I woke up before dawn.
Not because of noise, not because of light — the house was completely still, the kind of still that only happens in the last hour before the world remembers it needs to move again. The curtains at my window were heavy and dark, and the room was cool in the way summer rooms are cool only in those quiet hours when the heat has retreated and not yet returned.
I lay there for a moment, staring at the ceiling, and I let myself feel it.
The weight of what Kaien had asked me last night. The weight of what I had answered. Nine lives, I had told him. Nine, and this was the tenth. I had said it plainly, the way you say a fact that has lived inside you so long that speaking it aloud feels almost strange — not because it is hard to say, but because you have been carrying it alone for so long that sharing it still feels foreign.
