But Wesley was different.

She knew that he had fallen in love with Creije in a single moment. He talked about it often enough: how it was the blink of an eye and the click of a finger, forever tying him to the city and the ruin it held.

Quick as the death of innocence, she’d overheard him say to Tavia once.

“Where to now?” Saxony asked.

They were in the city outskirts, where only those who had lived in Creije forever—whose families had been born and died there—or those that had come for a dream and found desolation roamed.

Well, them and Tavia.

Tavia, who fled to the outskirts and as far from High Town and the busker dormitories as she could, to hold her morality close and keep Wesley at a distance. Neither of which had really worked, in Saxony’s opinion.

Her old flat was just a few streets away and Saxony recalled the many times they had both stumbled back there, drunk as the fire-gates, and she’d spent the night dozing on Tavia’s sofa and trying to drown out the sound of her snoring in the other room.

“Which way?” Saxony asked again.

She didn’t ask because she didn’t know, but because it seemed necessary to try and fill the mourning silence.

“The alley behind the amity precinct,” Wesley finally said.

Saxony almost sighed in the relief his voice brought. He didn’t sound broken, but then again, Wesley was an expert at hiding anything he didn’t want people to see, especially when those things were as complicated as emotions.

“It’s the closest shelter before we hit the bridge,” Wesley said.

He looked to Tavia.

“Got the little explosive eggs ready?”

She patted her backpack, which held six of Nolan’s Star Eggs.

“Check,” Tavia said. “Ready to go boom.”

Saxony looked to Karam. “Got your fists ready?” she asked.

“Check,” Karam said, with a narrow smile.

They swerved through the streets together, jumping from shadow to shadow like ghosts, moving between the various Crafters and buskers, or even the Loj-infected. Tourists, once wide-eyed, who were now far more empty-eyed. Who had been forced into battle, or gotten trapped in the city during the fight and been found and forced to drink the Loj elixir. Their eyes like ash and their necks marked like cattle.

Saxony and the others navigated through them so easily that it made her realize how much she had not only grown to love Creije, but to know it.

Like the back of my hand, Wesley had said.

Like mine, too, she thought now.

Returning to Rishiya and the Uncharted Forest felt like returning home after so long in Creije, but now returning to Creije after so long in Rishiya, that felt like home too.

Another side of Saxony: the side that held on to her brother so tightly.