The quarters had become a comfortable place.
Lilith hadn't expected that. She hadn't expected a lot of things about Nocturne but the quarters specifically had surprised her. The volcanic glow came through the narrow window at the right angle in the evenings, the stone held warmth from the day, and the three of them had settled into the space without friction. Each had found their corner and made it theirs without any negotiation required.
She and Eve were on Lilith's bed, backs against the wall, heads resting together. Not talking. The sessions left a specific kind of tiredness behind — for Lilith it was the tiredness from sustained concentration pushed past its comfortable limit, and for Eve it was something quieter but no less real. By evening all either of them wanted was to sit like this and not think about Librarians or scanners or folded parchments with unknown contents.
Eve's shoulder was warm against hers. That was enough.
The door opened.
Lysander came in with his boots unlaced because he always unlaced them on the way rather than waiting until he was inside, and his hair was a disaster, and he had a new scrape on his chin that hadn't been there this morning. He dropped onto his bed and sprawled across it and looked at the ceiling with an expression of complete contentment.
"Dekkan showed me a new drill," he announced, to the ceiling.
"How was it?" Lilith said.
"Very hard," Lysander said, still looking up. "I fell twice."
"And?"
"And I did it anyway." A pause. "Dekkan said I was getting better."
"You are," Lilith said.
Lysander turned his head to look at her. "How do you know? You're not there."
"Because you come back like that every day," Lilith said.
He seemed to find this satisfactory and turned back to the ceiling.
Lilith looked at the window. The volcanic glow had settled into its evening patterns, slow and amber and constant. She thought about the routine — prayers, education, disciplines, evenings in the quarters — and found something unexpected in the thinking of it.
This isn't bad, she thought. I could get used to this.
The thought sat warmly for a moment.
And then the feeling arrived.
It came without announcement and sat underneath everything else like a sound at the edge of hearing. A wrongness. Not in the room, not in the fortress, not in any direction she could point to. Just a bad feeling pressing in her chest and staying.
She knew this feeling back at the ship, when she woke up. When someone is coming.
She also felt it before the Changeling attack on the orphanage. She'd felt it on the ship before the cold hand on her neck. Both times something had followed it and both times she hadn't been wrong.
Lilith sat up straight.
Eve felt the movement and lifted her head and looked at her face and read whatever was in it.
"I need to go check something," Lilith said. "Stay here. Both of you."
Eve nodded once, already sitting straighter, already alert.
Lysander rolled onto his side and looked at her. "Is something wrong?"
"I don't know yet," Lilith said. "Stay put."
"Okay," he said, and he meant it completely, which was the thing about Lysander — he didn't argue when it mattered.
Lilith stood up.
She took one step toward the door and stopped.
She turned back.
I don't know what's out there, she thought. I don't know if I'm coming back in two minutes or two hours. I don't know anything except that the feeling is real and I've learned to listen to it.
She crossed back to the bed. Eve looked up at her, eyes steady and questioning.
Lilith leaned down and pressed her lips to Eve's forehead, gentle and brief, and straightened back up.
Eve's face did something completely involuntary. A small, startled softness crossed it, her eyes going slightly wide, her mouth pressing together in an expression that sat right at the edge of a smile and clearly hadn't planned to be there at all.
Lilith looked at her for a moment.
Then she laughed, quiet and genuine, the first real laugh she'd had in days, and turned and walked out the door before Eve could compose herself.
The door closed.
Eve sat on the bed and looked at the door.
She replayed what had just happened. The gesture had been quick and warm. Lilith's hand steadying her shoulder and then the brief press of lips against her forehead and then Lilith stepping back laughing at whatever Eve's face had done.
Eve touched her forehead with two fingers.
She wasn't sure what to do with this. She filed things well but this didn't fit neatly into any category she currently had. The shoulder contact and the head-resting and the hand-holding were familiar — she understood those as Lilith being close because close was how they existed. But this was something else. Something with a different shape to it.
She was still looking at the door when Lysander spoke.
"Lilith really loves you," he said.
Eve looked at him. "She does?"
"That's what my mum used to do," Lysander said. He sat up and crossed his legs and looked at Eve with the earnest focus he brought to explaining things. "When she was worried. Or going somewhere." He thought about it. "Or when she was really happy to see me. She did it then too."
Eve lowered her fingers from her forehead slowly. "What does it mean," she said.
Lysander opened his mouth. Then closed it. He frowned at the middle distance with the focused expression of someone who absolutely knew something and was discovering that knowing it and explaining it were very different skills.
"It's like—" he started. Stopped. "It's when you really care about someone," he said. "Not just normal caring. The really important kind." He pressed his lips together, thinking hard. "Like when someone is so important that words aren't enough so you do it instead."
Eve considered this carefully. "Words aren't enough," she said.
"Sometimes," Lysander said. "Yeah."
She looked at the door again. At the space Lilith had occupied a few minutes ago, stepping back and laughing with her eyes bright.
"She was worried," Eve said. "Before she left."
"Yeah," Lysander said. "But she still did it." He picked at the edge of his bootlace. "That's the thing. She was worried about whatever's out there and she still stopped to do it." He looked up at Eve. "That means it was important. She wanted you to know before she went."
Eve sat with this for a long moment.
She thought about Lilith turning back when she didn't have to. Crossing the room, leaning down — not because the situation demanded it but because she'd wanted to. Because it had mattered enough to stop for even when something out there was pressing on her chest and telling her to move.
She wanted you to know before she went.
The small involuntary softness came back to Eve's face, quieter this time and more settled. She looked at the door and thought about Lilith out in the fortress corridors following a feeling she'd learned to trust, and she felt something in her chest that she still didn't have a full vocabulary for but that was warm and certain and had been growing since a glass tube on a Mechanicus ship when a girl with mismatched eyes had woken up and filled the empty space.
"I know she loves me," Eve said quietly.
Lysander looked at her for a moment. "I know you know," he said. "But it's still good to be shown."
Eve looked at him.
He was six years old with scraped palms and unlaced boots and had just explained something she suspected most people spent considerably longer learning, and he said it like it was obvious because to him it was.
"Yes," Eve said. "It is."
She looked back at the door and smiled — small and private and entirely real.
Outside in the fortress corridors, Lilith was following a bad feeling into the dark.
And somewhere in Prometheus, something was waiting.