The night came faster than I expected.
One moment, the afternoon light was still slanting through the windows, golden and heavy, painting the corridors in shades of honey and amber. The next moment, the oil lamps flickered to life on their own, their flames casting long shadows that danced across the marble floors, and the world outside the windows turned to ink.
I had spent the hours after Vidya's lesson walking the corridors of Astraea Adhyayan, trying to memorize its turns and twists, its dead ends and secret doors. But the building seemed to resist my efforts. Every time I thought I had learned a path, the walls shifted slightly, the doors moved, and I found myself somewhere I had not intended to go.
The children I passed in the corridors did not meet my eyes. They kept their heads down, their hands folded in front of them, their footsteps silent. They looked like they had been trained to be invisible, and I recognized that training because I had trained myself the same way, in a different life, in a different world.
But here, invisibility was not a choice. It was a survival mechanism.
By the time I returned to my room, my feet were sore and my mind was heavy with questions I did not know how to ask. Meera was already in bed, her teddy bear tucked under her chin, her small body curled into a tight ball. Kavita sat at her desk, writing in a notebook with a pen that moved so fast it seemed to be trying to escape her hand. And Aanya was sitting on her bed, the curtains pulled back, her honey-coloured eyes fixed on the door as if she had been waiting for me.
"You missed dinner," Aanya said.
"I wasn't hungry."
"You should eat anyway. The food here is not good, but it is food. And you will need your strength."
I did not ask what I would need my strength for. I did not want to know.
I walked to my bed, the journal of the first Null Aegis still pressed against my chest, and sat down on the thin mattress. The lavender smell was weaker now, or perhaps I had simply stopped noticing it. The pillow had already begun to shape itself to the weight of my head, and I hated that. I hated that this place was already beginning to feel familiar.
"What's that?" Kavita asked without looking up from her notebook.
"A book."
"I can see that. What book?"
"A journal. From the library."
Kavita's pen stopped moving. She turned to look at me, her sharp eyes narrowing. "Vidya gave you access to the archive? On your first day?"
"Yes."
"That's not normal."
"I don't think anything about me is normal."
Kavita studied me for a long moment. Then she turned back to her notebook and resumed writing, her pen moving even faster than before. "Be careful with what you read in there," she said. "Some of those books are dangerous."
"Books can't be dangerous."
"These can."
I wanted to ask what she meant, but the way she said it—the flatness in her voice, the way her shoulders had tightened—made me stop. I looked at Aanya instead. She was still watching me, her expression unreadable.
"Can I read in bed?" I asked. "Or is there a lights-out rule?"
"There is a lights-out rule," Aanya said. "But the rule is not enforced equally for everyone. Some of us are allowed to stay awake. Some of us are not."
"And which am I?"
"That depends on what Hargreaves decides after your first session." She paused. "How did it go? The session."
I thought about the chair. The wooden arm. The ghosts of the children who had sat there before me. The way Hargreaves had looked at me when I said I felt everything.
"It went," I said.
Aanya nodded, as if that was the only answer she had expected. She pulled her curtains closed, and the fabric swallowed her, leaving only the shape of her behind the cloth.
I opened the journal.
The pages were yellow and brittle, the edges crumbling slightly when I turned them. The handwriting was small and precise, written in ink that had faded to a pale brown, and the language was old—not so old that I could not understand it, but old enough that the words felt different. Heavier. As if they had been written by a hand that knew it was running out of time.
My name is Amara. I am seventeen years old. I have been at Astraea Adhyayan for three years. Today, the doctors told me that I have two years left to live. Maybe three, if I am careful. But I have never been careful, and I do not intend to start now.
I read those words three times.
Seventeen. The same age as me. Two years left to live. Maybe three.
I turned the page.
