there through all of it, grinding against his mouth like she was trying to wring the last of it out of him.

And the room lit up.

It came from the walls first — a thin line of white at the base of the stone, running the length of the wall behind the cot, then another on the wall opposite, then the ceiling, spreading out from the corners like frost, faster than frost, until the whole dead room was throwing light. The candle on the ledge blew out in the surge — one hard gust of nothing, no wind, and the flame was simply gone — and the two of them were left in a white glow that came from stone that had never glowed before, bright enough that Malik could see the cracks in the ceiling, the dust on the shelf, the small scar at the corner of Talla's eyebrow, every detail of a room that had spent six years in the dark.

Talla's eyes were open. She was looking past him, up at the walls, and her hands were still in his hair, and she was still shaking, and her mouth was open and nothing was coming out of it.

Malik lifted his head. His chin was wet. He wiped it on the back of his wrist and looked around the room and then back down at her, and Talla was staring at the walls like a woman watching her own house catch fire.

"It's never," she said. She stopped. Started again. "It's never done that. Six years. It's never once—"

The light held. Steady, white, no pulse to it — not the ring's slow green-blue throb, nothing like it, just flat bright light pouring off stone that had been gray an hour ago, and the room was small and bare and fully lit, and there was nowhere in it left to hide.