Day four after the conversations ended.
Aiden looked worse than he had the morning he'd first told me. The defense rotation had run for three nights — Seraphina sharing the suite, then Lucien, then me — and each morning Aiden walked out of his bedroom with the same hollowed eyes, the same too-careful smile, the same Starfire signature humming at a frequency I'd come to associate with bodies burning fuel they didn't have.
He ate breakfast. He went to morning lecture. He trained with Draven on the terraces. He attended the cure protocol session at noon. He came back. He went to bed. He didn't sleep — not really. He dreamed. And in the dreams he was somebody else, doing something the somebody-else version of him had been built to do.
By the third night, the green of his eyes had started to look thinner. Like watercolor that had been worked over too many times. Whatever he was burning to stay himself, the supply was finite.
The fourth evening, Seraphina made the call.
