Our cake collapsed in the middle.
Eirene stared at it for half a second—then she laughed. That crooked, helpless laugh she only let out when something went wrong in a way that felt ridiculous instead of dangerous. She covered her mouth with both hands, mindful of the sleeping apartment, and looked at me across the kitchen counter, flour still dusting her fingers, her green eyes bright.
"It's fine," she whispered. "We can fill it with frosting."
"It's a crater."
"Craters can be filled." She grinned at me like this was a victory.
For a moment, it was just that.
We sung under our breath while we frosted it—the old counting song, the one we'd learned before we knew what we were, before the Order named us, before any of it meant anything.
Her voice was low and steady, and mine found harmony without thinking, like it always had.
She touched a frosting-sticky finger to the tip of my nose and mouthed happy birthday to us, and I rolled my eyes.
But I didn't wipe it off.
We ate the cake on the floor between our beds, the candles burning down in their saucers, the Spire's lights glittering cold and perfect through the window. Eirene sketched in her notebook while she ate, the way she always had, like the world might vanish if she didn't get it down first. A single sheet of thin parchment lay beside her plate—folded once, edges worn soft from handling. I didn't ask what it was. I never asked anymore.
I watched her and the thought sat warm and full in my chest.
I didn't say it outloud.
I don't know why.
The candles burned lower. Wax spilled and hardened. The air smelled like burnt sugar and smoke, and beneath it—something else. That green, faintly bitter scent she'd been coming home wearing for weeks. Sharp like crushed rosemary and something growing in the dark.
I noticed.
I always noticed.
Then she set down her fork and started packing.
Sketchbooks, one by one. Charcoal wrapped in cloth. The folded parchment tucked into the front pocket of her satchel without her even checking it first.
Again.
I sat on my bed with the wooden bird in my lap and watched her. My thumb found the chipped place on its wing the way it always did—the flaw, the uneven seams of red paint where Father's careful hands had still fallen slightly short. He'd carved it back when the wood still told him where to cut, when he'd press his thumb against a hairline crack and say: See? Right here.
He'd pressed it into my palm then like it meant something.
I kept it because it proved once, we had not been afraid.
Now I watched my sister fold her life into a bag.
"Where do you go?"
It came out smaller than I meant it to.
Eirene paused. Green eyes lifted to mine—we have the same eyes, the same hands, the same face, and lately it's felt like I am always translating her wrong, always one word behind.
"Somewhere I need to be," she said. "Just—somewhere."
Just somewhere.
Not here. Not with me. Somewhere unspecified and alone.
The way she said it—like it was simple, like it was obvious, like there was nothing in that answer that should require any further explanation.
My thumb pressed harder into the chipped wing.
Pine and lavender drifted from her cardigan. And that earthy green smell underneath it, the one that didn't belong in this room, that had never belonged in this room.
"Is it a boy?"
Part of me wanted it to be. A boy that I could hate. A face, a name. Something temporary.
She blinked. "What?"
"Every night. The secrets. The smell you come back wearing." I let my voice go flat, which was its own kind of weapon. "Is it a boy? Some Spire scholar who doesn't know what we are?"
Say no. Just say no and let this be simple.
"Eris—"
"You're actually leaving me on our eighteenth birthday to go see him."
"There is no boy," her jaw tightened. "You know that."
"Do I?"
I stood. The carved wing dug into my palm where I'd gripped it too hard and I was glad for the small, clarifying pain of it. "Because I don't know anything anymore. I don't know where you go. I don't know what you've found. I don't know why you won't tell me—why you'd rather sneak out every night like I'm too stupid to notice than just tell me."
"I'm trying to protect you—"
"From what?" The laugh that tore out of me was ugly. Sharp. "From knowing things? From being your twin? From the fact that you've been lying to my face this whole fucking time and I just kept waiting for you to stop?"
Something crossed her expression—not guilt, not quite. Something more complicated than that.
"You wouldn't understand," she said. "Not yet."
And there it was. Not yet. The qualifier that meant: you're not enough yet. You haven't earned it yet. I've decided, alone, that you're not ready.
