Ha'ken was in the corridor outside the quarters.
He stood with his arms crossed and his back to the wall, eyes moving at intervals down both directions of the corridor. He looked at Lilith when she stepped out and his eyes moved over her face immediately.
"Something's wrong?" he said. Not a question.
"I have a bad feeling," Lilith said. "I know how that sounds."
"Tell me about it."
She told him. The feeling had arrived without announcement and sat in her chest and pressed, and she knew it because she'd felt it before — before the Changelings, before the hand on her neck on the ship. Both times it had been right and both times something had followed it.
Ha'ken listened without interrupting.
When she finished he was quiet for a moment. He looked at her face and she could see him working through it — not dismissing it, but not accepting it without consideration either. His jaw was set and his eyes were steady and he wasn't moving yet.
He's thinking about what else it could be, Lilith thought. He should be. That's the right response.
"You've been through a significant adjustment," he said carefully. "New world. New fortress. New routine. A body responds to that kind of change and the response can feel like a warning when it isn't."
"I know," Lilith said. "But this isn't that. It's the same feeling, Ha'ken. Not anxiety. Not nerves. The same exact pressing in my chest."
He held her gaze for a moment.
"Then we go to the Apothecaries," he said. "Forren checks you over. If something is happening physically or psychically, he'll find it. And if it's nothing, you'll know that too."
Lilith nodded. That was reasonable and it was the right call.
She fell into step beside him and they moved through the corridor, Ha'ken's armored footsteps steady on the dark stone and Lilith's considerably quieter beside them.
The fortress was quiet at this hour but not empty. Chapter serfs moved through their evening tasks and two Salamanders passed them going the other direction and acknowledged Ha'ken with a nod and glanced briefly at Lilith without stopping. The volcanic glow came through the high windows at intervals, amber and slow.
"How are you finding it here?" Ha'ken said.
Lilith glanced up at him. "Nocturne?"
"The routine. The sessions. All of it."
She thought about the quarters and the evening light and Eve's shoulder warm against hers. She thought about Lysander coming in with unlaced boots and new scrapes and the satisfied look on his face after a hard session. She thought about the senior Librarian saying better than you should be and meaning it.
"It's good," she said. "I didn't expect it to feel settled this fast but it does." A pause. "The Librarians push hard but that's fine. I think I need that."
Ha'ken nodded.
"The bad feeling," Lilith said. "It's getting worse."
Ha'ken looked at her. "Since when?"
"Since we left the quarters. It's been building." She pressed her hand flat against her sternum briefly. "It's not just in my chest anymore. It's everywhere."
Ha'ken's pace didn't slow but his posture changed — his shoulders pulled back and his eyes moved to the corridor ahead and then to the side passages and then back to Lilith, covering the space around them in a fast and practiced sweep.
"How much worse?" he said.
"A lot," Lilith said. "Ha'ken, it's—"
She stopped.
Something in the corridor ahead changed. A shift in the air, a quality she had no words for, the same thing she'd felt on the ship right before the cold arrived and the hand settled on the back of her neck. Her mouth went dry. The bad feeling spiked from pressing to overwhelming in the space of one breath and she pulled in air to speak again.
"Ha'ken—"
His eyes went wide.
From the deep shadow of the side passage to their left a figure burst out — fast and low, clearing the gap between shadow and corridor in a single explosive motion, one arm outstretched and reaching toward Lilith, and a voice cut through the corridor sharp and urgent, too loud for the space, impossibly present:
"No!"
Lilith turned toward the figure.
The floor beneath her feet began to glow.
Not fire and not the Warp's churning colors. Something else entirely — a pattern of light spreading outward from where she stood, pale and geometric, the lines precise and deliberate, spreading across the stone fast and covering it in seconds. The glow climbed up around her and she felt it not on her skin but inside her chest, inside the part of her that reached for the Warp when she reached at all, and this pull was total and complete and left no room for response.
Eve, she thought.
The light took her.
Ha'ken moved.
Two strides covered the distance to where Lilith had been standing and he found nothing. Stone floor, dark and unmarked. No burn, no residue, no sign of any kind that the light had been there at all. Just the corridor, ordinary and empty.
Lilith was gone.
The figure was gone with her.
Ha'ken stood in the empty corridor and looked at the floor where the light had spread. He looked at the side passage the figure had come from. He looked at the space where a five-year-old girl had been standing and was not standing anymore.
One second passed.
His fist hit the comm bead at his jaw.
"All points," he said. His voice was level and hard. "This is Ha'ken. Chapter Master to the comm immediately. We have a disappearance. Corridor seven, east wing, level three." A pause, listening. "No. Not an intruder breach. She's gone. The child is gone." Another pause. "No trace. No warning. Get me Tu'Shan now."
He stood in the corridor and waited for the response and did not move, because moving meant accepting there was somewhere useful to go and there wasn't. She was gone and the fortress had nothing to tell him about where that was or how far.
The comm crackled.
Tu'Shan's voice came through it and Ha'ken began his report and the fortress around him started moving.
In the quarters, Eve and Lysander waited.
Lysander had relaced his boots at some point and sat back on his bed with the Salamanders book open across his knees. He turned pages at intervals. He was on chapter four, about the Promethean Cult and its traditions, and he had several questions saved up to ask Lilith when she got back. He was also mildly hungry but had decided not to mention it.
Eve sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the door.
She wasn't reading and wasn't doing anything except sitting there and looking at the door and waiting. She'd been doing this since Lilith left and she was still doing it and she wasn't going to stop until the door opened.
The connection was there. It was always there — warm and constant, the thread that ran between them and had nothing to do with distance or walls or the stone of a fortress. She held it and it held steady and that was enough to sit with.
"She'll be back soon," Lysander said, without looking up from his book. He said it plainly, settled on it, not asking.
Eve looked at the door.
"Yes," she said.
Outside in the fortress the sound of armored boots moving fast through corridors had started up, distant but real, and neither of them knew what it meant. Neither of them knew that the person they were waiting for was no longer in Prometheus. Neither of them knew that Ha'ken was standing in an empty corridor reporting to the Chapter Master and that the fortress was already shifting into a response to something it didn't understand yet.
The connection held warm and steady.
Eve held onto it and waited for the door to open.