Chapter 10 — Part 1: The Road Back to Silence
They got the orders at dawn, when fog still clung to the stone like breath that couldn't make itself leave. The message did not come to a Warden, or a faculty inbox, or the Cohort board where ambition and shame shared a cork. It arrived inside a sealed, black-paper packet knotted with red cord and stamped with the University sigil that wasn't quite the University sigil—an older ring, the tree stylized into a hooked silhouette that might have been roots or talons.
Bren from the east gate brought it himself. Bren did not bring things himself. He stood in the dormitory's common room with water still beading his pauldrons and a look that had mislaid its humor somewhere between the tower stairs and the truth. "For the four of you," he said. "Direct. No detours. I did not see it." He set the packet on the table and left before the silence found the edges of his name.
Kara undid the knot with hands that still smelled faintly of rosemary and smoke. The packet breathed dust that had lived too long on a shelf no one visited. Inside lay a single brass wafer keyed for a field reader and a short page of instructions written in a hand like a knife.
COHORT NINE. Proceed at once to Coordinates 40.0913 N, 105.2782 W. Recover sealed data caches (pre-EMP archival). Authorization: Director Class. Authority: V. No escort. No additional faculty. Return with all contents.
Jax already had his portable reader in hand; he clicked the wafer into the slot and waited while it hissed and negotiated with a cipher too elegant to have been born in wartime panic. A clean map overlay resolved—mountains like a fist, foothills like knuckles, and a red crosshair blinking over a knot of land sixty klicks west-northwest, where cartographers had written as little as they could and the wind had done the rest.
"That's dead country," he said, pushing unruly hair back with the same hand that held a micro-spanner. "Old research grid. EMP ghosts drift like rotten weather. Any drone we send'll forget the name we gave it."
Kara traced the contour lines with the pad of her thumb. "Water?"
"Sparse," Jax said. "Spring lines that only want to be generous after rain. We'll make do."
Ronan leaned forward, elbows on knees, scaled patterns along his jaw dulled by the gray light. "Why us?" Not complaint. A measurement. His eyes slid, inevitably, to KrysKo.
KrysKo sat at the center of the silence, scarf loose, gaze level, watching the way the red crosshair pulsed exactly once per breath. The system had already begun to hum through his nerves like strings on a long-silent instrument.
[Routing overlay accepted,] the mechanical register of his HUD observed, clean as glass. [Cross-referencing archaic tags…] A faint flicker. [Match: PROJECT KRYSKO PERIMETER—TIER 2 OUTERWORKS.]
Then the other voice—the one like a warm hand braced on a shoulder—unfurled with patient certainty.
"You feel it, don't you?" the voice said, deep and river-slow. "The ground out there remembers you, KrysKo. It named you before you named yourself."
Kara saw the small shift he never wasted and did not ask. She laid her palm over the hills. "We go. No escorts means no arguments about where to step."
"Also no pickup when the ground decides to teach us humility," Jax said. "Which, if I'm reading the weather, is a lesson we're scheduled to repeat."
"Then we carry our help," Ronan answered. He rose, decisive as weather. "Rings. Food. Water enough to offend the desert."
They packed like people who knew the world took offense at waste. Storage rings clicked open like small throats learning a first word, and in went practical miracles: coils of filtration hose; collapsible bladders; salt tabs; three days of ration bricks that tasted of sincerity and not much else; flint and tinder that Jax called "romance" while palming his striker anyway; Kara's vials and oils and quick-bind gauze; charcloth; powdered binder in paper Jax had disguised to look like sweets; extra socks (Kara's insistence); extra batteries (Jax's faith); and three dull bronze plates from the old set that KrysKo slid in without anyone naming them.
Ronan cinched his ring and laid his palm over it. "We walk as one," he said, and the sentence sat in the room like a small oath that didn't need a witness.
They left by the east gate under a sky that had not yet chosen a color. The bells kept their own counsel. Drakari on the parapet touched chime-stones as the four passed—fingertips to stone, a soft cadence a human ear would call nothing but that nevertheless ran along the wall as if a quiet animal had decided to keep pace.
The first miles were easy. Not kind—nothing was that anymore—but light-footed. Terraces gave way to scrub that made a life out of refusing whiskey offers from the sun. The road became suggestion and then rumor. Kara set a pace that didn't bruise the day. Jax told the ground three jokes. The ground declined politely to laugh. Ronan listened to the sky for teeth. KrysKo let his focus soften until the shimmer at the horizon traded faces—present for memory, memory for present—and he could tell which was which without trusting either.
