My favorite thing about humans: we sing to our dead.

Yours. Yours. In flesh, in blood.

Annedine

10

They’d traveled all this way for nothing. Crier didn’t really know what she was expecting—a perfectly preserved cottage with a sign on the door, HERE LIES YORA’S HEART? She was a fool. Even if the Tourmaline stone were here, it could be buried anywhere beneath the long grass. Or on the pebbly shore where Leo and Siena had stood. Maybe it had been hidden there and was then carried away by the rippling waves, swept out to the deep center of the lake, where the water was black and still. Maybe it was resting at the bottom of the lake, covered with sand and silt, a little chunk of sky.

Footfalls behind her, muffled by the grass. Hook. He came to stand beside her, looking out over the seemingly endless stretch of water. Even Crier, with her Automa eyesight, could make out only a faint black line at the very edge of the horizon. The other side of the lake. Varn.

“I’m sorry,” said Crier. “I should have known this would be fruitless.”

Hook hummed. “Honestly, these past couple days, it’s the happiest I’ve seen them since . . . since Erren was captured. Tourmaline was always a long shot. We’ll keep looking, yeah?” He sighed. “We always keep looking. We always keep trying.”

Are you my friend? Crier wondered, glancing at him. In the sunlight, his skin glowed. His eyes were a brown Crier associated with soft, rich earth, the kind that could grow anything, that nurtured every seed. We’re allies, she thought. Is that the same thing?

No, probably not.

It ached a little. Crier wanted to be his friend. Was that so impossible? Contrary to what Kinok had once tricked her into believing, she didn’t have a fifth pillar. She had no Passion. She was Automa, through and through, a Made creature, flawlessly Designed. Intellect, Organics, Calculation, Reason. There was no room inside her for emotions like this. For yearning like this. For loneliness like this. But she was so human-shaped. She was so human-shaped. How could she live in this vessel and not feel any attachment to the world, to its people? How could she live in this body and have no room inside her for the way Ayla’s voice became low and raspy at the end of a long day? The way Crier’s own hands felt when she played the harp, like she was an extension of the instrument and all her hundred strings were singing? The way Hook watched over his band of children who could not let themselves be children, who were so much braver than Crier, who had lost friends and hunted monsters and still sang songs about coming home?