All my life, the Shears had been there. Silver eyes in the dark I'd mistaken for stars.
The three symbols of the Spindle, the Thread, and the Shears were stamped onto every door seal and brass plate in Lumen. By twelve, I'd stopped noticing them. The way you stop hearing the click of a clock in your own home. They had become the visual grammar of a city I never chose. Yet sometimes, those silver blades would catch my attention, a flicker, a wrongness I couldn't name. A catch in my chest like cold air coming through a gap in a window.
I pulled my hand away from the window panes, my fingerprints already fading. I had been at the library all afternoon, reading the same books for the third time.
The kitchen smelled of vanilla and something slightly burnt, which meant Eirene had been baking since before I came home.
There were shoes by the door that I didn't recognize. I stepped over them.
The voices reached me before I reached the kitchen. Eirene laughed loudly, followed by two others.
Kit was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed, saying something that made Hana cover her mouth. Hana was sitting on the table, the actual table, which my mother would have hated, with her legs dangling. They both looked up when I came in.
"Eris!" Hana smiled. "Happy birthday."
"Happy birthday," Kit said. He raised his mug to me.
I managed a "thanks" that came out softer than intended. The gratitude was real—it always was—but the words after it remained trapped somewhere between my ribs and my throat.
Eirene was at the counter with her recipe book splayed open, even though she knew every measurement by heart. She was always like that—methodical in ways I'd never been. Her hands moved through the flour. Sure. Decisive. Like she had already decided something and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
When she looked up, our eyes locked and I felt that old twin-current spark between us—that silent language built in the womb, where she'd memorized me before I knew how to lie.
One glance was enough.
She went back to frosting. I crossed the kitchen, hoisted myself onto the counter beside her, and swiped my finger through the bowl of frosting before she could stop me.
She gave me a look and kept humming.
Kit and Hana were discussing the Gathering—all sanctioned smiles and Order-approved revelry in Ring Three's civic hall, where the music had been scrubbed of anything interesting, where paper lanterns hung at regulation heights, and where the food tasted like someone had followed instructions so precisely they'd managed to cook the soul right out of it.
Eirene was going. Of course she was.
Hana's met mine, her voice dropping to something genuine. "Come with us, Eris." The words hung there, an offering with no strings attached.
"Maybe," I said.
Kit's eyes met mine above the rim of his mug, patient and undemanding. I liked him a little for that.
This is fine, I thought. I'm good at this.
I could do this. Hover at the periphery for twenty minutes, nod at the right moments, and then slip away unnoticed.
I had spent eighteen years perfecting the art of being almost-there, of occupying negative space so skillfully that people forgot to notice I wasn't really among them.
Eirene caught my eye. Something in her face said: I see you. I know.
I looked away first.
Kit and Hana left around six o'clock.
"Happy Apophrades. Happy birthday. We'll save you a spot if you change your mind."
The door closed behind them, and left just the two of us again.
I stayed perched on the counter, legs swinging slightly, while Eirene folded wax paper over what remained of the cake. The quiet settled between us comfortably, familiar, asking nothing from either of us.
"Are you going to the Gathering?" I asked.
She didn't look up from the cake. "Maybe."
I watched her fold the wax paper with perfect corners.
"Eirene." The word came out sharper than I meant it to. I let out an already frustrated breath. "Just—"
The sentence hung there, incomplete. My mind raced through the ways it could end. Tell me the truth. Stay with me tonight. Stop packing your life away where I can't reach it. But none of them made it past my lips.
She disappeared into our room and came back with a canvas bag hanging from one shoulder.
The zipper gaped open at the top, revealing dark, folded fabric. She must have packed it hours ago—waiting in our room while Kit and Hana visited, while I'd struggled through small talk, while we'd shared that silence I'd mistaken for understanding. All along, she'd been watching the clock, waiting to leave.
I looked at the bag, then at her face. I swallowed past the knot in my throat. "We've never spent a birthday apart. Not once in seventeen years."
"I'll be back by morning," she said.
I looked at her. "You said that last week."
She was already moving toward the hallway. I slid off the counter.
"You come back at dawn smelling like a place I've never been invited." My words came out like a wire pulled too taut, ready to snap.
"Every time. For four months."
She froze at the threshold, her back a wall between us. Her black wool coat dangled from her fingers and swung around her shoulders, her pack following.
"Eris…" she said softly.
"Where are you going?" I asked again.
"Just… out."
"It's our eighteenth birthday."
"I know."
She turned. We were mirror images with few flaws—her eyes caught the light differently than mine, though they were the same impossible shade that looked black until you saw them in sunlight. Our faces held identical angles, as if carved by the same knife, yet something in her expression had always been unreachable to me.
"I'm careful," she said. "I'm always careful."
