"Six," said Lyra.
She kept her eyes on the Veil Gate, where Kael's breathing came through like a ripple on dark water, a low light that rose and fell. Her fingers drummed against her thigh at a steady pace, and between one breath and the next she counted six beats.
"Four when he went in. Then five. Now six."
"I can count too, Lyra," said Elian, without turning.
"Then do something."
"I am doing something. I'm waiting. It's the part nobody ever remembers."
"And Anya?" Lyra turned her head toward the corridor that led to the isolated chamber. "She told me to stay with him. She said she'd hold the thread herself. But I..."
"Anya has a thread to hold. If you go in, you distract her. And if you distract her, the Guardian comes undone." Elian touched her shoulder, barely. "Stay where you said you'd stay."
Lyra pushed her hand into the surface of the Gate. It passed through as if through still water and found nothing to grab: Kael was beyond the Veil, where no hand could reach. She pulled it back. Her fingers, for once, went still one after another.
"I'm staying," she repeated softly, and it was not a sentence meant for Elian.
"It's the most comfortable distraction there is," he said. "You don't feel it as a threat. You feel it as a safe harbor. Nobody runs from a harbor."
"And what can you do?"
"One echo. Just one. If I send it too soon, I'll make him stay out of spite." Elian brushed the edge of the Gate with two fingers, without pushing. "I'm waiting for him to move first."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then we'll talk about it with a little less optimism."
In the Garden the light was golden and still, and Elara's hand was warm inside his.
They walked along the water. The lotuses opened in a row, pink and white, and Anya followed a step behind, talking softly with Elara about everything and nothing. She never searched for words and she never stopped. Kael listened to her for a while. Then he looked at her hands, loose at her sides. That morning, before the Threshold, one of those hands had stopped in midair, reaching for his wrist. Now it didn't reach.
'She doesn't hesitate anymore', he thought. 'Why doesn't she hesitate anymore?'
He waved the question away the way you wave away a fly. The question came back.
"Elara," he said, just to say something. "The last night. What did I tell you?"
She laughed, a laugh with no regret in it. "It doesn't matter, Kael. You're here."
Kael stopped.
The real Elara never let a promise drop. She would have thrown it back at him for months, repeating it word for word until he apologized. This one didn't ask, because he had nothing to apologize for. The Garden could only give him what he already owned, and those words he no longer owned.
The crack was small. A thin line in the glass of a window. He looked at it without touching it.
"Let's go to the end," he said. "I want to see the last one."
"You've already seen it," said Elara, and squeezed his fingers. Hard. Too hard, for the small hand he remembered.
"I want to see it again."
She let him go, or maybe he let her go. He followed the embankment to the far end, where the water turned dark, and found the lotus in full bloom, pale pink, perfect. He knelt and brushed a petal with the tip of his finger. It was warm as a clasped hand, smooth, without a single vein.
"Kael." Elara had come up behind him. "Come back. Nobody asks anything of you here."
It was true, and that was what convinced him it wasn't. His bud, the real one, in the real Garden, was closed. It had one yellowed leaf near the base, a fingernail of yellow he had stared at the night before in front of the Portal and still didn't know how to heal. This one had no yellow leaf. This was the flower of someone who had never had to wait.
Behind him, Anya had stopped talking.
Kael didn't turn around. He stayed crouched, holding a doubt in his hand whose weight he couldn't measure yet. The voice came from very far away, thin and dry, just as he remembered it.
'Boy.'
Elian. An echo, nothing more.
'If everything agrees with you, check who's speaking.'
Kael closed his eyes.
'I know', he thought. 'I already know.'
He didn't let go of Elara's hand when she came back to take it. Not yet. But he stopped walking where she led him: he planted his heels in the grass of the embankment, and the Garden, for the first time, had to wait for him.
Elara was smiling, the smile intact. Too intact: not even the real Elara smiled like that for so long without inventing some mischief to get into.
In the Deep Foundations, inside the isolated chamber, Anya held the twin thread between thumb and forefinger.
The Guardian walked seven leagues from Aris, in the thick of the woods, and she felt it at every step like a pulse in her fingertips. She saw nothing. She counted its steps to keep hold of something. Beyond the thread was the rhythm of the Silents, a hunger moving between the trees.
She could no longer feel her legs, crossed on the stone. The price of lucidity had been working on her for hours: at first a half-beat of delay, now a full beat. She tried to say "west" out loud, to hear herself, and the word reached her lips a breath after the thought. The thought itself ran slowly, like water in an old canal, and the fear she should have felt she knew only from somewhere far off, the way you know the name of a city you have never seen.
The thread rippled.
East. Then west.
For hours the Silents had run as a pack, blind, after the sound of Kael, louder and closer. Not anymore. One line broke off to the east, another to the west, and the Guardian in the middle, walking straight. Someone behind them was giving orders to that pack with the patience of a person tying a knot.
The Whisperer. She couldn't hear him, but she could feel his hands.
Anya pulled the thread south, where the gorge opened between two rocks. The Guardian obeyed. But the Silents of the eastern wing were already there, halfway through the gorge, and the western ones were running to close the narrows behind it.
She sent the thread racing west. The Guardian veered. Unfortunately, it was too late: the western wing had gotten there first.
The Guardian stopped.
A thing made of protective dreams had only instinct left: it stayed between the two lines, and the thread in Anya's fingers stopped vibrating. Three steps east. Three steps west. The gap between the two flanks was three steps wide, and closing.
'One more pull', thought Anya. 'Straight ahead, through the middle, before it shuts.'
She raised her hand to give it.
The hand never arrived. It stopped in midair, a finger's width from the thread, and did not answer. Anya looked at it the way you look at someone else's. She felt the thread vibrate without her, and on the other side, in the middle of the woods, the gap kept closing.