By noon, the land remembered what war had made it. Salt flats lay where wheat had once argued in friendly voices. Glass dunes collected in shallow seas, edges honed to knives the sun liked. Turbine towers rose and did not work, black reeds bad at birds.
They cut shade beneath the broken mouth of a culvert and drank sparingly. Jax coaxed a little courage back into his field reader. "Machines don't like this place," he muttered. "Electrostatic tantrums, low-frequency sulk. My drone would make it a klick and then marry a sagebrush."
Kara dabbed her neck with a damp cloth. "We'll make it if we stop flirting with heat stroke."
Ronan pointed with his chin. "Marker stone. Drakari cut."
It looked like any stone—the trick of the thing. Ronan knelt and ran a thumb along shallow grooves not even a careful human would notice. The scaled plates along his throat fluttered as he drew the scent of it.
"Old," he said. "Placed when the south patrols still ran this far. Two lines: Ground not friendly. Keep to the right of the wind."
Kara smiled despite heat. "Short advice. Trustworthy."
"Hug the shale teeth, avoid the glass sea," Jax translated, shading his eyes. "We might swear less."
"Let's swear less," Kara said. "We've used our allotment for the week."
They bent right into the shale. The shadow there didn't try to sell them anything. Twice KrysKo raised a hand and the column stopped as one—weighing crust over powder, teaching boots to touch like fingers. He moved like water that got to choose its own shape.
The first trap waited in the obvious place—where any sensible foot would seek purchase. He saw it by the way the wind coughed in a circle. He brushed dust with two fingers and the rose of wire showed its steel.
"Museum piece," Jax breathed, going prone with a grin he trusted more than most orders. "Shaped charge with a fondness for ankles. If whoever set this had a mother who loved them, they married it to a second."
KrysKo's eyes went higher, reading the grammar of the stones. There—the careful wrongness of three pebbles refusing gravity. He looked to Ronan. Ronan nodded. Jax loved both roses apart with a little screwdriver and a lot of respect. When they were only lessons and not threats, he tucked them into a pouch. "Someday," he said, "in lecture, this will make a better argument than I do."
"Most things do," Kara murmured, smiling.
The next trap was not wire. It was a lie told to gravity—thin glass fused to look like honest shale. KrysKo found it by the echo of his own step, a hollow vowel the ground should not have made. He took Kara's wrist without asking, and she let herself be taken back a pace.
"Thank you," she said.
"You're welcome," he said.
The sun limped lower. In the hour when long shadows begin to think they're tall, they reached the scar.
If you did not know what you were looking at, it was a fold in land the wind had bullied. If you did, it was a wound and a door. The ridgeline bulged and then split, and beyond the split a shallow valley gathered itself before dropping all at once into a bowl of stone where nothing wanted to grow and the wind had taken its grievance elsewhere. On the far wall of that bowl, half-swallowed by a slump of scree, a circle the size of a good house had been cut in the world. Around its circumference, metal glinted where the stone remembered heat.
"That," Kara breathed, voice too soft for the emptiness and yet answered by it, "is not a field cache."
"No," KrysKo said.
Jax tried on a grin and found it too tight. "In case anyone still suspected the coordinates were a suggestion."
Ronan stood very still. "My mother's people would not tread here without singing," he said. "To ask the ground to let us forget what it saw."
"Will it help?" Kara asked.
He thought, then shook his head once. "It will not hurt."
He sang. Not a song a human throat would volunteer: low, river-stone tones that found places in the rock KrysKo didn't have names for. The bowl did not answer. It listened.
They made a modest camp on the lip, in a fold of shale that promised a little mercy if the wind turned cruel. They ate without theater. Jax sketched the geometry of the circle because the hand that could fix refused to idle. Kara wrote what she smelled, wrote what she felt, and wrote the difference like a Drakari might. Ronan leaned his back to stone and watched shadow for lies. KrysKo stood at the edge and looked down, while inside him the mechanical ledger unrolled maps with missing norths.
[Perimeter architecture: composite—human alloy, Architect tesserae. Authentication modes: heat, signature, pattern.]
