The morning came like a wound.
One moment I was lying in the darkness, staring at the painted stars, counting the beats of my own heart. The next moment, the oil lamps flickered on, the door unlocked with that same sharp click, and the woman with the ponytail was standing in the doorway, her white salwar kameez crisp and unwrinkled, her expression as blank as a fresh page.
"Wake up," she said. "Meditation in thirty minutes."
I had not slept. My eyes were dry, my head was heavy, and the journal of the first Null Aegis was still on the floor beside my bed, its red leather cover catching the lamplight like a warning. I had not read any more of it. I had not had the courage.
Meera sat up immediately, her teddy bear still clutched in her arms, her eyes still half-closed. Kavita was already dressed, already composed, already waiting by the door. Aanya emerged from her curtains with her hair already braided, her honey-coloured eyes already alert.
Only I remained on the bed, my white kurta wrinkled from lying awake, my hair tangled, my mind full of questions that had no answers.
"You look terrible," Kavita said.
"Thank you."
"It wasn't a compliment."
"I know."
I washed in the cold water of the bathroom stalls, scrubbed my face with the soap that smelled of nothing, and dressed in the white clothes that were beginning to feel less like a costume and more like a uniform. When I looked at myself in the mirror above the sink, the girl who looked back at me had darker circles under her eyes than she had yesterday. The white strands at her temples seemed more visible in the morning light, catching the glare from the window like threads of silver thread.
I tucked them behind my ears and walked to the meditation hall.
The children were already sitting in their rows, their backs straight, their eyes closed, their hands resting on their knees. The incense smoke curled up toward the painted stars on the domed ceiling, carrying the smell of sandalwood and something else—something that reminded me of the library, of old paper and older dust.
Hargreaves stood at the front of the room, his hands clasped behind his back, his face as unreadable as it had been yesterday. He did not look at me as I found my cushion at the back of the room. He did not look at me as I sat down and crossed my legs and tried to still my racing heart.
"Breathe," he said.
I breathed.
"Listen."
I listened.
The silence was different today. Yesterday, it had been empty—a blank space waiting to be filled. Today, it was full. Full of the children's heartbeats, full of their fears, full of the imprints they had carried into this room on their clothes and their skin and their breath. I felt them pressing against me, soft and insistent, like moths against a window.
"Close your eyes," Hargreaves said.
I closed them.
"Now reach inside. Find the door."
I did not want to find the door. I wanted to pretend it was not there, the way I had pretended for sixteen years that I was ordinary, that I was nothing, that I did not feel the echoes of everyone else's pain. But the door was there. It had always been there. And now that I knew its shape, its warmth, its weight, I could not un-know it.
It sat in the center of my chest, dark and tall, its handle glowing faintly in the darkness of my own body.
"I found it," I whispered.
"Good. Now do not open it. Simply sit with it. Feel its presence. Feel how it sits inside you, how it has always sat inside you. Do not be afraid of it. It is a part of you. It has always been a part of you."
I sat with the door.
The minutes passed. The incense smoke curled. The children breathed in unison, their chests rising and falling like a single body.
And the door waited.
When meditation ended, Hargreaves announced that I would be spending the morning with Vidya in the library. The other children filed out of the room in silence, their bare feet making no sound on the marble floor. Meera glanced back at me once, her eyes wide and worried. Kavita did not glance back at all. Aanya touched my shoulder as she passed, her fingers light as feathers, and then she was gone.
I walked to the library alone.
The wall was a wall again. Solid. Unremarkable. The same honey-coloured sandstone as everything else in this building. I stood in front of it for a long moment, trying to remember how Vidya had pressed her fingers against the stone. Three fingers. A pattern. A question.
I reached out and touched the wall.
Nothing happened.
I pressed harder.
Nothing.
I closed my eyes and imagined the door inside my chest, the warmth of its handle, the weight of its presence. I imagined that warmth flowing down my arm, into my fingers, into the stone.
The wall began to change.
Not as quickly as it had for Vidya. Slowly. Reluctantly. As if the stone was not sure it wanted to let me in. But the transparency spread from the tips of my fingers, radiating outward in a widening circle, until I could see the shelves beyond, the books, the darkness that had no end.
I stepped through.
Vidya was sitting at her desk, a cup of tea in her hand, a pile of books in front of her. She did not look surprised to see me. She did not look up at all.
"You found the door," she said.
"The wall, you mean."
"The wall is a door. The door is a wall. The words we use do not matter. What matters is that you opened it. That is more than most children can do on their first attempt."
"I had help."
"You had memory. The warmth of the door inside you. That is not help. That is instinct." She set down her cup and gestured to the chair on the other side of her desk. It had not been there yesterday. Today, it was. "Sit."
I sat.
The chair was wooden and straight-backed, uncomfortable in the way that all chairs in this place seemed to be uncomfortable. But the cushion was softer than the one in the session hall, and I found myself sinking into it despite myself.
