Chapter 267: The Second Crossing.
"Abram."
Venna’s fingers moved against mine, working, trying to pull me back. She could feel it happening—feel me going out further than I should have been going. The pressure of her grip tightened in small, urgent pulses.
"Abram."
It was like standing in one world while living in another. Time had stopped where my body was and kept running where my eyes were, and neither version of me could reach the other. The dark of the libra sat heavy around my skin while the grey light of Riya’s house kept moving in front of me, independent, unreachable.
I stood in Riya’s house and tried to follow the masked man down the stairs with nothing but my eyes, straining after a figure I couldn’t chase. The broad set of his shoulders, the controlled drop of each step. He’d killed Venna’s mother. I was almost certain of that. But that wasn’t why I was pulling toward him.
He’d stopped when Riya said my name. That was why.
"Abram." Venna’s voice came again, closer this time, hooking into me from wherever she was—thread and weight and the faint heat of her breath in the dark. "Don’t strain. Please. Don’t push it."
I opened my eyes into the dark.
No heaving this time. No gasping the way I had yesterday, when the plain had spat me back out and left me shaking in this chair. Just a room with no light in it and a girl holding my hands. The air between us felt heavier than it should have, dense with expectation.
"Hey." Her voice went soft. "Are you here?"
"Yes." I tightened my grip on her fingers. Bone and tendon pressed against mine.
Something about her still refused to settle in me. There was a quality to being near her, some atmosphere she carried—warmth without heat, presence without weight—that made me feel connected to her in a way I had no explanation for. Not attraction. Something older than that and stranger, sitting underneath the conversation, present since the burial, quiet and constant as a second pulse.
"What did you see?"
I turned it over before I answered. The image of the body on the floor. The girl on the stairs. The man who had walked through me. The last thin sentence that had carried my name.
I’d watched her mother die. I’d watched her killer walk out. And the last words the woman ever spoke had my name in them.
"I saw..."
"Did you find what you were looking for?" She tried to help me across, her fingers warming in mine, small adjustments of pressure that felt almost like searching.
"No." No point lying about it. The word left me flat. "I saw your mother dying."
"Did you?"
Something moved in her voice. Not joy, exactly, and not grief either. Excitement laced with something else I couldn’t name—bright and sharp and slightly off-key—and it sat oddly against what I’d just told her. The dark between us seemed to lean in.
"Yes."
"It’s working." Her hands closed tighter. The joints of her fingers dug into mine. "Abram, it’s working."
I waited for her to ask how. How her mother had died, what it looked like, whether it had been quick. That’s the question anyone asks.
She didn’t ask it. She set it aside like the fact that the libra had taken me there at all mattered more than what I’d seen when I arrived. The silence that followed was deliberate.
Then, finally:
"Who killed her?"
"I didn’t see his face."
Her fingers started moving in mine, small restless motions—thumb sliding, pads pressing, releasing—and her heart picked up. I could hear it across the space between us without the system doing anything at all to help me. A quick, hard rhythm under her skin.
"It’s okay, Abram." She steadied herself in real time, out loud, voice finding its level again. "It’s okay. The libra shows what connects us. We’ll join the dots ourselves. Let’s go together this time. Both of us."
"Okay."
I agreed to it easily, which surprised me. The word left my mouth before the caution had time to catch it.
I hadn’t got what I came for. I’d walked into this dark room to find Brahim, to find whatever I’d done to a man who died before I was born, and instead the libra had handed me a masked killer, a friend who’d lied about being in a hospital bed, and a dead woman using her last breath on my name.
Nothing I wanted. Everything I now had to carry.
Pay attention to all of it, I told myself. Every detail. Nothing here is decoration.
"Ready?" Venna asked.
"Yes."
Her fingers tightened around mine until the edges of her nails registered against my skin.
"We go together," she said. "The libra takes us wherever we’re connected. And I think everything I’ve dreamed about you since I was four is finally going to have an answer."
I sat still in the chair and waited. The wood under me felt older than it had a moment ago. The dark pressed closer.
The system said nothing. It had stayed quiet since the first crossing, which I noticed and filed away with everything else—another silence that meant something I couldn’t yet read.
"I’ll be with you the whole time," Venna said. "If you need pulling out, I’ll pull you out. It can take hours to settle where the libra wants us. Don’t panic when it does. We’re safe in this room. Nobody comes through that door."
"Okay." Then, because it occurred to me: "How many hours did you book?"
"Twenty."
Twenty hours.
She’d known before I called that I wasn’t leaving here soon. The knowledge settled in my chest like a weight that had already been measured.
"Close your eyes. Please."
I closed them. The dark behind my lids was the same dark that filled the room. No difference. Only the pressure of her hands and the sound of her breathing close enough to feel.
The two of us were leaving the present behind and putting our lives in the hands of a dark room and whoever Abuela had standing at the door.
For a while there was only dark, in this world and the other one both, no difference between them. Our hands stayed locked. The heat of her palms against mine was the only fixed point. Then the wind took us—sudden, directionless, tossing us back and forth like loose polythene caught in a current, no ground anywhere, no up or down, only the sense of being carried by something that had already decided where we would land.
It set us down.
And the light began, slowly, to open.