The other voice set itself beside his breath. "A house with dead lights and a live lock," it said. "It will not obey force. It will obey recognition."
He slept a little. The kind of sleep that teaches muscle to be stubborn.
They didn't go down at first light. They went along the lip—measuring, drawing the place with their feet the way careful people do. Ronan took the left, KrysKo the right, Kara and Jax between them, a sensible distance of voice and line-of-sight.
The third trap found them. Not wire this time. Not glass. A whisper under the stone—air moving where it shouldn't, the faintest sigh through a seam too honest to be natural. KrysKo put his ear to the rock and heard the dream of machinery, the kind of slow pulse that forgets the word heart and keeps time anyway.
"Alive down there," Jax breathed, reverent despite himself.
"Or pretending," Kara challenged.
"Alive," Jax said, and let the grin fold into his eyes instead of his mouth.
They took the long way around the seam. It cost an hour and two bad jokes. A spur of rock offered a more civilized descent. They slid in switchbacks, boots biting where the shale allowed dignity.
Halfway to the bowl floor, the first shot came. Not the old crack of a rifle. A shaped pulse, a hiccup in air, heat that bit a hand-sized gouge out of the ledge above KrysKo's head.
"Cover," Ronan snapped, already shifting into the oblique angles of someone who had learned to take being targeted personally. Kara dropped and rolled into a shallow belly of stone, breath even because panic wastes oxygen; Jax hugged wall and counted the rhythm of the shooter without meaning to: one, two, three—cycle.
"Ridge at ten," Jax called, peering with one eye under his forearm. "Two—no, three. Triangulated like they passed a class no one should teach."
Ronan's pupils narrowed to field-knives. "Flank. We go low."
Kara's fingers found a small flask the color of rain only places like this remembered. "Smoke on wind," she said. "On your count."
Ronan set his palm to an unkind stone. His scales darkened, then calmed. "Now."
Kara popped the flask. Green smoke bloomed and let the wind decide it. The first shooter coughed. The second swore. The third saved breath. "Go," KrysKo said, and he and Ronan did the thing they had discovered they could: be two kinds of speed together. Ronan went blunt and direct and certain; KrysKo went oblique and low and unkind to assumptions.
The first gunner glimpsed Ronan and chose badly. Ronan took a mouthful of heat across his left shoulder that would have quartered a lesser man, closed anyway, and introduced the gunner's helmet to rock with intimate force. The second swung his muzzle toward KrysKo and learned to regret it; KrysKo rose inside the barrel's arc, disarmed with elbows and a decision, and sent the gun to where gravity kept its collection. The third tracked KrysKo—and Jax's pistol spoke from the lip above with one precise syllable. The gunner's shoulder opened like a wallet and he fell absent from the decision.
"Everyone?" Kara called, steady.
"Two shoulders and a sense of humor," Jax said.
Ronan spat red and nodded once. "Living."
"Living," KrysKo echoed.
They bound the enemy first because victory, if it means anything, means being better. Kara's hands did their work without asking permission of her fear. Jax demoed a captured pulse-gun into an education. Ronan leaned his bulk against the stone and let pain argue with pride. KrysKo set his palm on Ronan's scorched shoulder and let the core hum take the edge off everything except the truth.
The three gunners were not locals or scavengers. Their boots had marched in formation somewhere they no longer wanted to name. The thigh plate of one bore a scratched sigil: a bird denuded of feather and sentiment, all angles and appetite.
Jax didn't say the nickname. He looked at KrysKo. KrysKo looked back. They understood a thing together so it didn't have to say itself aloud.
They left the men water within reach, wrists tied, eyes covered, the way you leave fuses unconnected but not insulted. Then they went down into the bowl.
Up close, the circle had the kind of geometry the heart doesn't enjoy. It made light around it sharper. Scree drifted against its lower lip as if the earth had tried to tuck it in. The inlay wasn't one metal and not two; it was a braid—Architect tesserae marrying human logic gates under an alloy that had learned to be uninteresting.
KrysKo stopped at a respectful distance. The system inside him stood at a threshold like a man whose childhood home had moved the table but kept the smell.
[Authentication arrays dormant.] A beat, as if the machine were embarrassed to be moved. [Fallback mode available: biometric + pattern + phrase.]
He didn't have a phrase. He had a name and a rhythm. He had a body that remembered to move when songs were asked of it.
