Elena chose the meeting place herself. Meeting someone who should have been present all your life but was absent makes one cautious. She picked an abandoned observatory at the edge of Mondrovia's old scientific quarter—a glass dome cleft with rusting telescopes, pointed skyward like broken prayers.
The city lights couldn't quite reach it, and the psychic noise thinned there, as if even thoughts had learned to tread carefully.
If Ariston was going to step back into her life, it would be on neutral ground.
She arrived alone.
The night air was sharp, carrying the scent of rain-soaked stone and dirt. Elena crossed the cracked marble floor slowly, her boots echoing beneath the hollow dome.
Her pulse was steady, but beneath that calm facade, images of a forgotten childhood flashed in her mind: a child's laughter abruptly cut off, a hand reaching and then pulling away, shadows stretching across a room she once feared.
