Young Isati lurks behind Allayria's eyelids as she cleans up from the aftermath of the battle. Her broken expression is there when Allayria dips her head under in the bath; her quaking, claustrophobia lingers when Allayria wraps the dry robe around herself. It is a memory she did not share with Lei, even though she is curious, very curious.

Was he still around then? she muses, staring at a more familiar reflection in this hotel mirror now. Or was it after?

She doesn't quite understand why this is what she found inside the masked follower, and not a current connection to the Imperator or even Isati herself. She doesn't understand why Isati's memory would even be in there.

Is it a trick? A trap?

No, not it doesn't feel that way. There are better ways to lure Allayria—hints at a weakness in their network of minds, false trails back to her or her mother. Not an old memory of suffering and pain.

Her knuckles are white against the sink when she glances down.

It has to work, she thinks, not for the first time. The next one... it has to work.

Working backwards through Abadi and Isati's disturbing network of minds is the best way Allayria can think to get to them fast, get to them without sacrificing a tidal wave of blood on the battlefield.

If I can find them, she tells herself again, if I could get at them—or even just know their location...

She hears Lei enter the room and straightens up. His eyes lock onto hers, as they naturally do, pulled by some innate, electric sense, but they are alone here, and the blank, flat veneer has been shed from his face.

"I'm going to try again," she tells him. She promises.

She watches in the mirror as his hand fists and flexes.

"Come to bed," he says in a low voice instead.

It takes a while for his breath to even out; she keeps track of it in the shuttered twilight, the way his silhouette rises and falls in slumber. The hotel is overrun; there are no extra rooms and with Lei's supposed one currently occupied by their special guest, it leaves only this small, narrow one for them to share. Neither of them likes it.

We've slept this close countless times before, she tells herself not for the first time. On floors, in the dirt. I don't know why it's so different in a bed.

Tomorrow, tomorrow things will shift. Tomorrow things will change. They'll meet with Jin, assess their gains and losses, then move down south, to Ruben, Hiran, the others. They'll regroup, salvage what little fighting force is left in the Thalassa inhabitants, establish supply routes and porting, and move... move...

Into the great darkness, the vast unknowing, with the all-seeing specter awaiting them.

"Mother wants to meet you," Isati's ghost had whispered out of a dying soldier's mouth. "Mother wants to find you. I should let her."

I should let her.

Allayria's brow crumples against the pillow. Let.

She waits until Lei is in that deep sleep, heavy and sunk down deep into pillows and blankets before she moves.

The hallways are just as dark as their room, but for the shafts of white light that strip along them, ribbons from the cold glow of lanterns outside. She slips past them, past the sounds of generals murmuring in their rooms, soldiers clinking glasses in the atrium. Those that pass say nothing, because congratulations and entreaties fall on deaf ears when directed at the Paragon.

She watches for wandering eyes when she enters the stairwell, and when she makes it to that top corridor she walks with a projected nothingness, a beacon signaling to any passersby look the other way.

The thing is still stretched out when she breaks into the room. Still alive, if she's to judge by the rapid rise and fall of its chest. It squirms again, squirms as she approaches, twisting and tucking but it cannot get away. And then something shivers along its spine. Something she hadn't seen before.

She stands there, staring at it, and the creature goes slack, slack except for one middle finger whose knuckle taps, slowly, on the dark wood floor beneath it.

It's a hello. It's a sign. It's an I've been waiting for you.

She approaches, and when she touches the mask something is waiting in there for her.

It's not a feeling, it's a place, and there almost seem to be walls, smooth, curved walls that cocoon this nonexistent space, closing it in with low ceilings. It's a small room, and there's another human being at the other end of it.

She's watching, head tilted, perched in a massive glob of shining, shifting metal, and the muscles tense in Allayria's back and shoulders; her hands curl into fists, itching with the question of what she must call first.

"That won't work here," Isati says, her voice low and smooth, a hint of a smile playing on her features. "That's not how any of this works."

Not how any of what you can do works, Allayria thinks, though her fingers flinch and flex. What she can do may be a different matter entirely.

"I thought you might come," Isati says. "I knew you could figure it out."

Allayria backs up and feels, with a cold jolt, the hard surface of the room behind her. A room that doesn't exist. A room in her mind. A room—

"Stop thinking about it," Isati murmurs over a space of nothingness. "Trying to work this out will only make you unravel."

Focus, Allayria tells herself, a hand braced on her knee. Her mind is here now, but what path does it take to go back? Find the route, find the thread.

"Did you like my present?" Isati asks, bringing herself back in focus. "When the seawalls were breached I put the four little friends up on the tower for you. Returned to their sender."

Allayria's mouth curdles, remembering the bodies in the lightning light, and the creature that had lurked behind them.

"You Jarles have terrible gift-giving ideas."

A flash of a white grin, jagged and edged, which simmers down into a smile, small and dangerous.

"You take pieces off my board, I'll take pieces off yours," she answers. "This is how we play."

It's just a game, young Isati whispers through the years, voice strained and breaking. It's just a game you have to learn to play.

Maybe she hears it, or maybe she reads it on Allayria's face, because the smile drops off hers, and her eyes narrow against it, a sharp knowing, a pained intuition.

"What have you been poking around in inside this empty head?" Isati whispers low, her gaze arresting now, fixed and fixated. "What have you been digging through?"

There's no way out.

Her hand strikes out like lightning, too quick for Allayria to react, but it brings neither seen metal nor fire but something else, a sudden rush, a sudden push and then Allayria isn't here, but in a tree, with Jarles marching in the shadowed woods beneath her. She's crouched in a murky hall, staring at the wide-eyed girl in the dark bedroom who stares back. She's in the blank room, a heavy spoon full of slop held between two senseless fingers. She's settled in the cold blackness, alone and desperately afraid in the belly of a stone beast which whispers mouthlessly. She's underwater, her lungs choking on salt and water, her blood drifting out of her in spirals. She's alive and hoping, hoping to fail, hoping to return to the sunshine with nothing, hoping riddles have failed her, hoping that Ben—

Ben, Ben in the daylight.

Ben in the firelight.

Ben at the other end of a bow, fixed and determined, nothing breaking in his face but the bleak gleam in his eyes.

It's her, alone in a shapeless room, in front of a cracked mirror, thinking, wishing, breaking the hairline fractures in her façade.

I can't let them control me.

There's something like victory in Isati's expression when she comes back into view, but also something new, something stricken, and Allayria only has a second to process it before the Smith-caller throws her back, out of the connection.

A/N: Bonus posting! In which everything is... terrible. Let's visit someone who can make it better.

LOL, JK. STRAP YOURSELVES IN, KIDS.

Chapter notes: Allayria's memories are poignant moments from Paragon and Partisan, including scenes from Paragon's "A Proposition," "With Friends Like This," "The Descent," and "Endings;" as well as Partisan's "The Tangle of Vines" and "Fractured Mask."