Ronan stood half a step behind and didn't offer counsel. His presence said: I will break what you need broken and not what you don't. Kara's fingers ghosted the seam of KrysKo's sleeve like a rail in a dark stairwell. "Take your time," she said. "We are not late for anything worth being late for."
"This wants a story," Jax murmured, tracing the seam where alloy met stone. "If it were purely human, I'd knock with current and swears. This wants to be recognized."
KrysKo stepped forward until cold breathed up his arm. He set his right forearm into the groove at three o'clock. The inlay thrummed—a pitch that liked his bones.
"Left," the warm voice said, amused and proud at once. "You were designed for symmetry. Try not to insult the engineers."
He smiled before he remembered to hide it, set his left forearm into the groove at nine. The pitch doubled. The seam brightened—not bright so much as interested.
"Now the part that is not metal," the voice murmured. "The rhythm they taught you when they wanted you to be awake and obedient. You learned only the first half."
He breathed, slow and restful. He moved—not much. A hinge presented itself to itself: weight forward, weight back, pressure along ulna, a small half-turn that told the circles that circles exist. The seam lit. The bowl heard a note it had been promised and stood up straighter.
[Pattern accepted.] The mechanical voice tried to sound indifferent and failed. [Fallback phrase… unavailable. Substituting identity banner.]
He didn't need to speak. He did anyway, for the others. "Project KrysKo," he said. The word didn't feel like a verdict. It felt like a key.
The door considered politeness and then chose relief. Stone slid. Metal breathed. Dust lifted. The world made a sound only jars and old men make when the lid lets go.
Cold air came from the dark—not sweet, not foul. Old. Clean. A memory of sterility that had worked once and forgiven nothing.
"That's a flavor," Jax said hoarsely.
Kara tightened her fingers on KrysKo's sleeve before remembering herself and letting go. "We go," she said, and made it not a question.
"Together," Ronan agreed.
They did what Cohort Nine had learned to do in a dozen small ways and one large: cross a line and trust they could cross it back.
The corridor admitted it had always been there. Lights woke at ankle height as if the house were embarrassed to receive guests in the dark. The air curled at the back of their throats like old linen. On the right, glass cradled things that weren't jars and weren't coffins and made Kara stand taller because rooms like this asked hands to do harm unless told what not to do. On the left, a corridor fell in gentle curves toward a lower heart.
They didn't hurry. They didn't dawdle. The system found its ledger again and began to make tidy notes.
On the fourth landing a slim console lifted its face and offered a square that wanted a hand. KrysKo set his left, then his right. The screen cleared. Lines scrolled in a font that respected itself.
[Identity: PROTOTYPE UNIT — KRYSKO O'RUADHRAIGH.] [Status: ACTIVE.] [Facility: ECHO CHAMBER — OUTER ACCESS.] [Access Mode: TRUSTED.]
"Welcome home," the warm voice said in his bones, with the softness of old pews and a river at dusk.
He neither flinched nor forgave. He went on.
They passed a door someone had welded shut by hand—arrogant enough to distrust locks, fearful enough to leave signs. They passed a long pane where darkness kept its archives. On the final landing the stairs surrendered to a platform large enough to hold an army's worth of hesitation. Before them, another circle waited—three times the first. No inlay. Just stone that remembered heat so well it had never cooled.
Kara stood at KrysKo's shoulder and didn't ask air to be kind. Jax drew half a step closer than his theater preferred. Ronan set his hand to the stone and let the hum teach his scales how to sing under their breath.
KrysKo reached.
The door didn't brighten. It recognized. The platform trembled like foundation remembering joy. The mechanical register inside his head flickered, then washed with a color he hadn't known it could make.
[Level milestone met.] [Adaptive Profile: Prototype — eligible for evolution.] [Category unlock: EVOLUTIONARY DESIGNATION — CHOOSE.] [Delay evolution until safe zone?]
"You have walked back to the room where they tried to make your future in an afternoon," the warm voice said, from a bench that knew names. "You can choose to be more weapon. You can choose to be more man. You can choose something no ledger has imagined. You do not have to choose with your friends standing in a doorway."
KrysKo looked at Kara, at Ronan, at Jax. He looked at the stone. He counted, and allowed himself the mercy of imagining, too. "Delay," he said.
[Confirmed. Evolution queued.]
The door unsealed.
