The coarse gravel crunched under Katharina's slow steps as she made her way back to the manor, contemplating the vivid rose in her hand.

  If she kept walking, she would be headed for the guest rooms, but as she carefully twirled the rose between her fingers, avoiding the prickly thorns, she couldn't help but wonder why she hadn't been able to grow her own rose yet.

  It wasn't as though she had made that great an effort, and after she had gotten the phone that had been her primary focus of where she expended the little aura she could spare when a day of suppressing the brand was over. Yet she realized now that she had had it for months, and it had only gotten drier in their little room, where it lay lifeless on the table.

  The aura in this rose was still fresh; perhaps by studying it like she had the prince's gem, she could uncover something that would help her bloom her own.

  Katharina had learned by now that as long as she fully intended to obey the brand's orders, suppressing its urging to do so immediately became far easier. Especially tasks that required bringing something from point A to point B were one of those where the brand was the least fussy about how she got there; she often abused this, to take the scenic routes around the manor when hauling stuff on housework days.

  And so with a deep breath and a concentrated mind, Katharina turned her feet, heading toward her own dry branch.

  As she closed the door to their room behind her, Katharina made sure to make as little sound as possible, though no one was supposed to be around; you never knew who might be passing by, and though she could suppress her own presence, objects around her still made sounds.

  Katharina gently placed the two branches side by side on the table and stared at them for a while, almost as if, any minute now, they would spring to life and divulge all their dirty little secrets. Of course, nothing happened.

  She placed a hand over each branch and closed her eyes, focusing entirely on feeling the differences between the two.

  Hers felt exactly like a dry branch, the bark starting to curl and peel a little where she hadn't been careful, and not a drop of aura could be found within it.

  The one now belonging to the noble lady felt smooth and cold to the touch, though it had just been picked from a sunbathed bush. On it lingered the unmistakable aura of the prince, in many ways very similar to that of his gem, detached yet still formed with his signature.

  But the fact that it was so similar to the aura in the gem only made Katharina wrinkle her brows in disappointment. There was no way for her to tell what he had envisioned when he made it bloom, and therefore no easy way for her to replicate it. She would have to figure it out on her own.

  Though she hadn't categorized her own aura use, or anyone else's, for that matter, before, it fairly quickly became obvious to her. Either she used her knowledge of the physical world to make a clear and concise mental model for what she was trying to achieve, like with the pump or the phone. Or she based it on the strong emotions and sensations implanted in her by the brand and the horrible experiences she had gone through after arriving in this place, but that had only really been used for her suppression.

  She opened her eyes and started from one branch to the other. Maybe this comparison was meaningless, when she didn't even know the fundamentals.

  In her brief obsession over the two branches, she had nearly forgotten the original cause that led her to hatch this plan of stealing aura. And it dawned on Katharina that though she had had these two objects lying around for months now, she had never thought to compare why she had instantly been able to pour her aura into her phone, yet the rose seemed to elude her abilities.

  She brushed the noble rose to the side and dug her phone out from the slit between her mattress and the wall where she had been keeping it.

  With suppressing the brand's insistence on getting on with delivering the rose, and the little trick she had pulled during tea with the prince, Katharina didn't exactly have any aura left to power her phone, so it lay next to the branch as just a useless block of fancy tech.

  But a fancy block of tech, she understood the inner workings of, a lot better than she did the rose.

  She crouched down slowly, keeping her fingers and nose on the edge of the table, inspecting the two objects through squinted eyes.

  First was the fact that the rose was of this world, while her phone had come here with Katharina. Second, the rose had been a living thing; her phone not so much. And finally, when Katharina had powered her phone, it was based on her own desire and her own intent, yet this directive to make the bud bloom was not her original thought.

  Behind her, Katharina heard a pair of running footsteps making their way through the corridor, followed by the sharp click of someone turning the doorknob. In a panicked flurry, Katharina sprang up from her crouch and bonked her lip against the table on her way up, leaving a metallic taste spreading from the bleeding slit that had formed.

