After Levi's encounter with Sylvia, Curwyn led him up two floors and stopped outside a door at the end of a corridor. Even here, before they reached it, the air was different — not warm, not cold, nothing with a temperature at all. Just a subtle wrongness. A barely perceptible pull, like the space near the door had a slight drag to it that ordinary space didn't have.
"Staff won't come down this corridor anymore," Curwyn said quietly. "We know she's eating because the trays disappear." He stepped back. "I'll leave you to it."
His footsteps receded. Levi stood alone in front of the door.
He knocked. Two quiet raps. Nothing.
He tried the handle. The door wasn't locked. The resistance when he pushed wasn't mechanical — it was the air itself, thick and pressing back against the door like a held breath. Levi pushed steadily and the door opened.
The room was dim. Curtains drawn. And everything in it was moving.
Not violently — that was the first thing he noticed. No chaos, no destruction. Just the quiet strange wrongness of a room that had forgotten how to be still. A cup on the desk rotating slowly in place. The pages of a book lifting and resettling one at a time with no wind to move them. The blanket on the bed rippling in a slow continuous wave. Small objects — a hairpin, a coin, a pen — tracing long lazy arcs through the air and returning, as if caught in a current that only they could feel. The corners of the room seemed slightly too deep, the walls breathing almost imperceptibly in and out.
Priscilla was sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up and her back against the headboard, staring at the curtained window. She was dressed. Her hair was neat. She looked, on the surface, completely fine.
Levi stepped inside and closed the door.
The pressure settled against him like a second skin — constant, not painful. He was aware of every object around him in a way he normally wasn't, each one carrying a faint hum of displaced force. He crossed the room carefully, pulled out the desk chair, and sat down facing her.
She didn't look at him.
The cup kept rotating. The book pages kept lifting and falling.
He sat with it. He didn't speak. He'd learned something in the last hour — that some people needed to be met with words and some needed to be met with presence, and Priscilla had always been the second kind.
A minute passed. Maybe two. The rotating cup slowed slightly.
Another minute.
Priscilla's eyes moved — not to him yet, just away from the window, downward, to the blanket rippling across her lap. She watched it the way you watched something you've just become aware of for the first time, as if until this moment she hadn't known it was moving.
Then she looked up and saw Levi.
She didn't startle. She just looked at him with those quiet, careful eyes and said nothing for a long moment.
"You're awake," she said finally. Her voice came out slightly rough from disuse.
"Yeah," said Levi.
Another silence. The hairpin completed its arc and drifted back. The pressure in the room ebbed fractionally.
"I didn't know what to do," said Priscilla. Not an apology — a fact she'd been sitting alone with for days and needed to say out loud to someone.
"I know," said Levi.
"I kept thinking I should go to Sylvia. That she needed someone." Priscilla's eyes dropped again. "But every time I tried to get up I just—" She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
"She's okay," said Levi. "She will be. She was asking about you."
Something moved across Priscilla's face — grief and guilt and relief tangled together. The book stopped turning pages. The coin drifted down and settled on the desk with a soft clink — the first object in the room to come to rest.
"I couldn't cry," said Priscilla quietly. "I kept waiting to and it just... didn't come. I don't know what that means."
"It doesn't mean anything," said Levi. "Everyone's different."
"Sylvia cried."
"Sylvia also set fire to a reinforced military chamber for three days straight," said Levi. "There's no right way to do this."
Priscilla was quiet. Then, very softly: "She was kind to me. Melissa Sensei. From the beginning, even when she didn't have to be. I keep thinking about small things — the way she used to leave extra food out when she knew I'd forgotten to eat. The way she never made me feel like I was in the way."
Levi said nothing. He let her have it.
"I don't know how to be angry about it," Priscilla continued. "Sylvia's angry. I understand being angry. But I just feel—" She found the word. "Hollow. Like something got taken out and I don't know how big the space is yet."
The room was stiller now. More objects had come to rest. The warping at the corners had eased. The blanket on Priscilla's lap lay flat.
"You don't have to know how big it is yet," said Levi. "You don't have to figure any of it out right now."
Priscilla looked at him properly then — the full weight of her attention, the way she looked at things she was trying to understand completely. "How are you doing it," she asked. "You just woke up. You found out everything at once. How are you this steady?"
Levi thought about it honestly. "I don't know if I am," he said. "I think I'm just moving forward because if I stop I'm not sure I'll start again." He paused. "But I've got the two of you. That helps more than anything else."
Priscilla looked at him for a long moment.
Then she unfolded herself from the headboard, swung her legs off the bed, and stood. She crossed to the window and pulled the curtain open. Grey Blizzarian light came in — cold and clean — and the last of the drifting objects settled quietly to their resting places.
The room was still.
"Okay," said Priscilla.
"Okay," said Levi.
They left the room together.
✦ ✦ ✦
Sylvia was where he'd left her — sitting against the scorched pillar, knees up, looking at the middle distance. She looked up when they came in and her expression did something complicated when she saw Priscilla. She stood up.
They didn't say anything. Priscilla crossed the room and Sylvia met her halfway and they held on for a moment in the specific way of people who had both been in separate terrible places and were relieved to be in the same one.
Levi stood near the door and let it happen.
When they separated, the three of them stood in the scorched chamber — battered, hollowed out, in a kingdom none of them had planned to be in — and something settled. Not fixed. Not healed. But present. Together.
The quality of the air in the room was different from when Levi had arrived. The temperature had come down. The pressure was gone. The chamber was just a room.
After a while, Priscilla said: "So what do we do now?"
"Tomorrow we meet with the King," said Levi. "He'll brief us properly — Olympia, what happens next, what our options are." He paused. "But I've been thinking about something. About the way we've been approaching this war."
"How so," said Sylvia.
"We've been reacting. Defending. Waiting for the attacks to come and trying to hold the line." He looked at them both. "That ends. From here on, we take the fight to them. We find their base. We go on the offensive."
Sylvia looked at him. "How do we even start finding their base?"
"Research. Information. We ask the right people until we find someone who can point us toward the right source." He paused. "We start tomorrow."
A silence.
Then all three of their stomachs growled simultaneously — loud, specific, the body's complete indifference to the weight of the moment.
"I haven't eaten in five days," said Levi.
It started as a breath and became a laugh — the specific laugh that came after too much, that wasn't happiness exactly but was the sound of three people who had been through something terrible and were still alive and still together and still capable of laughing at a stomach growl. It lasted longer than it should have and neither of them tried to stop it.
When it settled, Sylvia wiped her eyes — for a different reason this time.
"Okay," she said. "Food first. War second."
"Of course you'd say that," said Priscilla.
They walked out of the chamber together.