Air old enough to have opinions breathed over them and chose not to judge. A long room unrolled beyond—bridges of glass over dark, ribs of alloy the color of cold teeth, a distant glow like a thought not yet admitted to speech. The circle closed behind with a sound like a friend being polite.
"KrysKo," Kara said softly.
"I know," he said.
They stepped forward as one.
The room wasn't a room. It was the inside of a mountain wearing a cathedral's bones. Arches ribbed the space like a colossal lung. Every footfall returned to them slow—as if the place were deciding whether to give their noise back.
"It's awake," Ronan murmured, Drakari eyes tracing faint veins of energy moving behind glass, like blood through translucent bone. "But sleeping at the same time."
Kara's first breath shook. "This isn't a lab. It's a memory."
Jax's laugh arrived late, small against the vault. "If this is a memory, whoever dreamed it never learned minimalism."
[Environment recognized: PRIMARY GENESIS CORE,] the mechanical reported, its propriety failing to hide awe. [Sub-designation: PROJECT KRYSKO — INITIALIZATION SITE.] [Caution: cognitive feedback risk—containment advised.]
"And be careful," the other voice added, dusk-warm. "The past does not always thank those who wake it."
They crossed the first glass bridge. Under them lay depth their eyes refused to measure—shape of chambers with the lights out, hints of suspended frames like cocoons, long work tables seeded with the average tools of extraordinary sins.
Kara slowed at a row of shadowed cradles. She reached without touching. "These weren't for bodies," she said, frowning. "Not only. For lattices. For learning to be muscle before belonging to meat." The words steadied her; naming sometimes helps.
Jax peered over the lip of the bridge into a bay of inert housings. "If we turned this all on, the city would see it glow. If we turned this all on, the city would come to ask who we think we are."
Ronan pointed with his chin toward a dais on the far side of the chamber—a raised platform ringed in low consoles, a throne for a kind of responsibility no one should inherit. "Center first," he said. "Peripheral after."
They reached the dais. Its console woke with less reluctance than KrysKo feared and more than he wanted. A band of light circled his hand when he rested it on the edge. Text rose in pale rows and waited.
[TRUSTED OPERATOR DETECTED.] [OPTIONS: STATUS / ARCHIVE / CACHE RETRIEVAL.] [Warning: partial damage to Archive arrays. Redundancy engaged.]
"Status," KrysKo said, and the word echoed back down his spine.
The screen answered like a dutiful clerk. Facility power at 17%. Perimeter locks in fallback. Roving maintenance drones: none. Experiment vats: drained, sealed. Personnel logs: missing. Directive logs: corrupted. External repeaters: online (2 of 5).
Kara leaned in. "Repeaters. That's what sang to the dead in the trees."
Jax whistled soft through his teeth. "Someone bridged University field hardware to an old song. Clever, bored, and brave or cruel. Maybe all four."
"Shut them," Ronan said.
"Later," KrysKo said. "We close the throat after we retrieve the tongue."
He selected CACHE RETRIEVAL. A map of the mountain's interior unfolded—veins and nodes, corridors like nerves, boxes blinking where someone a lifetime ago had tucked away contingencies. Three caches inside the Echo Chamber. Two beyond, in outer works that had fallen under scree, reachable by tunnels that looked like suggestions more than promises.
"Pick your favorites," Jax muttered.
"The ones they meant us to find," Kara said. "And the one they hoped we wouldn't."
"Which is which?" Ronan asked.
"Both," KrysKo said, and touched the nearest node.
A door opened somewhere far under their feet. Air shifted, a small animal moving in a large house. They followed the path the console laid in brass under their boots.
The first cache lived behind a rib. The door was human, not Architect—hinges and bolts and numbered labels that made Jax nostalgic for clean stupidity. Inside: vacuum cans stacked in tiers, each stamped with the University's ringed tree and an older mark beneath—roots or talons.
Kara lifted one carefully, shook it playfully by her ear, then stopped her own smile. "We don't know their jokes," she said, and set it back.
"Labels," Jax murmured, scanning. "'TRAINING MATRICES: K-CLASS.' 'MOTOR LEARNING PACKETS: VESTIBULAR.' 'COGNITIVE HANDSHAKE PRIMERS: HYBRID BRIDGE.'" He looked up at KrysKo, grim and admiring in equal measure. "They jarred pieces of you."