  Lian barged into the room, huffing and heaving for air, her cheeks flushed from running, and her brand burning so hot it glowed through her dress right below her chest. But most surprising was the book she held clutched in her arms.

  "Katharina?"

  They stared wide-eyed at each other for a second before Lian lifted the corner of her mattress and tossed the book into its hiding spot.

  Katharina had managed to lean on the table such that neither her phone nor the two roses could be seen, yet that fact barely mattered to her anymore, as this scene seemed so out of character for Lian.

  "Lian, what are you..?" Her voice trailed off when she wasn't sure which of her thousand questions she wanted to pose.

  But it didn't seem to have mattered either way as Lian only managed to stare back at Katharina with gritted teeth. Lian painfully clutched the glowing spot and let out a suffocated yelp of pain between her teeth.

  Then she spun on her heel and headed for the door. The last thing Katharina saw of her face was that Lian's eyes had turned blank; any expression of self was gone, and the brand had taken complete control.

  Katharina felt her own brand slowly ramp up in anger the longer she was ditching, and soon she too would lose herself and rush mindlessly back to her task at hand. She preferred to keep her wits about her and in control of her own body. The rose had been a dead end anyway, but it seemed a new path of investigation had opened up; she could keep experimenting with her phone, at least the possession of that had been sanctioned.

  And so she gently picked up the noble rose and headed for the destination her feet sought. And the day continued as if nothing had transpired; it wasn't until evening, when they both lay in bed, that Katharina was alone with Lian again.

  Katharina kept her eyes fixed on the wooden boards of the ceiling, but now and then they would start to drift toward the corner of Lian's mattress. The image of Lian rushing in with a book in hand kept swirling in her head, generating one question after another.

  Finally, the speculations became too much. Katharina turned her head to look at the seemingly slumbering girl next to her.

  "Lian?"

  "Yes?"

  She answered immediately, clearly not asleep, and the tone in her voice made it obvious that Lian knew exactly what Katharina was about to ask.

  "What were you-e doing? With a book."

  The long moment of silence that followed made Katharina wonder if it had been better to pretend she hadn't seen anything.

  "Nothing..." Lian rolled over to face the wall. "It's ?∞????∞ナ?. I have it for if something bad is going to happen."

  Katharina just hummed knowingly, though she wasn't exactly sure if she knew.

  "I will not tell, I promise." She said to reassure Lian.

  Still, she couldn't help but wonder how a book was supposed to help in case of something bad happening; if anything, that book would be the bad thing. But she wasn't exactly one to judge; neither of them was supposed to have been in their room that afternoon, and she, too, was hiding both a dry rose branch and her phone.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  "You know, Lian, I have something as well." Confiding in Lian felt natural, but compared to before, where Katharina had always been at the mercy of Lian's generosity, this was the first time Katharina had something on Lian. Honestly, Katharina didn't like the tight clump that formed in her throat when she thought about it.

  Lian didn't answer, but Katharina didn't care; she wanted them on equal footing, and so she pulled her phone from its hiding place.

  With her very last bit of strength, she managed to make the screen light up for a split second, not enough to power it, only barely enough to get the 'drained battery' logo to show.

  The light from the digital display lit up their little room with an unfamiliar blue hue, which made Lian turn instinctively in her bed to investigate what made this light. But instead of looking at her phone, she was staring at Katharina. A slow, gentle smile formed on Lian's lips; they were in this hell together after all.

  Katharina didn't question further where Lian had gotten the book, and Lian didn't question what the peculiar device Katharina fidgeted with in the evenings was; instead, she sat intently reading through her story.

  Katharina couldn't help but see a certain resemblance to their inattentive dance teacher in Lian, as she sat engulfed in the story, reading all that the final summer sunlight would allow as it slowly disappeared beyond the hills.

  But contrary to their calm and composed teacher, Lian was sweating profusely whenever she read the book; it was clear that she was not nearly as good at defying the brand as Katharina.

  Which Katharina couldn't help but find endearing.

  This way of existing in each other's secret transgressions against the masters quickly became routine.

