She sat up in her cot, breathing hard, the dream still clinging to her thoughts like cobwebs. In it she'd been standing in a place made of ribs and shadows, and something vast had been speaking her name—except it wasn't her name, not really. It was older than that. A title. A designation.
Vessel. Singer. Key.
"Stop it," she whispered to the empty room. "You're not crazy. You're just tired."
The room didn't answer, which was good. The day she started getting responses from furniture was the day she'd known she'd finally lost it.
She swung her legs off the cot, wincing as her bare feet touched the cold stone floor. The dormitory room was small—barely eight feet square—with whitewashed walls, a single narrow window, and a shelf containing everything she owned in the world: three books, two changes of clothes, and a wooden box with a broken lock that held her mother's last letter.
She didn't look at the box. Looking at it made her remember, and remembering made her angry, and anger was dangerous for someone like her.
Someone like her. Gods, she hated that phrase. As if she were fundamentally different from everyone else in the world, marked by something she hadn't asked for and couldn't control.
But you are different, a traitorous voice whispered in her head. You know you are.
She pushed the thought away and dressed quickly—rough cotton shirt, wool trousers, the leather vest that had belonged to her mother before the empire took her away. The vest still smelled faintly of ink and old paper, the smell of the Imperial Archives where her family had worked for three generations before the accusations came.
Heresy. Forbidden knowledge. Crimes against the Empire.
Her parents had been executed when she was nine. The official records said they'd been studying texts that questioned how the gods had died, that they'd been trying to wake something that should stay sleeping.
What the records hadn't mention were the medical examinations that came afterward. The blood tests, the hours she'd spent in a cold room while Imperial physicians muttered over her half conscious body, scribbling furiously into their books.
When the last of it was done, She could still remember the way the head examiner had gone very still, his eyes shadowed by a suspicious knowing look, before sealing her file and marking something Ilara couldn't read. "Monitoring required," she'd heard him whisper to the other physicians beside him. Not "immediate conscription or processing, as was the standard procedure for the curiosities the empire unearthed. Instead she had been shipped off to the imperial orphanage, like she was dangerous but they couldn't prove it yet. Like they were waiting for something to manifest that her parents had hidden too well to find
Afterwards, she was told that her family's name was stricken from the rolls, that she should be grateful the empire had spared her, and that her life in the orphanage was a mercy she didn't deserve.
She'd spent the last ten years trying not to believe that. She'd failed.
Ilara splashed water on her face from the basin by the window, scrubbing away the remnants of sleep and the phantom taste of bronze. Outside, the city of Veresh was waking—she could hear the morning bells, the clatter of carts on cobblestone, the distant sound of the god-engines starting their daily cycle. The engines ran on aetherich, crystallized god-bone mined from corpses of gods like Tharos Taltos, Saltos, and other deities of the pantheon, from the Age of the Titans, refined until it burned clean and hot. They powered everything in the city—the lights, the factories, the water pumps.
They also hummed.
Ilara had always been able to hear it, even as a child. A constant low vibration that most people didn't notice, like the ticking of a clock you'd lived with so long you'd stopped registering it. But lately the hum had been getting louder. More insistent. And sometimes, late at night when she was alone, she could almost make out words hidden in the frequency.
She was definitely losing her mind.
A knock at the door made her jump. "Ilara? Are you awake?"
She recognized the voice —Merra, one of the other girls from the orphanage. They weren't quite friends, but they'd shared a dormitory wing for five years, which created a kind of weary solidarity.
"I'm up," Ilara called, tying her hair back with a strip of leather.
"What is it?"
"Prelate Sorin wants to see you. In his office. Now."
Ilara's stomach dropped. Prelate Sorin was the administrative head of the orphanage, a thin-lipped man with cold eyes who treated his wards like inventory to be managed. He'd never called her to his office before. Not once in ten years.
"Did he say why?" she asked, opening the door.
Merra shook her head. She was a year younger than Ilara, with dark hair and the kind of carefully neutral expression that came from learning early how to avoid attention. "Just that it was important. And that you should bring your things."
"My things?"
"That's what he said."
Bring your things meant she wasn't coming back to this room. Ilara's mind raced through possibilities—had she done something wrong? Been reported for something? Or was this about her age? She'd turned nineteen last month, old enough to be released from imperial custody, though the orphanage usually kept you until twenty-one if you had nowhere else to go. And she had nowhere else.
"Thanks for telling me," she said, trying to keep her voice steady.
Merra hesitated. "Ilara... be careful. Sorin had two people with him. They looked like imperial agents."
The floor seemed to tilt slightly. "What kind of agents?"
"The kind with silver pins on their collars. Engine Council, maybe? I don't know." Merra bit her lip. "I'm probably wrong. Just... be careful, okay?"
She left before Ilara could ask anything else.
For a long moment Ilara just stood there, heart hammering. Engine Council. Why would the Engine Council want anything to do with an orphan girl from a disgraced family?
Unless they know. Unless they found out about—
No. There was nothing to find out. She hadn't done anything, hadn't broken any rules, hadn't used her voice for anything except singing to herself when she thought no one could hear.
Except.
Except last night, in the dream, she'd been singing. And in the dream the bones had answered.
"It was just a dream," she said aloud, trying to convince herself.
But her hands were shaking as she gathered her few possessions into a canvas bag, and the taste of bronze wouldn't leave her mouth no matter how much water she drank.