The world looked smaller after London.
Not quieter. Smaller. Streets that had been full the week before were taped off. News feeds ran the same three minutes of sky tearing open, then the body count, then the silence where our daughter used to be. They did not know her name. They did not know she had only cried once. They called her the child taken from the lab. That was all the public got.
I got the rest.
I got Elena sitting on the edge of the bed in the ruined lab's recovery room, hands empty, eyes fixed on the wall where Katulu's message still burned in gold-black cuts. I got Dr. Voss's sheeted body in the hall. I got the sound of my own bones knitting wrong while I dragged myself across a city that had paid for a fight I lost.
We went home because there was nowhere else to go.
The houses next door to each other looked stupid in the daylight. Gardens. Fences. A porch where we had eaten pasta and talked about names. Nova. We had said Nova if it was a girl and then the sky opened and someone else took her before we could say it out loud.
Elena did not cry at first.
She sat at the kitchen table with her hands on the place her belly used to be and spoke like she was reading a report.
"If I had said no," she said, "none of this happens. No artifacts. No powers. No Clan. No claim. She would not exist for them to take."
I stood in the doorway because sitting felt like agreeing.
"And we wouldn't exist either," I said.
She looked up. The look was not soft.
"Don't do that. Don't turn it into a love story so it hurts less. I signed the trial. I let them put something in me that did not belong to this world. I survived and the others died and I thought that made me lucky. It made me a door."
"You didn't know."
"I knew enough to say yes." Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated that it cracked. I could see her hate it. "Voss is dead because I said yes. London is dead because I said yes. Our daughter is in another world because I said yes."
"She's in another world because Katulu took her," I said. "You didn't hand her over."
"I couldn't stop him."
"Neither could I."
That landed worse. She stood. The chair scraped. She was still weak from labour and she stood anyway, purple light flickering at her wrists and dying because there was nothing left to spend.
"You were in London," she said. "You were the one who was supposed to hold them. I was in a bed. I reached for her and my hand missed. Do you understand what that feels like? I touched the blanket. That is what I get. A blanket."
I took a step toward her.
"Don't," she said.
I stopped.
"You keep trying to make it bearable," she said. "It isn't bearable. If I had never taken the trial, I would have been a normal woman. I would not have flown. I would not have met you. And she would not be theirs."
The room went very still.
"So you wish we had never met," I said.
She closed her eyes. "I wish she was here. I don't know how to want both."
I waited for the rest of it. It didn't come. She turned to the window and looked at the garden like the garden had done something to her.
"You're being cruel," I said. "Not to me. To yourself. And you're using me to do it."
"Good," she said. "Someone should."
I left.
Not walked. Flew. The back door took the frame with it because I did not have the patience to open it. Violet light tore a line over the rooftops and I kept going until the houses were a stain and the air was thin enough to hurt. I hovered there with my hands shaking and the city below still smoking in places no camera was allowed to show.
She was not wrong about the cost.
She was wrong about the blame, and I could not stay in that kitchen and listen to her build a grave out of the only good thing we had made.
I came back after dark.
The lights were off in her house. I went next door, to my parents' old place, and slept on the sofa with my boots still on. The cushions smelled like nothing. No her. No baby. No sex. No argument. Just the low ache in my side where Katulu's spear had gone through and the worse ache that did not have a wound attached to it.
I did not go to her room.
She did not come to mine.
At some point I heard her on the other side of the fence. Bare feet on the path. A pause. Then the door of her house closing again, soft, like she had almost crossed and decided the almost was enough.
I stayed on the sofa.
In the morning the news said the death toll in London had climbed past two hundred. Paris and New York had held, barely. The rifts were closed. The message on the lab wall had been photographed and sent to every linguist still alive. None of them could read it.
Elena texted once.
I'm sorry I said it like that.
I stared at the screen until the words blurred.
I didn't answer.
Not because I didn't love her. Because love was not the problem. The problem was a girl who had cried once and then vanished into a language we could not read, and a woman who thought the price of meeting me was too high, and a man who had slept on a sofa because the bed felt like a lie.
We were not touching.
We were not healing.
We were two houses and a fence and a missing child, and the world outside was still counting its dead.
I put the phone face down.
Then I got up, because staying down had already cost us once, and I was not going to let Katulu's message be the last thing written on a wall.