They ended up on the patio, as they usually did.
The pool catching the last of the afternoon light. The garden going quiet. The particular silence that follows significant things, all three of them still inside it.
Priscilla sat at the pool's edge with her feet in the water. The silver was gone. The levitation was gone. She looked like herself — warm, present — but something underneath was different. Lighter. Or maybe just more honest.
"I need to tell you both something," she said.
Levi and Sylvia looked at her.
"What happened in my inner realm. Why it took longer." She kept her eyes on the water. "I'm not telling you because you need to know. I'm telling you because you're my friends and I've been carrying it for a long time and I think it's time it was said out loud to people I actually trust."
Sylvia, who had known Priscilla longest, said nothing. She just waited.
Priscilla told them.
—
Not all at once. In pieces, the way she'd experienced it in the realm — the apartment, her parents' plan for her, the accumulating pressure of being made into something she wasn't. The night it broke. The building. What she found when the dust settled.
The pool made small sounds. The garden was very still.
When she finished, nobody spoke. Not because there was nothing to say — Levi could feel the weight of several things he might say, each one reconsidered in quick succession — but because some things need a moment of air before the response.
Sylvia reached over and took Priscilla's hand. Not dramatically. Just took it, and held it.
Levi looked at the pool. "How old were you?" he asked.
"Eleven."
He nodded slowly. He thought about being eleven — training with his mother in the early mornings, still learning the shape of his ability, still making the mistakes of someone who hadn't finished developing yet. Six years. Getting up every day, going to school, being warm and funny and present. With this underneath all of it.
"You've been carrying this the whole time I've known you," Sylvia said. Her voice was quiet and direct. "And you were still—" She stopped. Started again. "You're one of the most genuinely good people I know. That hasn't changed."
"It doesn't undo it," Priscilla said.
"No. But it's true at the same time."
Priscilla was quiet. Then: "You're not saying much."
Levi looked at her. "I'm thinking."
"About?"
"About the fact that after something like that, you decided to become an MK. To protect people. Instead of — anything else." He paused. "That's not nothing. That's a very specific kind of person."
Something in Priscilla's expression shifted — the last of the careful management releasing into something simpler.
"My parents would have hated this," she said. "Sitting by a pool talking about becoming MKs."
"Probably," said Levi.
"They also would have been terrified for me."
"Also probably."
"And eventually—" She said it slowly, arriving somewhere she hadn't quite finished working out until this moment. "Eventually they would have been proud. Once they saw I was going to be okay." She looked at the water. "I'd like to believe that."
"Believe it," said Sylvia. "It costs nothing and it's probably true."
Priscilla laughed — a short, genuine sound, surprised out of her. Sylvia squeezed her hand.
Levi looked at the pool and thought about all the things people carry and the specific weight of choosing to keep moving anyway, and felt something for his two friends that he didn't have a name for yet but that felt important to have.
✦ ✦ ✦
Inside, Chef Jeff was doing something that had begun to make itself known through the kitchen window.
"Dinner," Priscilla said eventually.
"Yeah," said Sylvia.
They went inside. The pool kept its small sounds behind them.
Later, lying in bed with the lights off, Levi stared at the ceiling and thought about everything that had happened in a single afternoon. The inner realm — his ocean, Ivel, the tree. The 3rd form arriving everywhere at once, exact and total. Priscilla floating three feet off the ground with silver light around her. And then, poolside, the three of them becoming something more than classmates.
He thought about what Melissa had said: the inner realm teaches you what you actually are. Not what you've been told.
He thought about her expression when he described the oak tree. The look that wasn't surprise.
Tomorrow, he decided. Tomorrow he'd ask her what she knew.
He closed his eyes. The ocean received him before he'd finished the thought.
And in the branches of the static blue oak tree, Ivel was already waiting.