"You're not answering me."
"I'm aware of that."
"For months now, you've been feeding me nothing but bullshit and looking me right in the eye while you do it."
Her face shifted, not with the shame I expected, but with something more elusive I couldn't quite grasp. For a moment, her eyes darkened as if something moved behind them, quick and hidden, like when you glimpse movement in a pond but can't tell what made it.
"I'm trying to protect you, Eris."
"From what?" I threw my arms up, then slapped them against my thighs with a sharp crack that echoed through our kitchen.
Eirene's voice cracked like a whip. "It's not safe for you to know! If the Order found out that you—" She caught herself, her jaw snapping shut.
"The Order?" The name fell between us like a stone. "What the fuck does the Order have to do with where you go at night?" I lunged forward, fingers outstretched for her wrist but she retreated like I'd swung at her.
My fingers curled into fists at my sides, my nails biting into my palms. "Eirene, what have you gotten yourself into?"
"I'm not in danger," she said, each word measured and precise. "But I can't explain. Not yet." Her eyes darted to the window, then back at me.
I looked at her. Her coat hung from her shoulders like it had been made for her, the bag nestled against her hip with the ease of habit. Her face held that new expression I'd been seeing all year—the one I'd refused to name. Beyond my anger, deeper than the betrayal of being deceived by my own reflection, my chest tightened with something small and poisonous that tasted like fear.
"Fine." My voice ripped out of me like broken glass. My armor slammed up and something within me cracked.
"Never mind. Don't tell me, "I spat. "I don't give a shit about where you're going or if you ever come back."
The words landed between us like stones dropped into still water.
For a second, her breath hitched, then I felt the wall go up on her side before the ripples settled.
I grabbed my coat off the hook and walked out the front door before either of us could say anything else.
"Fuck!" I snapped, slamming the door behind me.
I yanked my coat tighter, shivering as the night air bit through the black wool—that vicious October chill that happens when salt-laden winds sweep in from the harbor, and winter waits around every corner.
The street was already filling with people heading to the Gathering—paper lanterns in windows, the civic seal above every door lit gold.
I walked.
Not toward anything in particular, just away. Each step put distance between me and our house, between me and the hurt that had flashed across her face, away from the stranger who had worn my skin and spat those unforgivable words.
The crowds thickened near the civic hall, and I ducked down a side street to avoid them, my hands still trembling against my thighs.
The twin bond hummed low and steady in my chest. She was there—furious and upset, I could feel that, the frequency sharp-edged and closed. But still there. Present.
Ten minutes, I told myself. Give her ten minutes, then go back and finish it properly.
I counted them out in a loop around the block. Then I went back inside.
The door to our parents' bedroom was shut, with just a thin line of lamplight shining beneath it. I didn't slow down as I passed. For months now, they'd been retreating earlier and earlier each night—curtains drawn by sunset, Mother's voice hushed to nothing by eight. Not the heavy sleep of someone truly exhausted, but a pulling away. I'd stopped asking why long ago.
Eirene's shoes were gone. The bag was gone. The cake sat wrapped on the counter exactly where she'd left it, and everything else was exactly where it had always been.
She was not here.
I stood in the kitchen for a moment.
Then I reached for the twin thread, that constant hum beneath my ribs I'd never lived without.
She was there. Present, but distant. Like she'd pulled the door shut and locked the bolt, leaving me on the wrong side.
She had planned this. Not just the bag, but this.
I stood in the kitchen for another long moment, then I walked back out.
The Civic Hall was three streets over and already full by the time I got there. Paper lanterns strung from the high ceilings. The Order's sanctioned music played from the brass receivers—slow, approved, all the edges sanded off. The smell of food that had been made correctly but was somehow still wrong.
Hana spotted me across the room, her wide smile faltering as she took in whatever expression was written across my face.
"Eris—"
"Is she here?"
Hana's eyes flicked to Kit approaching with a tray of drinks, and I caught the silent message that passed between them in that fraction of a second.
"We haven't seen her," Kit said. "She said she was coming but—"
"How long ago did she say that?"
"This afternoon. Before we stopped by." Kit's voice slowed, each syllable placed with deliberate care of someone stepping across thin ice. His eyes darted to Hana, then back to me. "Did something happen?"
I scanned the hall. Paper lanterns swayed overhead, their glow casting everyone in amber light, making strangers of familiar faces. Beneath the chatter, the Order's music droned on—that familiar, sterile melody I'd heard since I was thirteen, now as mundane and forgettable as my own pulse.
She wasn't here. She had never planned on coming here.
I reached for the bond. The wall was still there. I could feel her behind it, holding. Not just angry. Angry and spending herself to stay that way.
Where are you?
Only silence answered me.