ADAEZE POV
The letter was still on the desk.
I know you changed.
Four words. No name on it. She had turned it over six times looking for anything else, a smudge, a watermark, a hair, anything that would tell her who slid it under her door while she was sitting on the floor asking the system questions. There was nothing. Just the writing, small and neat and completely sure of itself.
She had spent the rest of the day being careful. Attended one afternoon appointment, a brief and mercifully surface-level thing about a social calendar that required almost nothing of her. Ate alone in the chambers. Spoke to no one she did not have to speak to. Sat with Zara's archive until her eyes hurt and then sat with it more.
Now it was past midnight and the palace had gone quiet in that specific way old buildings go quiet, all the smaller sounds dropping away until the only thing left was the settling of stone and the very distant sound of a guard rotation somewhere below. She had not slept. She was not going to sleep.
She had tried. Laid flat on the bed for an hour with her eyes closed and her mind doing the opposite of closing, just running and running over the same things. Thessaly's face when she said Father is coming. The way Oryn had looked at her in the corridor this morning. The letter on the desk. Every time she started to drift something would snag her back and she would be fully awake again, heart going slightly too fast, staring at the ceiling crack.
At some point she stopped trying and got up.
She sat down in front of the system panel and crossed her legs on the floor and looked at it.
"We are going to try this again," she said. "The secondary deviation. I want to know what it is."
SECONDARY DEVIATION. ORIGIN UNKNOWN.
"I know that is what you said before. I am asking something different now." She pulled her knees up. "Is it a plot anomaly? Something that happened by accident, something the story generated on its own?"
The panel held still for a moment. Then, slowly, NO.
She felt something tighten in her chest. "So it is deliberate. Someone did something on purpose that changed the plot."
No response. Not a yes, not a no.
"Is the deviation connected to me? Something I did in the last four days since I got here?"
NO.
"So it predates my arrival."
The panel did not confirm. But it did not deny either and she was learning the difference. She pushed forward.
"By how long? A week? A month?"
Nothing.
"More than a year?"
The light shifted. Just slightly. Not text, just a pulse. She took that as a yes and moved on.
"More than three years?"
Another pulse.
Her stomach did something unpleasant. More than three years. Whatever this was, it had been running in the background of this story for more than three years before she landed in it. Before she landed in it. Which meant the story she thought she knew when she was reading it on Lena's couch was not the same story she was currently inside.
Someone had already been changing it.
She sat with that for a moment and then she did what she always did when something was too large to hold all at once. She broke it down. Went back to the beginning. The novel. Chapter by chapter, reconstructing it in her head the way she used to reconstruct a case study for clinical exams, starting from what she knew for certain and building outward.
Chapter one. The world-building, the court, the pack structure. Fine, all of that tracked against the archive.
Chapter two. Zara's first appearance at a public function, the confrontation with a minor noble, the way the court responded. She checked the system's reaction as she moved through it. Steady. Consistent.
Chapter three. The heroine's introduction. Elowen, walking into the court for the first time with that particular warmth that made everyone in the room lean toward her. The way Cael noticed her. The way the whole chapter seemed to breathe differently when Elowen was on the page.
The system pulsed.
Not much. Just a small shift in the light. She stopped.
"That," she said. "What just happened. Is the deviation connected to Elowen?"
The panel was still.
"I am going to keep going," she said. "Tell me if I hit it again."
She moved through chapter four, chapter five, six. Normal. Steady. Then chapter seven, the scene at the river, the conversation between Elowen and a minor noble where Elowen said something to make the woman laugh and the mood lifted and the chapter turned.
She remembered reading that scene. Remembered thinking Elowen was well-written, her dialogue natural, her timing good. She had liked Elowen. She had been rooting for her, actually, even while she felt bad for Zara.
The system pulsed again. Harder this time.
"There," Adaeze said. "The river scene. Chapter seven. What is wrong with it?"
Nothing from the panel.
She went back to the chapter in her memory and read through it again slowly. The setting. The dialogue. The joke Elowen made to lighten the mood. She was trying to remember it exactly, the specific words.
It came back to her in pieces. The noble woman had been upset about something, some court matter, and Elowen had said something about the situation that was funny in a dry, specific way. Something about how the problem would sort itself out once everyone involved stopped performing and started thinking, which was not the kind of thing a heroine in a fantasy court novel typically said.
It was the kind of thing Lena said.
Adaeze went very still.
Lena, sitting on her couch with a bowl of jollof on her lap, watching a reality show and saying exactly that. Stop performing and start thinking. Those exact words. One of Lena's things, a phrase she used so often it had become background noise between them.
She made herself keep going. Found the other two moments where the system had pulsed, chapter eleven and chapter fifteen, and went back to both of them in her memory and looked specifically at Elowen's dialogue in each one. Chapter eleven, Elowen describing the taste of the palace wine as overrated, which was not a fantasy heroine's observation, that was someone from a world with better options. Chapter fifteen, Elowen navigating a tense political moment by going quiet and waiting for the other person to fill the silence, which was such a specific and modern conversational strategy that it had sat wrong with Adaeze when she read it and she had just assumed it was a writing quirk.
It was not a writing quirk.
Her hands were not steady when she reached for the system panel.
"Is Elowen a transmigrator?" she asked.
The panel held still for four seconds. Five. Six. The longest it had ever gone without responding to a direct question.
Then, slowly, YES.
The room felt smaller suddenly. Or she felt bigger in it, too much happening inside her chest for the space to hold comfortably. She pressed both palms flat on the floor and breathed.
A transmigrator. Elowen was a transmigrator. Someone from the real world had landed inside the heroine's body more than three years ago and had been living here, shaping the plot, making those small off-key choices that the system had been flagging.
She needed a name. She needed to know who.
She reached for the panel and typed it in, one word, the only name that made sense when she laid everything out.
ELOWEN.
The system went silent. Not the silence of not having an answer. The silence of deciding how much to give her. She could almost feel it, that pause, the weight of it.
Three seconds.
Then the text came through.
TRANSMIGRATOR IDENTITY CONFIRMED.
DESIGNATION. LENA PARK.
ARRIVAL DATE. 4 YEARS, 7 MONTHS AGO.
She read it once. Twice. The letters did not change.
Lena.
Lena had been here for four years and seven months. Lena who had died the same night she died, in the same accident, on the same wet road. Lena who she had spent months believing was simply gone, who she had cried for in the spaces between classes and late at night in her apartment with nobody watching. Lena who she had kept finding in small things, a phrase someone said that sounded like her, a laugh across a room that had the same rhythm, and every time it had been nobody, just her own grief making the world sound like her best friend.
But she had been here. Four years and seven months in this palace, in this story, wearing a heroine's face.
Alive. In a way. Here.
And she knew Adaeze was here too and she had not come. Had not sent a word. The unsigned letter was still on the desk. I know you changed. Maybe that was Lena. Maybe that was the only thing she had managed to say across four years of silence and a shared death and a world that was not theirs.
Maybe.
The system added one more line.
SHE KNOWS YOU ARE HERE.
Adaeze sat on the cold floor of Zara's chambers with her hands flat on the stone and the panel glowing in the dark and her best friend's name sitting in front of her in clean white letters, and she did not move for a very long time.