  Now and then, Katharina snuck a glance at the pages, but what she saw was always just indistinguishable paragraphs of letters that looked like swirling patterns moving across the page. Katharina's language was still clumsy, but at least she spoke mostly fluently by now, and she definitely understood more than she could articulate, but reading that was a facet still beyond her reach.

  And so she opted to tinker with her phone and tried to understand why her aura worked there when not on the rose, until either she or Lian would pass out from exhaustion.

  Katharina would power her phone, see the battery symbol light up, and then hold on to the sensation and apply it to the rose. It only resulted in the stem getting fried at the end.

  And so the following day she snuck out to pick a new branch for experimentation, so as not to destroy the original. Each night would be a new approach, a new experiment, a new mental note. While Lian slowly flipped the pages.

  Katharina found that depending on the lessons they had endured throughout the day, if their respective tasks had required using aura, both of them would tire out faster. But as the days passed into weeks, Katharina found that she could keep expending her aura, powering her phone even after she had done the evening's experiment.

  It wasn't as though she felt like she had more aura at her disposal, merely that she got better and better at controlling it, and especially better at holding the clear mental image of the inner circuits.

  She, in fact, got so good at it that she could be charging her phone while slowly drifting off into sleep, though she had to be careful not to drain herself completely in the meantime. Then, in the morning, she would take a mental note of how much power her phone had. Initially, the percentages barely rose, even with her phone turned off, but over time, the battery slowly filled.

  Until one morning, she awoke to the glorious sight of thirty percent on the dark screen.

  It had been an arbitrary decision that had landed her on thirty percent; however, Katharina didn't even wait until evening before turning her phone on.

  And there it was, the image of her boyfriend lovingly kissing her cheek, tugging painfully at her heartstrings and reminding her that this had not always been her reality.

  She unlocked it and thought there was no signal; everything seemed just as it always was.

  The first odd thing she came across was the camera roll filled with terrible selfies of the prince sitting in some vast, opulent room, most of them a little blurry, and taken from below, giving off the vibes of a middle-aged man with his first smartphone.

  It made her chuckle at first, but it also struck her as absurd. Why had he taken pictures? Maybe he didn't know that he was saving them.

  Then she swiped to the calendar app.

  There was only one explanation that sprang to mind; her phone had been left without power for too long.

  Not that it really mattered, it wasn't as though Katharina even knew what calendar system this world operated by, but it did get her thinking.

  Her finger slid across the image of her with the girls' squad sharing drinks last New Year's.

  The brand tugged, and she had to leave the thought behind with her phone while going about the day.

  When they returned to their room and their forbidden evening ritual, her phone surprisingly still had power.

  Katharina regretted not turning it off during the day, as now the battery was back down, but seeing as leaving it with no signal and no active apps hadn't drained did give her a bit of comfort.

  The irony of all this effort she had put into getting this useless phone that meant so much to her was not lost on Katharina, and she found herself laughing silently through her nose in little bursts of regretful air.

  The next morning, Katharina made sure to only turn the phone on briefly, not for any particular reason, just because she was so ecstatic to finally be able to look at the images of her friends, and because she kind of wanted to show Lian, but hadn't quite decided if that was a good idea or not.

  But before she could get around to making that decision, she noticed that something was amiss.

  Looking out the window, it didn't seem like they had been allowed to sleep in, and Katharina certainly didn't feel any more refreshed than usual. In fact, she felt as aura drained and tired as she had ever since she had started trying to solve the rose.

  Katharina still only knew aura from what she had experienced and the little R?fna had taught her, but in general, her impression was not that it had odd side effects unless you wanted it to have so. But of course, there was the time when her phone had been on its own adventure through this god-forsaken world before making its way back to her.

  But then there was the other slightly more terrifying option.

  No, Katharina was not about to jump to any conclusions; this had to be tested.

  Every morning Katharina would turn on the phone, and every morning, to her great horror, she would see the time drift. It was merely two hours a day, yet with all the days she had been there, those hours added up.

  When there was no longer any doubt in Katharina's mind that the days were in fact longer, it just added another confirmation that this was a world far from her own. A different planet, even.

