There is something in the air as I approach the apartment building on the east side of Booktown. People walk back and forth beneath the bright noon sky, only a slight touch of chill in the air. Seasons don’t much exist in Faeth, but the weather is fickle so high up. A steel box as tall as a man sits out in front of the apartment building, set just to the side of the steps, where it forces short blue people to navigate around it on their way down the street.

  I stand like an island in the water, stock still as strangers' faces move around me. The chill should be bracing, but it can’t reach me anymore, can’t let me know that I am awake and alive.

  The stone steps leading into the building feel brittle as I climb them toward a glassy, green door emblazoned with the address “1302 East Chapter.” An overwhelming call to push my presence out and envelope the entire building comes over me as my fingers grace the brass handle to pull open the entrance door. I stuff down the sensation. Some things you have to see with your eyes.

  The crinkling sound of brown moving paper greets me from the open door of the apartment I walk toward. Only a single door along the row is open, sunlight spilling out of it and into the hallway. It is marked with only a number, 213, and it is the apartment of my friend Jasper.

  “Jasper,” I call, poking my head around the door to look inside.

  The man looks up from where he is crouched on the ground in the center of the room. Huge leaves of brown paper cover the floor, where they aren’t tightly bound around various objects throughout the room. It doesn’t take a moment for me to notice that there isn’t any furniture left lying around.

  “Charlene.” Jasper’s voice catches, and he winces as he stands too quickly. The white cotton of a patch sticks out from the collar of his shirt. It covers a burn on his neck that threatens to scar. Unconsciously, his hand flicks up to the patch as he catches me looking at it. “It’s not really that bad. The pain is mostly gone. I just keep it wrapped up so that the ointment one of the healers gave me can stay on it.”

  He says that, but why wince if it doesn’t hurt?

  “I came by to see how you are doing.” I scan the room again, picking out the distorted shapes of pans, more than one sailing ship, and a lamp beneath the cover of paper wrapping. “I heard that you were out of the hospital.”

  “I am,” his smile is a light thing. “It was a strange few days when I first started waking up. I know better than most the kind of damage a blast wave can do when you are standing that close to it. Well,” he laughs, “I know much better than most now. From what I heard, I would just be charred bones if you hadn’t been there, and wouldn’t have gotten off with just a four-day coma and a significant concussion.” He smiles, and damn me, there is an unevenness to his expression that stabs a dagger into me. “Yet, there you are, as strong and beautiful as ever. You really are something else, Charlene.”

  “I’m just good at taking a hit,” I say.

  “With as many punches as life throws at you, I wouldn’t mind being able to take a few myself.” His glad expression falls as he removes his spectacles and takes a lens cloth from the breast pocket of his vest. As he stares down at the glasses in his hand, polishing them clean, I can’t help but notice his right pupil is more dilated than the left. He can’t see out of his right side anymore. All the wonders of this city, and they can’t fix something like that.

  “You seem to be going somewhere,” I say, looking pointedly at the wrapped furnishings about the room. “I thought the academy was giving you time to recover.”

  “They are,” he says. “I have missed a lot, but they have been kind to me about it. We have come to an agreement, actually.” He pauses, looking down at the things still scattered about. “I think I am going to be heading home.”

  “Home?” My brain is trying to tell me something that I don’t want to understand. “You live here, don’t you? Here in Faeth.”

  “Gaz is already back home,” he says as if he didn’t hear me. “I don’t know if she will come back. I don’t think she ever really liked the city.” He grabs a wrapped lamp, and there is a second where his face twitches. Trying and failing to pivot smoothly, he instead picks it up with his other hand and drops it into an open box. “I’ll be taking a sabbatical. The academy agreed that they will allow it. It will only be a year or two.”

  A year or two…

  “What about your fighting golem? I heard that the authority found all of the stolen golems.” Of course they did. I had Dovik drop them covertly on a lieutenant’s desk, well after closing inside that storage ring I found. The man would make a hell of a thief if he had a mind for it.

  “They did,” he confirms, nodding. “The actual golem wasn’t either of ours, and we only owned a portion of the enchantments that we made. The enchantments are nice, experimental, and Tatus agreed to buy us out of our portion. It’s a good bit of suns. Should be able to get by.”

  “So, you’re giving up?” The harshness in the words makes the man on the floor in front of me flinch. It takes me a moment to move past the heat in my throat before I can feel bad about saying that. I sounded just like my mother.

  “I…I didn’t give up, Miss Devardem,” he says. It is only when I catch him stuttering do I realize that he hadn’t been. He had cheer in his voice before. It’s gone now, and I’m the one who made it go away. “The arena is destroyed.” He turns away, clearing his throat as he grabs something else wrapped in the thick brown paper before setting it gently in the box. “I went back and saw the club. Only charred sticks remained. That could have been me. The last thing I ever new in this world could have been that sound, the roaring of air, and the pinprick of light down the hallway.”

  Jasper grunts again, clearing something sticky from his throat before he forces levity back into his voice. “You saved my life. Thank you, Miss Devardem. I think I was going to be a coward and leave without saying that to you, but I’m glad you visited. Thank you for saving me.”

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  “You’re leaving too.” Even though I whisper the words, I don’t mean to say them.

  Jasper’s eyes leap back up. “Did you say something?”

  “No.” I smile. “No, nothing.” It feels like there is a sudden pressure against the back of my eyes. Feelings come at me from the side, but I don’t know what they are or what they mean. All I can do is nod and grin at him, pretending to be happy, pretending that I would make the same decision in his shoes.

