The corridors were empty when I left the library.
The afternoon light had shifted again, turning from gold to something softer, something that looked like the colour of old honey. The oil lamps had not yet flickered to life, but the shadows were lengthening, stretching across the marble floors like fingers reaching for something they could not quite grasp.
I walked slowly, my bare feet cold against the stone, my mind still full of Rani's fear and Arjun's rage. The imprints had left me, but the memory of them had not. I could still feel the smallness of the nine-year-old girl, the way her terror had pressed against the walls of my chest like a caged bird. I could still feel the heat of the Sunder's desperation, the way it had tried to burrow into me, to make a home in the spaces between my ribs.
I had pushed them out. Both of them. But the effort had left me hollow, like a room that had been emptied of furniture and was still echoing with the absence.
The door to my room was open.
Aanya was sitting on my bed.
Not her bed. Mine. She was sitting cross-legged on my thin mattress, her back against the wall, her honey-coloured eyes fixed on the doorway as if she had been waiting for me to appear. The journal of the first Null Aegis was open in her lap, and she was reading it with an intensity that made her look older than her years.
"You're in my bed," I said.
"You were gone a long time. I got bored."
"You could have read your own book."
"I wanted to read yours." She did not look up from the page. "Amara was in love with someone she should not have loved. A boy who was not Awakened. A boy who did not know what she was. She writes about him for pages and pages. The way he laughed. The way he held her hand. The way he looked at her like she was ordinary."
"Was that a good thing or a bad thing?"
"I don't know. She does not seem to know either. She wanted to be ordinary. But she also wanted to be seen. Really seen. Not as a Null Aegis. As herself." Aanya finally looked up. "I think that is what all of us want. To be seen as ourselves. Not as our powers."
I sat down on the edge of the bed. Not close to her, but not far either. Somewhere in the middle, where the distance felt accidental rather than deliberate.
"Vidya had me touch an imprint today," I said. "A hair clip. It belonged to a girl named Rani. She was nine years old. She was terrified."
"What did you feel?"
"Fear. Loneliness. The kind of fear that makes you forget how to breathe."
"And what did you do with it?"
"I let it go."
Aanya closed the journal. She set it on the pillow beside her and turned to face me, her knees almost touching mine. "That is more than most Null Aegis can do. Vidya told me that. She said you have a gift for release."
"She said I had practice. Sixteen years of pretending not to feel anything."
"Pretending is not the same as not feeling. You still felt it. You just did not let it show."
I looked down at my hands. They were still. No trembling. No shaking. Just hands, ordinary hands, the hands of a girl who had spent the morning touching the grief of strangers.
"Who is the boy?" I asked. "The one with the carved-wood face. The one who watched me in the dining hall."
Aanya's expression shifted. Something flickered in her honey-coloured eyes—not quite surprise, not quite warning. Something in between.
"His name is Rohan," she said. "He is a Sunder. One of the strongest we have. He has been here for eight years."
"Why does he watch me?"
"He watches everyone. That is what Sunders do. They watch, and they wait, and they measure. They need to know how strong someone is before they decide whether to befriend them or avoid them." She paused. "Rohan is not dangerous. Not to you. But he is not safe either. No one here is safe. Not even me."
"Are you warning me?"
"I am telling you the truth. Which is different from a warning." She picked up the journal and held it out to me. "Read the rest of this tonight. There is a passage in the middle—page ninety-four—where Amara talks about trust. About how she trusted someone she should not have trusted, and how that trust cost her everything she had left."
"Cost her what?"
"Read it. You will understand."
I took the journal from her. The leather was warm from her hands, and the pages had that old smell—dust and time and something that might have been tears.
"Thank you," I said.
"For what?"
"For not treating me like a stranger."
Aanya smiled. It was a small smile, barely there, but it changed her face in a way I could not name. 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.
"You are not a stranger, Nyra. You are a roommate. That is different." She stood up from my bed and walked to her own, pulling the curtains open. "Dinner is in an hour. Do not miss it. The food is terrible, but the company is worse, and you need to get used to both."
She disappeared behind her curtains.
I sat on my bed with the journal in my hands, the afternoon light fading around me, the shadows growing longer.
Page ninety-four.
I opened the book.
I trusted him because he was kind. That was my mistake. Kindness is not the same as goodness. Kindness is a tool, like any other. He used it to get close to me. To learn my weaknesses. To find the cracks in my armor. And when he had learned enough, he told the doctors everything. How much I could absorb. How long I could hold it. What it felt like when I was close to breaking.
They thanked him. They gave him a room of his own. They let him leave Astraea a year early.
I never saw him again.
But I felt him. Every day. Every night. In every imprint I absorbed, I felt his betrayal like a splinter under my skin. I could not remove it. I could not forget it. It became a part of me, as much as my power, as much as my grief.
That is the danger of trust. Not that it will be broken. But that the breaking will leave a scar that never heals.
I closed the journal.
The oil lamps flickered to life.
And somewhere in the room, behind the curtains of her bed, Aanya was reading her own book, or pretending to sleep, or waiting for something I did not yet understand.
I set the journal on the floor beside my bed.
I lay down on the thin mattress.
I stared at the painted stars on the ceiling.
And I thought about trust.
About kindness.
About the boy with the carved-wood face who watched me in the dining hall.
About Aanya, who had read my journal while I was gone.
About Vidya, who had given me a hair clip full of a child's fear.
About my mother, who had erased her own memories to protect me.
Kindness is not the same as goodness.
Amara had learned that lesson the hard way.
I wondered how many times I would have to learn it before it stuck.