Page 58 of Zenith Tower

“His Mark is breaking,” Hale said.

Caspian looked at the healer. “Do something.”

“I am.” Her voice remained controlled. “It isn’t enough.”

Marrow turned on the guard. “Get the administrator here now.”

The man left at a run.

Kieran’s fingers loosened around mine.

That hand had covered mine while he told me he wanted ordinary mornings. Now the fingers lay slack against the sheet, the rings at his knuckles cold beneath my thumb.

“No.” I closed both hands over his. “Kieran.”

His eyelids did not move. His lips had lost their color, and the pauses in his breathing stretched until I could no longer trust that another breath would come.

Hale looked at the healer.

She shook her head once.

The unfinished line at my wrist pulled so hard it hurt.

I pushed back my sleeve. Caspian’s line ran silver and complete across my skin, carrying him to me even through locked doors. Hale’s lay rain-dark beside it. The green-gold ended abruptly near my pulse, brightening at the unfinished edge while Kieran’s light failed beneath his collar.

It had burned when his Mark reached toward me in the corridor and warmed again during the review. Now the heat ran from my wrist into my palm. I did not know whether following the line would save him, but it had answered every change in his Mark, and nothing the healer tried had slowed the fracture.

“Astra.” Caspian had followed my gaze to my wrist.

He looked from the unfinished line to Kieran. His hand flexed once at his side. He was afraid, but he did not tell me to stop.

Marrow stepped toward the bed. “Astra, you have no idea what that line will do.”

“No.” I turned back to Kieran. “But waiting is killing him.”

Kieran’s chest failed to rise.

The healer reached for him. Hale said his name again.

I put both hands over the failing light at Kieran’s chest and followed the green-gold line.

Astra

Cold rose into my palms.

It came from Kieran, from skin that had burned beneath my hands only hours earlier and now held almost no warmth at all. Beneath it, faint but distinct, the green-gold line drew me deeper.

Marrow shouted my name. The healer reached across the bed to pull me away, but the green-gold at my wrist flared before she touched me.

“Wait,” Hale said.

I closed my eyes.

The room remained around me: Kieran’s weight beneath my hands, Caspian’s fear beside my own, the healer arguing with Hale. Yet the unfinished line opened somewhere inside my awareness, and all of it receded.

I followed the heat.

It led through Kieran’s skin and into the fractured Mark. Beneath my hands, green-gold channels split apart at the shoulder, their light thinning as the fracture spread towardhis chest. Where the Mark remained whole, warmth moved through it. Beyond the break, there was only cold.