I woke before dawn.
Kaien was still asleep. That in itself was remarkable — in every life I'd known him, he slept like a soldier: light, poised, ready to surface at the smallest sound. But here, now, in this borrowed room with its thin walls and its crinkly mattress, he was deeply, genuinely unconscious. His face had lost all its guardedness. He looked younger. He looked like someone who had finally, after a very long time, been allowed to put something down.
I watched him for longer than was probably wise.
Then I got up, dressed quietly, and went to sit by the window.
The city was already stirring below. Vendors setting up stalls. A cart horse complaining about the early hour in the universal language of horses everywhere. Two women arguing good-naturedly over a basket of vegetables. Life, moving forward, indifferent to the tangled supernatural situation unfolding in a room above a dye shop.
I pressed my forehead to the cool glass.
