Page 12 of The First Scar
Serenya pinned me with a look. The scholar vanished and the survivor snapped back into place. She gripped the hilt of her blade.
"Back way," I whispered. "If they're alive, they'll have left a message."
She nodded once. We vanished into the shadows.
The back of the building was worse than the front. A narrow yard choked with broken crates and a rain barrel gone green with scum. Flies circled the drain grate. A child's sandal sat at the base of the wall, upright, like someone had set it down and meant to come back.
The back door gave under pressure, wood splitting at the seam.
We stepped inside.
The air hit me first—not stale, buthollow. Like something had come through and gutted the air on its way out.
The walls had been stripped bare, the shelves emptied. The cooking hearth cold, ash scattered in odd streaks.
No blood. No bodies.
But near the entrance—a teacup, shattered in place, edges swept outward in a starburst, dropped mid-step and mid-breath.
"Serenya," I said.
She was already kneeling by it, palm hovering above the shattered cup, breath slowed—that particular stillness she wore when she was listening to things the rest of us couldn't hear. HerLuminar Mark was Memory-Weaving. If the walls or broken cup knew anything, she'd pull it out of them.
I waited. Her brow furrowed, a twitch at her temple, and then her hand dropped flat, fingers splaying with a quick inhale.
"I can't find it."
"What do you mean?"
She didn't look up. "Someone erased it. They unraveled the memory thread by thread."
My heart slammed against my ribs. You don't erase memories on accident. You don't erase them without knowing what a Memory-Weaver is and exactly how to blind one. Whoever did this had come prepared—not for the family. For us.
"Can you follow it?"
"No trail. No residue." Her voice was defeated. "Whoever did this knew what they were doing."
I crossed to the hearth in two steps. Knelt. Ran my fingers across the soot-streaked stone until I felt it—a loose edge of brick. A scrap wedged beneath.
I pulled it free.
Pale blue cloth. The one I'd wrapped their balm in three days ago.
Torn. Bloodstained at one corner.
My throat constricted. For a moment I couldn't breathe, could only stare at that small, ruined thing and count every minute I hadn't been fast enough. Every street I should have run. Every second I'd wasted on a gods-damned cinnamon bun while a boy's life was hanging by a thread.
Serenya rose slowly, scanning the corners. "They were taken mid-motion. See the spread on that cup? There was no time to set it down. The cup was still spinning when they took them."
A sound slipped through the silence—distant and muffled, but unmistakable.
A shout.
Then another—closer.
Serenya's head snapped toward the window.
"We need to go," I said. "Now."
