Page 31 of Zenith Tower

“The shoulder.” I shifted the pillow with my left hand until the strain eased. “Better.”

She waited until I drew her back down to me.

The second time she moved, there was no attempt to outrun anything. She bent to kiss me, and we found our way back slowly. Pleasure gathered without urgency, deepening until I could no longer separate it from the ache of having her so close after believing I might never touch her again.

When release came, it left me shaking. Astra held herself still above me until my breathing settled. Then she eased down beside me and pulled the blanket over us.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes.

Her fingertips followed the green-gold line along my forearm, stopping before it vanished beneath the silver-green spread at my shoulder.

“You’re still ill,” she said.

“Painfully observant.”

She did not smile. “And I’m still going back for that file.”

“I know.” I covered her hand where it rested against my arm. “I’m still afraid too.”

She rested her head against my chest, on the side where my heart sounded strongest.

“But you’re here,” she said.

I put my arm around her. “For tonight.”

She lifted her head sharply.

“That was not a prediction,” I said. “It was an invitation to remain in this bed.”

“You’re terrible at invitations.”

“And yet you understood me.”

She settled against me again. Beyond the door, someone passed along the corridor and the water channels gave their low, constant murmur.

I stayed awake until her breathing deepened. My shoulder still ached beneath the pillow. Morning would bring Marrow, and Sadie Corwin’s unopened file was waiting somewhere below us. I kept my hand on Astra’s back and listened to her breathe.

Astra

Two nights after Kieran returned from the infirmary, we went back for Sadie Corwin’s file.

Kieran wanted to come. Hale looked at the tremor in his right hand and said no. The argument lasted until Kieran tried to fasten his own cuff and failed, after which he became very interested in insulting the Tower’s tailoring.

We left him in his room with the emergency cord beside his good hand and a promise that we would tell him everything.

Hale had watched another evening handover from the infirmary corridor. The outgoing readers carried their cases upstairs and the archive passage emptied, but the lower attendant remained at her desk. Someone still had to draw her away.

Hale approached with Kieran’s latest medication order and asked whether it replaced the infirmary order or supplemented it. When the attendant pointed to the reader’s signature, he asked where that reader could be found. By the timeshe took him toward the infirmary office, her answers had sharpened. Hale followed, still asking which order he was expected to obey.

Caspian and I passed behind them and reached the records stair.

Caspian took position in the service alcove, where he could watch both passages. He caught my hand briefly before I descended, squeezed once, and released it.

The lower corridor was empty. At its end, the archive door stood closed but unlocked, as it had before. The Tower guarded its bridge and its people; paper it trusted to the mountain.

I slipped inside.

The records room smelled of paper, cold stone, and the mineral damp that reached everything in the Tower. Silver light ran along the base of the walls. It caught the lower edges of the shelves and left the upper rows in shadow.