"You read the journal," Vidya said.
"Some of it."
"What did you learn?"
"That Amara was seventeen when she was told she had two years to live. That she lived for twelve more years by locking herself in a room with lead walls. That she died looking like a woman of ninety, with the eyes of a young girl."
"What else?"
I hesitated. "I learned that she was tired. That the doctors did not ask whether she wanted to continue. That she felt everything, all the time, and that it was a wound that never closed."
Vidya nodded slowly. "That is what it means to be a Null Aegis, Nyra. To feel everything. To carry everything. To never be allowed to forget." She leaned forward, her young eyes old again. "But Amara made a mistake. She thought the only way to survive was to close herself off completely. To lock herself in a room and wait for death. That is not survival. That is a slower kind of dying."
"Then what should she have done?"
"She should have learned to open the door on her own terms. To let the imprints in, one by one, and then let them go. To use her power as a bridge, not a prison." Vidya reached across the desk and took my hands in hers. "That is what I am going to teach you to do. Not to close the door. Not to lock yourself away. But to open it, just a crack, and to choose what comes through."
"I don't know how to choose."
"Then we will learn together."
She released my hands and stood up. She walked to a shelf on the far side of the library, her bare feet silent on the stone floor, and returned with a small wooden box. The box was old—older than the books, older than the shelves, older than anything I had seen in this place. Its surface was carved with symbols I did not recognize, and when Vidya set it on the desk, the wood seemed to hum.
"This box belonged to Amara," Vidya said. "She kept it with her in the lead-lined room. Inside it are the imprints of her final years—the pain she could not release, the memories she could not forget, the grief that followed her to the end of her life."
"You want me to absorb them?"
"I want you to try. Not to absorb them fully. Just to touch them. To feel them. To see if you can let them pass through you without taking root."
I looked at the box. It hummed. The sound was low and steady, like a heartbeat, like a lullaby, like a warning.
"What if I can't let them go?"
"Then we will try again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. There is no rush, Nyra. The imprints have waited for three hundred years. They can wait a little longer."
I reached out and touched the box.
The wood was warm beneath my fingers. Warmer than it should have been. Warmer than the crow's feather, warmer than the door inside my chest. And as I touched it, I felt her.
Amara.
Not the woman she had become at the end—white-haired and paper-skinned and locked in a room of her own making. The girl she had been at the beginning. Seventeen years old. Scared. Alone. Trying to understand a power that was killing her.
I don't want this, she whispered. Her voice was inside my head, inside my chest, inside the door that was beginning to open whether I wanted it to or not. I never wanted any of this.
"I know," I whispered back. "I know."
The door opened.
Just a crack. Just enough for a single imprint to slip through. And the imprint that came through was not pain. Not grief. Not the wound that never closed.
It was a memory.
Amara, sitting in a garden that was not this garden, with a boy who was not this boy. He was holding her hand. He was telling her a story about a crow and a snake and a tree that grew at the edge of the world. She was laughing. Her hair was black, not white. Her skin was smooth, not paper. Her eyes were young, because she was young, because she had not yet learned that her power would take everything from her.
I loved him, she whispered. That was the worst part. Not the pain. Not the dying. The loving. Because I knew I would have to leave him, and he would have to stay, and we would both be broken by it.
The memory faded.
The door closed.
I pulled my hand away from the box.
My cheeks were wet.
Vidya was watching me, her expression soft, her young eyes full of something that looked like understanding.
"What did you feel?" she asked.
"Love," I said. "She loved someone. And she was afraid of leaving him."
"That is what I wanted you to see. That Amara was not just a Null Aegis. She was not just a cautionary tale. She was a girl. A girl who loved, and laughed, and hoped, and despaired. Just like you."
I wiped my cheeks with the back of my hand. "She died anyway."
"Yes. But she lived first. That is the difference between surviving and existing." Vidya closed the wooden box and pushed it to the side of the desk. "You will not become Amara, Nyra. You will become yourself. And yourself is someone who can open the door and choose what comes through. That is your gift. Not the absorption. The choice."
I looked at my hands. They were still trembling.
"The first Null Aegis," I said. "The journal. She wrote that the doctors did not ask whether she wanted to continue."
"No. They did not."
"You're asking me."
"Yes. I am asking you. Do you want to continue, Nyra? Do you want to learn to use your power? Or do you want to lock yourself in a room and wait for the end?"
I thought about my mother, alone in her kitchen, grinding spices at dawn. I thought about my father, walking into the garden on the night he decided not to come back. I thought about Amara, laughing in a garden that was not this garden, holding the hand of a boy whose name I would never know.
"I want to continue," I said.
Vidya smiled. It was the first time I had seen her smile, and it transformed her face, made her look younger, made her look older, made her look like someone who had been waiting for a long time to hear those words.
"Then let us begin."