"Anna's getting the ship ready," Roland said from the driver's seat as the car pulled away from Lux. "We can leave as soon as it's prepared."
"Thank you, Roland," Leonora murmured, pressing a hand to her temple.
"Don't worry, sis. You just need to rest for a while." He glanced in the mirror at Youri, who had fallen asleep against the window in the back seat almost as soon as the door closed. Then his eyes moved to his sister. His voice softened. "I haven't seen you cry in a long time."
Leonora's jaw tightened. "Shut up. If you tell a soul about this, I'll kill you myself."
"My lips are sealed," Roland said, with a small, wry smile.
A few hours later, the ship was waiting for them at the edge of the spaceport. Roland shook Youri's shoulder until he groaned and lifted his head. "Come on, Youri, wake up. We're leaving."
"Where are we, Roboy?"
"At the ship. It's ready to go."
"Finally," Youri muttered, still half lost in the fog of his hangover. He let Roland steer him up the ramp.
They had barely cleared the atmosphere when Leonora unbuckled herself and stood up. "Sister, where are you going?" Roland asked, gripping the arms of his seat, real panic in his eyes.
"Stay there, Roland. I have unfinished business with him." Her voice cut through the cabin like steel. Every movement she made radiated danger, a storm barely contained.
The door to the rear cabin hissed open. Leonora's obsidian eyes locked onto Youri. She crossed the room with her shoulders squared and her jaw clenched, and grabbed him by the collar, yanking him upright with a ferocity that rattled him. "Earlier, you said I turned you into this. What did you mean?"
"When did I say that?" He tried to shrug, but something uneasy flickered behind his eyes.
"Don't you dare play dumb with me."
For a long moment, he simply looked at her. When he spoke again, his voice was calm, almost unnervingly so. "You really don't remember me, do you?"
"I had never met you in my life until three weeks ago," Leonora said. Her voice was controlled, but a tremor ran through it.
"Yes, you had. Sixteen years ago, to be exact." He watched her face. "You probably don't remember much of your early childhood. You were sick all the time, weren't you?"
Her breath hitched. "How do you—"
"Leonora Kaelthorn," he said, his voice low and measured but threaded through with old pain. "I didn't recognize you at first. But now that I've seen you and heard you, I know. Sixteen years ago, you were at a space institute called Altex. It was a place for human alteration — for experimentation." His gaze bored into hers, cold and haunted at once. "You were a patient there. And so was I."
Leonora's hands began to shake. The cabin seemed to shrink around her as the hum of the engines pressed against her temples. "Altex," she whispered. "They experimented on people there?"
She remembered it only in fragments, the way children remember the worst years of their lives: a sprawling complex of steel and glass hanging silently in the void, more fortress than hospital, its docking bays opening like cavernous mouths. Inside, it had been a labyrinth of sterile white corridors that hummed with ventilation and distant machinery. Doors slid open by themselves onto operating theaters full of gleaming tables and suspended robotic arms, onto laboratories where cryogenic chambers and vats of luminous fluid held things she had been told not to look at. Everything had smelled of antiseptic and ozone. There had been no warmth anywhere in that place. No comfort.
"Yes," Youri said. Shadows of something old moved across his face. "I was sold there as a child. They cut me apart and put me back together, broke me down twice a day, and fed me just enough scraps to keep me alive. And then you arrived." His voice changed when he said it. "Gray hair. Radiant. Alive. You were the only light in that whole endless hell. I had never seen anyone like you. I didn't know love existed, not for someone like me. But when I saw you, something stirred inside me that I didn't even know was there."
Leonora stood frozen. Her heart thudded against her ribs like a drum of fear, anger and long-buried memory.
"One night I snuck into your room," he went on. "I had to see you. I had to talk to you. I opened your door, and there you were. You jumped me and pinned me to the floor before I could say a word." A bitter laugh escaped him. "'Who are you? Are you here to steal from me?' you said. And then you took one look at how skinny I was and let me go. 'Nah, you're too weak to steal anything.' So proud. So defiant. You were always like that."
Her throat closed. The memory was coming back now. It felt like fire against her chest.
"Then you asked who I was. Back then I was EH36, so that's what I told you. 'I'm EH36. Nice to meet you.' And you said, 'What kind of weird name is that? Didn't your parents give you one?'" A faint, pained smile ghosted across his lips. "You laughed, and that laugh was brighter than anything in that place — brighter than the lights, brighter than all the despair around us. I hadn't thought about my real name in years, and you didn't care. You just told me yours. 'I'm Leonora. Nice to meet you.' And I told you that your name meant light, and you asked me who had told me that, and I said I had read it in a book." His voice dropped until it was almost a whisper, as though he were confessing something he had kept for sixteen years. "Your eyes lit up. 'Wow, you can read?' And we laughed, as if laughing could hold the dark back."
He leaned against the wall behind him, and his gaze went somewhere far away. "You told me your mother used to read to you, and that she had promised you would learn someday. So I told you I would teach you. 'Really? Then I can surprise Mama when I get home!' you said. I promised you I would make you the best reader in the world, and you laughed again and said, 'Thank you. I'm looking forward to it.'" His voice cracked at last, and the hard edge in it broke. "That moment — that one little moment — stayed with me through every cut, every procedure, every day of pain that came after it."
Leonora's fists were clenched so tightly that her nails bit into her palms, and her lungs burned with every breath. Rage, sorrow and an ache so deep it was almost suffocating coiled through her all at once. She had survived Altex. She had survived everything the world had thrown at her since. And yet hearing him say these things dragged memories she had buried long ago back up to the surface like wildfire. They were not just memories. They were chains — two children bound together in a place built to break them, and everything that had been stolen from both of them since.
Tears threatened to spill over, and she swallowed hard against them. Beneath their feet the ship's engines went on humming, and every breath she took felt heavy with the weight of everything they had lost.