They call me a Null Aegis. They say I am the first of my kind, though I suspect there have been others before me, others who were not recorded, others who died before anyone could write their names in the ledgers. The doctors are fascinated by me. They bring students to watch me absorb imprints. They take notes. They ask questions. They do not ask whether I am tired. They do not ask whether I am in pain. They do not ask whether I want to continue.
I absorb everything. That is my curse. Every room I enter, I feel the people who have been there before me. Every object I touch, I feel the hands that have held it. Every breath I take, I taste the grief of everyone who has breathed in this place before me. The doctors say I am sensitive. They say it with wonder in their voices, as if sensitivity is a gift rather than a wound.
It is not a gift. It is a wound that never closes.
I closed the journal.
My hands were shaking.
"Are you alright?"
I looked up. Aanya had parted her curtains and was looking at me, her face half in shadow, her honey-coloured eyes glowing in the lamplight.
"The first Null Aegis," I said. "She died at twenty-nine."
"I know."
"How do you know?"
"Everyone knows. Amara is... famous here. Or infamous. Depending on who you ask." Aanya stepped out of her curtains and walked to my bed. She sat down on the edge, close enough that I could smell the jasmine in her hair. "She was the most powerful Awakened of her generation. She could absorb imprints from across a room, without touching anything. She could walk through a battlefield and take all the pain into herself, leave the soldiers standing in confusion, not remembering why they had been fighting."
"That sounds like a gift."
"It sounds like a gift. But every time she did it, she aged. A year. Two years. Sometimes more. By the time she was twenty-five, she looked forty. By the time she was twenty-eight, she looked sixty. And when she died, she looked like a woman of ninety, her hair white, her skin paper-thin, her eyes still young."
I looked down at my hands. They were the hands of a sixteen-year-old. Smooth skin, unbroken nails, the faint calluses on my fingertips from years of holding pens and turning pages.
But my hair had turned white at the temples after the mill. Just a few strands, easily hidden, easily ignored. But they were there. And they had not gone away.
"The journal," I said. "She wrote that the doctors told her she had two years left. But she lived for twelve more years after that. How?"
"She stopped using her power. She locked herself in a room in the lower levels and refused to come out. She said she would rather be a prisoner than a corpse." Aanya's voice dropped. "But the imprints did not stop coming. They never stop coming, Nyra. Even when you are alone. Even when you are locked in a room with lead walls and no windows. The world presses in on you. The past presses in on you. And if you are a Null Aegis, you cannot help but absorb it."
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
"I don't know. No one knows. That is why they are so interested in you. You are the first Null Aegis since Amara. And they are hoping you will be different."
"Different how?"
"Different alive."
Aanya stood up and walked back to her bed. She paused with her hand on the curtain, looking back at me over her shoulder.
"Read the rest of the journal," she said. "But do not read it alone. Read it with someone who understands. Read it with Vidya, or with Meera, or with me. Because there are things in that book that will hurt you if you read them in the dark, by yourself, with no one to hold your hand."
"I don't need anyone to hold my hand."
"Everyone needs someone to hold their hand. Even you. Especially you."
She pulled the curtain closed.
I sat in the darkness of my own bed, the journal open on my lap, the words blurring in front of my eyes. I wanted to read more. I wanted to know what happened to Amara, how she spent her final years, whether she had found peace or only silence.
But Aanya was right. The dark was too heavy, and I was too alone, and the journal felt heavier than it had before, as if Amara's ghost was pressing down on the pages, trying to keep me from turning them.
I closed the book.
I set it on the floor beside my bed.
I lay down and stared at the painted stars on the ceiling.
And I thought about my mother, alone in her kitchen, grinding spices at dawn, not knowing where I was. I thought about my father, walking into the garden on the night he decided not to come back. I thought about Amara, locking herself in a room with lead walls, choosing captivity over death.
I thought about the door inside my chest.
It was still there. Still warm. Still waiting.
And somewhere behind it, the children from the mill were sleeping.
Or waiting.
Or hungry.
I closed my eyes.
I did not sleep.