"Until what?" I stepped closer. My heart was in my throat. "Until I prove I can handle it? Until I earn the right to know what my own twin is doing every night she disappears?"
"You're twisting this—"
"I'm naming it." The words came out cold and I didn't have to raise my voice for them to land like something thrown. Ice doesn't shout. "You think keeping secrets makes you noble. It doesn't. It just makes you a coward."
I watched it hit her.
The color drained from her face. The flinch she couldn't suppress. Her whole body going still in the way it always did when I'd said something she couldn't answer—and I felt the satisfaction of it landing in my chest and hated myself for it.
Good. Feel it. Feel what you've been doing to me.
"Take that back."
"No. You've found something that matters more than I do, and you won't share it because then you'd have to let me in. Then you'd just be one of us again—just another twin with stained blood waiting for the Order to decide if we're worth keeping."
Her face went white. Not pale, but white. Like I'd reached in and taken something that wasn't mine to take.
"You don't know what you're talking about."
"Then tell me."
I hurled the bird onto her bed. It bounced once, rolled, and settled against her pillow with the chipped wing facing me.
"Tell me where you go." My voice cracked on it and I stopped trying to hold it together. "Tell me what's worth leaving me for."
Silence.
She looked at the bird. Then at me.
"I can't, Eris," she whispered.
Can't. Not won't, but can't, like something outside her was holding the words back, like she was being kept from them by something that had nothing to do with wanting secrets. Like she was afraid.
Of what?
"Can't or won't?"
"Both."
The crack in my chest spread.
I turned to ice. I'd learned years ago how to do this—how to crystallize hurt into something that couldn't be hurt further, how to make myself cold enough that nothing more could get in. It was easier than the alternative. The alternative was falling apart in front of her, and I would not do that. I would not give her that for her to leave me anyway.
"Then go," I said, flat and empty. "Go to whatever it is that matters more."
"Eris, please—"
"If you loved me," I said, and my voice didn't shake. "You'd stay."
The second it left my mouth I knew.
It was wrong. It was unfair. It was the cruelest possible version of what I actually meant. I'm terrified you'll go somewhere I can't follow.
I didn't take it back.
I turned to the window. The Spire's lights spread below in their perfect, indifferent grid—cold and unconcerned with the two girls in this apartment destroying something they would never be able to fully repair.
If you loved me at all.
Don't leave me behind.
I heard her breath hitch. Heard her take one step toward me and stop. The whole weight of it hanging there—stay or go, trust me or protect me, were two things that had become incompatible somewhere along the way without either of us choosing it.
"I love you," she whispered. Her voice was wrecked. "More than anything. You have to know that.
Then stay.
Please.
I didn't turn around. If I turned, I would beg and I would not beg.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
The door opened. Cold air pressed flat against my chest like a hand.
Then the door closed.
My hand had found the doorknob before I realized I was moving. I could still catch her—three seconds, maybe five. I could say I didn't mean it, I'm scared, I said it all wrong.
I stood there until the cold metal stopped being cold and I didn't open the door.
I stood at the window after that. Palms flat against the glass, watching the place where she'd turned the corner until there was nothing left to watch. The Spire's lights glittered in their perfect grid below, indifferent in the way that only systems can be—not cruel, just incapable of caring, which amounts to the same thing.
I didn't cry.
That frightened me more than if I did.
The candles had gone out while we fought. I hadn't noticed. The wooden bird lay on her pillow where I'd thrown it, the chipped wing catching the last of the light, and I left it there because I couldn't look at it. Couldn't think about broken things and patient hands. Couldn't think about all the times she'd quietly fixed what my void had damaged—objects, accidents, me—without ever asking me to account for it.
She'd been protecting me from something I didn't have a name for yet.
And I called her a coward.
We turned eighteen somewhere in the middle of that fight. We slipped into adulthood while tearing each other apart, and we would never have another birthday together. I didn't know that then—not in the way you know a fact, not consciously. But some part of me, the part that lives below language and knows things before they're utterable, must have understood.
Because I let her walk away.
I stood at that window until the cold moved all the way through me.
I would spend the rest of my life trying to decide whether I stayed because I was right.
Or because I was afraid she'd already chosen.