It had been three days.
Three days of sitting on the living room floor with the candles lit and KaSandra's voice guiding them through the quiet, and every single time Katherine found the signal, she lost it. She would feel it brush the edge of her awareness, that airy distant current that moved like wind through an open field, and the moment she recognized it something in her surged forward and the signal scattered like startled birds.
Carlyle had managed to hold it twice. The second time he'd held it long enough for KaSandra to confirm the direction, somewhere north, cold, far. But without Katherine anchoring the other half of their connection the image stayed incomplete, blurred at the edges, a shape without a name.
On the fourth morning Katherine woke up before anyone else.
She sat at the kitchen table in the gray early light with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had gone lukewarm, staring at nothing in particular. The house was the quietest it ever got, that specific silence of people sleeping, full of slow breathing and the occasional creak of the old floorboards settling.
She had been thinking about the block.
KaSandra had named it on the second day, gently and without ceremony, the way she named most things. There is something in the way, she had said, sitting across from Katherine with her golden eyes steady and patient. Something you are holding onto that is louder than everything else. Until you look at it, it will keep breaking your concentration.
Katherine had not asked what it was.
She already knew.
The back door opened and Thomas came in from the yard, his red hair damp from the cold morning air, a jacket pulled over his shoulders. He stopped when he saw her, reading the expression on her face the way older siblings learn to do early and never forget.
He pulled out the chair across from her and sat down without being invited.
"How long have you been up?" he asked.
"A while."
Thomas reached over and wrapped both hands around her mug to check the temperature, then got up without a word and put the kettle on. Katherine watched him move around the kitchen with the ease of someone who had lived in enough different places to feel at home in all of them, and felt a sudden fierce wave of gratitude for him that she didn't know how to say out loud.
He set a fresh mug in front of her and sat back down.
"You want to talk about it?" he asked.
"Not really."
"Okay."
He didn't push. That was the thing about Thomas. He never pushed. He just stayed, and somehow staying was always enough to make the words come on their own.
Katherine curled her fingers around the warm mug. "KaSandra said there's something blocking me."
"I heard her say that."
"She said it's something I'm holding onto."
Thomas nodded slowly, watching her.
"It's the fear," Katherine said quietly. It was the first time she had said it out loud and she felt it in her chest when she did, the specific weight of a true thing. "Not of finding the chosen ones or of Victor or any of that." She paused. "It's the fear of losing people. Of getting close to someone and then having them gone." She looked down at the mug. "Every time I feel that signal and I know it's a real person out there, someone I'm going to find and bring back here and fight alongside, something in me just." She stopped.
"Pulls back," Thomas finished.
She looked up at him.
"Yeah," she said. "How did you know?"
Thomas leaned back in his chair and looked at her with that particular expression he got sometimes, the one that was equal parts older brother and something older than that, something that had seen too much to be surprised by any of it anymore.
"Because I did the same thing for years after your grandmother died," he said. "I stopped letting people get close because if they weren't close I couldn't lose them." He paused. "It's a very reasonable thing to feel, Katherine. It is also a wall, and walls keep everything out. The bad and the good both."
Katherine was quiet for a moment. Outside the kitchen window the sky was beginning to lighten at the edges, the dark blue of early morning giving way to something softer.
"I already lost Thomas," she said, and then caught herself. "I mean. I thought I lost you. For a whole night I thought you were gone and I didn't know what to do with that."
"I know," Thomas said.
"And Dean. And Mom almost. And Courtney's sight." She shook her head slightly. "Every time we add someone new to this group there's just more people to lose."
"Yes," Thomas said simply. "There is."
She looked at him. "That's not very comforting."
"I know that too." He folded his hands on the table. "But here is the other side of it. Every person we have added to this group is also another reason we are still here. Niall and Kristen and Courtney. Carlyle. Dean coming back." He met her eyes. "You cannot protect yourself from loss by keeping your hands empty, Katherine. All you do is make sure you are carrying nothing when it matters most."
The kettle had long since gone quiet. The kitchen held the particular stillness of early morning, full of things said and unsaid.
Katherine turned the mug slowly in her hands.
"So what do I do?" she asked.
"Same thing you do with everything else," Thomas said, a faint smile crossing his face. "You stop being afraid of it and you go straight at it."
Katherine looked at him for a long moment. Then something in her expression shifted, not dramatically, not all at once, but in the quiet way that real things shift, the way ice doesn't shatter but simply, slowly, begins to melt.
"You're annoyingly wise for someone who forgets to drink their coffee," she said.
Thomas glanced at his untouched mug. "I am going to drink that."
"You've said that every morning for three days."
"And one of these mornings I will be right."
Katherine almost smiled. It was small and brief and she turned back to the window before it fully formed, but Thomas saw it and said nothing, which was exactly right.
Later that morning when KaSandra lit the candles and Katherine sat down on the floor across from her brother, she closed her eyes and found her power moving the way it always did, restless and cycling, fire to water to earth to wind to dark.
This time, when it moved, she moved with it.
And when the distant signal brushed the edge of her awareness, airy and light and far away, she did not reach for it.
She simply let it be there.
And it stayed.
KaSandra, watching from across the room with her golden eyes very still, felt the shift the moment it happened.
"There she is," she said softly, to no one in particular.
Carlyle opened one eye and looked at his sister. Katherine's face was perfectly calm, her hands loose in her lap, and there was something in the set of her expression that he recognized, the look she got when she had decided something and nothing in the world was going to move her from it.
He closed his eye and reached out to meet her.
Their twin bond hummed between them like a plucked string, warm and sure.
And together, for the first time, they held it.