KrysKo rested a palm on cold metal. The system inside him quieted the hum out of respect for something like grief. "Ship what we can carry," he said. "Catalog the rest and mark weight."
They loaded twelve cans into rings made to respect mass by magic and math. Kara tucked three small tins into her pack—medical, yes, but also because she needed to hold the harm to remember to prevent it.
The second cache was less polite. Architect tesserae lined the walls; the door refused human hands and bowed for a sequence KrysKo's bones offered without needing permission. Inside: a cradle the size of a man and not for a man, half-dismantled; a sheath of bronze much like the color of KrysKo's edges; three slots empty where weapons or words had been. A metal book lay on a slanted stand, face down, spine cracked once.
Jax hovered. "You want me to—"
"Not yet," KrysKo said, and did a smaller version of the thing he'd done at the first door. The book sighed open like someone set in their ways allowed a visitor. Inside: layered alloy pages etched with lattice diagrams and footnotes a human hand had written in pencil when no one was watching the cameras.
Kara leaned in. The handwriting snagged her attention more than the math—letters confident and narrow, a family language of someone who never apologized to paper. "'K-variant shows superior retention of nonverbal pattern instruction. Watch for emergent choice behaviors after stress. Allow.'" Her voice thinned around the last word. "'Allow.'"
"Not 'correct,'" Ronan said.
"Not 'erase,'" Jax added.
KrysKo closed the book. "Allow," he echoed, and no one decided for him what he meant.
The third cache hid behind a door that had been shut by the frightened hand upstairs—the welds like bad stitches over good intention. Jax grinned despite the place he stood and loved the seams apart without insult. Inside: nothing for a long breath. Then the room admitted the thing it held.
A chair. Not a throne. Utility metal, straps folded and clean. Above it, a halo of manipulators slept with their arms tucked, patient as old spiders. The floor wore a drain its designers pretended was for water.
Kara's feet rooted. She did not step forward because stepping forward would have been religion. "Don't touch it," she said, to no one in particular and to everyone.
Ronan stepped between her and the chair with a casualness that would survive an earthquake. He set a large hand on the halo's frame. His scales darkened like remembrance. "We've found enough," he said.
"Agreed," KrysKo said, and sent a small command through the console at his wrist. The room dimmed. Whatever warmth the chair owned fled without complaint.
They turned toward the dark and the glass bridges and the exit they had earned. The map on KrysKo's console still showed two more blinking caches in the outer works—under scree, beyond a tunnel that remembered water and didn't mourn its absence.
A tremor passed through the bones of the chamber—a long, slow exhale. The lights along the bridge brightened a fraction. The console on KrysKo's wrist chimed in a key that did not exist when he was born.
[External repeater—east: SHUT DOWN initiated.] [External repeater—south: SHUT DOWN initiated.] [Origin: unknown.] [Facility status: listening.]
"Someone else is in the story," Jax said, half wonder, half worry.
Kara's gaze went up toward the mountain she could not see. "The bell will be quiet where we left it," she said. "For now."
Ronan listened with his bones. "The wind is wrong. We shouldn't linger."
KrysKo nodded. "We take what we can carry. We mark what we can't. We come back with hands we trust."
They retraced their path across glass, past shadow and cradle, through the circle door that tried to be a friend. The outer corridor breathed over them with a relief that wasn't as politely hidden this time. At the first circle, KrysKo used both forearms again and the small hinge in his wrists, and the mountain gave them back to light.
The bowl outside waited the way empty places do when they're not convinced they've been emptied. The sky had climbed toward a hard blue. On the ridge where they'd left their shooters, white cloth hung from a rock—triangular, universal, the way cowards and reasonable men have always made their case. The men were gone. The canteens were gone. The water Kara had left had been taken, which is one way to prove trust works.
They made the switchback, ascended with care. The shale muttered underboots, but not in a mood to betray. When they reached the lip, Jax looked back and took a single photograph in his head because no paper deserved this truth.
At camp, they split the weight the way they always did—fair down to the ache. Kara checked Ronan's shoulder under sun and told the scales to be humble. Jax inventoried each can against a map he'd sketched like a thief planning a better theft. KrysKo set his palm to the rim of the circle they'd opened and then closed and left no words there because words would make it smaller than it was.
"Home," Jax said, and made it sound like a complaint and a prayer.
"Home," Kara repeated, softer, making it into duty.
"Home,"