  She found herself drifting off in thought during the day, trying to count the devastating loss of time she was living everyday she was trapped in this world.

  Finally, Katharina was done wallowing in her own uncertainty; it was time to pin down exactly how much was lost.

  That evening, Katharina tried counting on her fingers how many times she had been made to run in Furrow-brows lessons, as they equated to a decent chunk of the time she had spent at the manor. However, she quickly ran out of fingers, and then there were also all the weeks she hadn't run to keep track of.

  She looked up at the boards in their ceiling and started using the knots to hold the tens, by fixing her eyes to one, such that she could count backwards, but this turned out to only confuse her.

  If she could just work out roughly how long winter had lasted, maybe that would give her some hints about the length of the year. But she quickly lost track as separating one week from another was not as easy when their life was so monotone.

  Finally, she turned to Lian, whose forehead was beaded with sweat from reading.

  "Lian, do you know what day it is and how long I have been here?"

  Lian put down the book and shrugged lightly, not sure of the specific day either.

  However, a glimmer Katharina hadn't seen in a while appeared in Lian's eyes; a teaching moment was due. It turned out that Lian knew the structure of the year; until now, she just hadn't thought to teach it.

  There were four seasons, three months in each, much like Katharina was used to. The three summer months were the longest of thirty days each, while the rest of the months in a year were twenty-nine.

  "I'm not sure of the exact day you came here. It was sometime in early summer." She admitted while frowning in thought. "I guess that makes it just about a year ago."

  A year.

  It obviously made sense, still, it hit Katharina like a slap that stung harder than the brand. But this year was different, and Katharina was already reaching for the phone.

  Three hundred and fifty-one days.

  With a hand shaking just slightly, she worked backward, adjusting for the strange length of the days, the creeping drift that snuck up on her every morning.

  The number that came out the other end made her stomach twist.

  Three hundred and eighty days.

  She locked the phone, unable to stare any longer at the calculator and the result it had spat out.

  But as phones do at the sight of a face, the lockscreen lit up showing one of her precious memories saved in the rotating dias.

  It was an image taken on her last birthday. She had gotten so many gifts for her first apartment, and in this picture, she was grinning while hugging a blender that she barely ended up using.

  Katharina had felt the faces of her loved ones slowly fading in her memory; having these images to remind her was a comfort, but with time, they would no longer be true to how the people she loved actually looked.

  A thought crossed Katharina's mind that pulled her from her spiral and made her jump to reach for the rose.

  Katharina, now with time at the center of her attention, imagined all the time that has passed, and envisioned the time it would take for a bud to grow on a branch, swell up, and finally burst into a vivid flower.

  She felt her aura flow, like time, into the rose branch, lighting up their room. The branch swelled and contorted, looking as though it was a time-lapse of many weeks playing in seconds.

  The sight of this fifth or sixth rose finally blooming into a beautiful flower, at the simple price of time, felt like a pitiful reward for the realization it had taken to get here.

  In her, great longing and sorrow surged, and sprinkled in were tiny sparks of immense anger toward the world.

  She lay in silence, tears of wrath streaming down her burning temples, staining the pillow.

  Year of the Sun, 537, 17th Ungra

  Leopold's pen glided across the page of his diary, but as he had written out the date, it came to a halt.

  It had been an utterly boring and uneventful day.

  Leopold flipped aimlessly through pages; the last time he had noted something of interest was at his visit to Asbj?rn's manor, though that was weeks ago. Days when he was not engulfed in solving the mystery of the blond all just passed in infinite monotony.

  There were under three full months until the auction on the 4th of Himare, and before that, he would have to decide on his little mystery.

  He kept sifting through the pages, barely reading the entries, until he reached the same day exactly a year ago.

  He had gone to the slave merchants with Asbj?rn on that day, quite out of the ordinary, so much so in fact that Leopold was not for a second in doubt about what day it had been.

  It had been the first and only branding he had seen.

  And as it turned out, it had been the day he first saw her, and he couldn't read her mind, though of course that detail was nowhere to be found in his diary; too many people could read the words on these pages.