I sealed the first harvesting cell three hundred years ago," Arta said, voice raw but steady, no trace of the smooth, professional calm he'd worn at the riverbank left in it at all. "I believed it was temporary. I told myself that lie for three centuries because the alternative was admitting I'd helped build a system that fed on suffering to keep itself running. I broke the seal on that facility myself, two days ago, because a twenty-five-year-old grocery worker asked me a question nobody had bothered asking me in three hundred years — whether I actually believed what I'd been telling myself, or whether I'd just gotten good at not checking."The cold-voiced figure from the tiers opened its mouth to respond, but the presiding figure raised a hand, silencing the chamber with the gesture alone."Let the record show," it said, slower now, something in its carefully neutral tone finally beginning to fracture, "that this tribunal did not anticipate testimony of this nature. We wil

"A woman who gave everything she had left, twice, to protect people who never asked her to," Bara continued, forcing the words out despite how raw his throat had gone. "Once, three years ago, sealing a bee into a bottle rather than let the Concord get its hands on the last surviving piece of a rebellion you'd already decided deserved erasing. And again, just now, because a weapon built by your own faction to silence this hearing would have taken from me what it was trying to take from her instead.""Bearer," the presiding figure said carefully, "this tribunal grieves the loss—""Don't," Bara said, and the single word landed with enough weight that the presiding figure actually stopped speaking. "Don't grieve her in careful, tribunal language. She asked me for one thing before she died. She asked me to make sure nobody in this room got to manage this into something comfortable. I intend to keep that promise, starting right now, so please — don't insult what she just did by tr

"We're taking her home." Bara said it quietly, days later, standing at the edge of a small clearing near his father's old boathouse, a gentle bend of the same river where everything had started, Titan resting subdued but present on his shoulder, the whole exhausted group gathered close in the soft gold light of early evening. "She never had a home to go back to," Kirana said, voice thick. "Not after her own Comb fell. This is the closest thing." "Then it's enough," Bara's father said, helping settle the simple, unadorned marker into the earth at the clearing's edge, close enough to the water that the river's low murmur would be the last sound anyone standing here ever heard. They'd spent three days since the tribunal doing the quiet, unglamorous work that never made it into the dramatic parts of any story — grieving, resting, slowly reassembling something resembling ordinary life around the edges of everything that had changed irreversibly. Ba

"Sir, please move!""You saved that girl on the bridge," the old man said, not moving at all. "My granddaughter showed me. She says you can walk on water.""Sir, I'm asking nicely.""I'm just saying I'm grateful," the old man said, and finally shuffled off, beaming, leaving Bara holding an entire bus with his shoulder and a strange, hot ache behind his eyes.He set it down. Slowly. Gently. Like laying a sleeping animal on the ground.That was when he heard it. A voice, thin and cracking, from the crowd across the road."Look at him. There he is. The bad-luck kid."Bara turned. Standing at the far barrier, phone raised, was Pak Hendra.He looked worse than Bara remembered. Thinner. Gray at the edges, as if something had been quietly draining him for days. The grocery store apron was still tied around his waist, wrinkled and stained, as though he'd been wearing it around the clock."You did this," Pak Hendra said. He was trembling. "My store. My sup

Bara's mother made a sound behind him, small and strangled. He didn't turn around. If he turned around he would break, and he had promised himself he wouldn't break until this was done."So this is your grievance," he said. "The border eats its anchors.""The border was built by people who thought consent was a luxury," the figure said. "We are not trying to destroy the worlds. We are trying to stop the eating. If the Tenant is opened, the border collapses. No more anchors. No more hollow faces. The cost is what it is.""The cost is everyone within a hundred kilometers of this river," Sereth said sharply, stepping up beside Bara. "You know that, Ilya. You helped me calculate it."The central figure went still."Ilya," Bara repeated slowly. "You know him.""He was my student," Sereth said. His voice was very quiet. "The best I ever taught. He vanished the year the harvesting started. I told myself he'd died.""I did die," said the figure. Something like a