Selene left into the sky in the dead of night.

She couldn't bear to go back to the Peace Ball, and she wouldn't have survived it. She called for Winter and her thaumaturges and their guards, and she packed her Eastern Commonwealth-made gowns and they left in the Lunar podship that had taken her thaumaturges to Earth. She bandaged her feet and spoke not a word to Winter as they soared through the sky, even though she felt her eyes on her. Selene stared out the window at all the stars, distant and dangling in the black vacuum.

All those stars were hot balls of fire, somewhere far away, and Selene couldn't tear her eyes away. She couldn't help but remember that it was exactly here where the podship had malfunctioned and plummeted to Earth. She couldn't help but wonder if she would still be the same person who left Luna that day if she hadn't crash-landed, if she hadn't been rescued by Kai, if she had stepped off that podship in the same sparkling gown she had been wearing into the palace, to be nursed and coddled. She would not have a metal hand. She would still have a metal heart.

Selene was detached as they hissed down onto Luna, and hydraulics whispered and the door opened and there was Levana and her guard, a fake smile plastered ear to ear on her face. Selene walked past her without saying a word, and this place, this hangar, was so familiar it hurt. Selene and Winter used to play in that corner over there, where there was now a royal podship parked. There was aristocracy cooing and batting their lashes and greeting her, welcoming her back home, and Selene nodded to them and looked right in their fake, fake eyes without seeing anything more than a gauzy illusion. And when Selene clipped out into the halls, just as polished as the day she'd left, she felt nothing but a powerful sting as she looked around these familiar halls.

Was this really her home?

Her bag was already in her chambers, unpacked and placed in the corner, not a thread on it, when Selene took the elevator back up. A ghost had done all of her bidding, just the way she liked it, her bed made spotlessly with the end folded up and a white quilt folded over the arm of one of the sitting chairs. The vanity chair was slightly ajar, rotated sixty degrees to the left, just like Selene remembered shouting at her maid to do it all those years ago, for optimal sitting efficiency as soon as she came out of her closet.

Selene sat down on the edge of her bed and looked around. Same soaring ceilings. Same red velvet curtains, not a fold out of place or poorly groomed. The temperature was exactly 18 degrees, just her favourite amount of draft. Her hair always frizzed up when it was much warmer than that. Selene felt the covers beneath her hand, and they were new, but they were the same silk she had always liked her bed to be made with.

She stood and walked over to a window, fingering the curtain as she stared at the view outside her window. It was Earthrise time, and the blue planet began to creep up on the horizon, looming and looming until Selene couldn't stand watching the Eastern Commonwealth's land anymore. She grabbed the curtains and pulled them shut violently. It was the same old view she'd grown up seeing, but now it was different. She saw Kai in the planet, and she saw Linh Peony and Emperor Rikan. Selene turned away, massaging her temples. She was going to forget now. She was going to forget everything that had ever happened down there. She was going to forget the gardens, and she was going to forget Kai's eyes.

His eyes. Why did she keep seeing his eyes? They were so chocolaty brown.

"Shut up, Selene," she muttered to herself, and pinched her arm.

She was going to forget him.

Selene had business, quick business, in the research wing, and she didn't bother waiting to eat the meal that had been waiting for her on an ornate tray on her vanity. Selene padded down the palace halls to the elevator. Her feet hurt like the devil every time she took a step, but she refused to limp. She refused to let the guards standing post see that she was injured.

Selene stepped into the elevator and gazed around the brushed gold interior. She'd never even been in Artemisia Palace's service elevators, but now she was keen to see them. She wondered if they were neglected and dilapidated as the undesirable corners of Artemisia, as the sectors outside the palace dome, or if even the servants got some sort of distinction.

It was a stark difference, stepping out of the elevator into the hospital wing, as gold melted into silver and velvet red and sterile white walls. Selene hadn't come up here willingly for longer than she could remember. She'd never given instruction directly to any of the hospital staff, and though she used to be wheeled up frequently from one accident or another, she never stayed here long enough to have known more than the hallway and her designated room. So frequently, in fact, that she had a designated room.

But if Selene knew her own palace well enough, the medical research wing was just off the hospital, separated only by a set of double doors. Selene swept her bangs out of her eyes as she clipped through warily, judging corners and wincing at her ankle and foot.

"You're fine," she breathed to herself, "you're fine." 

She walked past a guard who looked so far down his nose there was no hope for eye contact, and then Selene found her doors, white and endorned red with a plaque informing her exactly where she was. She pulled the handle and slipped into the silent corridor, letting the door fall softly back to its jamb behind her.

Selene navigated the silver halls by memory, sweeping an eye over the little plaques beside each door and the names and room purposes printed on them. At the end of a hall, near a large window, Selene found the room she was looking for, a main lab that much of the letumosis research and development took place in. She knocked.