  For the next half hour, I help him place things into the boxes around the apartment. He is as methodical in the organization of his household belongings as he is with his classwork. Jasper turns the conversation to his home. He goes on about it, painting a far nicer picture now than he did the first time he told me about it. I don’t remember what I say; I’m too busy lost with the ball of pain stuck in the back of my throat.

  Then he is gone too, walking down the street as he follows to faethian men carrying the heavy moving container between them. I never even got to see Gaz again. The last time I saw her was at the academy more than a week ago; she waved to me as we passed each other on campus. There had been something in her expression then, but I’m only now coming to understand it.

  For minutes, I stand on the stoop outside the apartment building, watching people walk this way and that down and up the street. In my hand, a white box tied closed with red ribbon dangles from the bow, the sweet scent of a confection drifting up. Jasper never even noticed it. We passed his open door more than a dozen times, but he never noticed it sitting just outside the apartment.

  I don’t know when I start walking, only that at some point buildings begin to pass by. This burning ball of heat, scratching at the back of my throat, I begin to recognize it.

  He gave up. Just like that, he looked at his life and decided to run away.

  Jasper told me so bad that he wanted to become an enchanter to help everyone back home. He told me that he had some kind of dream. Did he really? Did he really have a dream? How could he just quit it like that?

  I can understand being afraid. I know what it feels like to be made small, to sit alone in pain in the dark, begging for help. I know pain and fear, so intimately it is written on my bones. But I’m not giving up; I can’t even imagine doing it anymore.

  How dare he say that he had a dream People with dreams follow them; they don’t just stop because they got hurt. Who has been hurt as much as I have? I was the one who felt that fire, who weathered it for him. I am the one who had pieces of me cut off, who had to stare down at her own severed arm lying in a pool of blood and horror. I am the one who was crushed by a god, who had to live for a month while rusty blades slowly pushed through my flesh.

  How could they say that they have a dream and just quit like that? What had Kendon gone through that I didn’t? And he just slunk off to hide back at home. Jasper said he dreamed of taking care of his whole kingdom with what he learned here, and getting blown up once was enough to make him quit that. How many times have I been blown up? How many times has my body been destroyed? I have been ripped apart. I have even had my soul cut open, and not even that could make me stop, but it was sure enough to make…

  I pause in the middle of the street. A woman bumps into the back of my leg and swears at me as she navigates her way around. “How terrible am I?”

  I can’t believe myself. The sun vanishes as I make my way beneath the streets and step onto the familiar moving walkways that ferry me home. No, this city isn’t really home, is it? It feels like forever since I last spent time in the open air beneath the pear trees, since I last heard the good-natured back and forth of honest men arguing with one another with their gloves caked in fresh soil. It has only been a few months, hasn’t it? It seems like a lifetime ago.

  I know that I’m not right. I know that my thoughts are wrong, that they are all jumbled up and resentful, but I can’t bring myself to feel that way. I don’t feel wrong. What do you do when you can’t feel what you know you should?

  A different sound greets me when I crack the door open to the penthouse. The music is soft and warm, echoing straight from the kitchen. I can’t place the instruments, can’t honestly place many instruments that aren’t a guitar or a trumpet, but there is something calming to the long peels of vibrating strings. The box I have been carrying thumps onto the countertop as I stroll in, once crisp and sharp edges now bending.

  Dovik stands in the middle of the room, looking sideways at me while he holds a graduated glass beaker in his hand, sipping on some plum-colored liquid. “You made it back quick,” he says. “Was he not home?”

  “Jasper left,” I tell him.

  To my surprise, Dovik doesn’t need me to explain. He closes his eyes and releases a sigh, tiling his head down toward the oven in front of him. “I thought he might. I didn’t know him too long, but…I thought he might.”

  Then I am left to stand there in the middle of the kitchen as silence stretches between us. My friend watches me for a long moment. Dovik takes a final sip of his pungent drink and sets it down on the island. “I wanted to say I’m sorry. I am saying I’m sorry. I was really wrong for what I said, Charlene. You were just worried about me, and I threw it back at you.”

  “I don’t think you were wrong,” I tell him, falling back against the island next to him. His shoulder is warm as I press mine against it. “Thank you.”

  The fabric of his shirt rasps as he pushes off the island and moves to the oven. “I was making cookies to help get you to accept the apology,” he says, propping open the oven door. Dovik licks his finger and taps one of the round, brown blobs on the tray inside.

  “Bribing me with sweets?”

  “You love sweets.” With his naked hand, he grabs the hot tray and slides it from the oven before setting it on a towel. “You actually had perfect timing, it seems. Want one?”

  Leaning over, I flick the edge of one. It cracks off the surface of the tray and bounces against the wall of the pan. I find the underside scorched black when I turn it over. Dovik winces as he sees it too.

  “On second thought, I think there still might be some cake left in the…”

  The cookie crunches loudly as I take a bite. The taste of salty, burnt batter washes over my tongue, and despite the clear coating of cinnamon on top of it, I hardly taste it at all. I laugh into my hand, a small spray of crumbs smacking against my palm.

  “I don’t bake often,” he says.

  “I could tell.” I step forward, letting the side of my face fall against his strong chest as my arms wrap around him. Dovik hesitates a moment, his hands held out at his sides, before slowly wrapping them around me. A few tears slip away and sink into the soft fabric he wears, more than I thought I could manage.

  “That bad, huh?” he asks.

  “Don’t leave me,” I whisper into him. “Please, don’t leave me too.”

  His arms grow tighter around me, holding me close like he is afraid I might vanish. “Never,” he says, iron in the word. “I never will.”

  I flinch when his hand comes up and runs down the back of my head. Just that simple gesture wrings more out of me, but I don’t pull away. Together, we stand in the kitchen, soaking in the smell of burnt cookies, and the world outside falls away. It is good.

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