Sweat drips from her, and the air is hard to breathe. But she can’t find it in herself to be afraid; she’s too tired and desperate.

(Foolish girl, she tries to tell herself. But with only one ear, she barely hears it.)

It is hot, yes, but this is better than a frigid, starving forest.

She sinks onto a mass of cushions. They are plump and generous, with no stink of sweat on them or hint of mildew. They are better than anything she has ever slept on.

“You’ve come up with a miracle,” she says, and her lips feel thick and slow. Unaccountably clumsy. She blinks, languid, catlike.

Phosyne has followed her, and settles on the cushions beside her.

“Your ear,” Phosyne murmurs, and trails her fingertips over the smooth skin where it used to be before Treila can flinch away.

At the touch of skin to skin, the chorus erupts once more inside Treila’s skull. She gasps, spine arching.

“Does it hurt?” Phosyne asks, and she sounds more curious than concerned.

Fair play, Treila concedes, when the noise softens. It’s exactly how she’d felt standing over Phosyne’s dying body that first night. The thought is half-hysterical. Phosyne reaches as if to stroke her brow, then hesitates.

Realizing it might hurt her.

And then she does it anyway.

Treila sags, boneless, as the noise doesn’t surge. There is only the normal faint ringing that has been with her since she returned. The cushions are still so soft.

“My ear was the price of returning,” she murmurs. “My finger the price to leave. I did, you know. Leave. There’s nobody waiting for us outside the gates anymore. We could just walk out, I think. Maybe.”

To a different world. A later world. A world where Etrebia has lost, at any rate, and that is the only thing that matters, surely? A world where Etrebia has lost and they are not being carved up into meat.

“The tunnel?” Phosyne asks. Her gaze is vague, as if she is looking down through the floor to it. But, of course, that’s impossible.

(But so are miracles. Treila would do well to stop asking questions.)

“The tunnel. But it will cost us.” The words come out—soft. Weak. Desperate. “It’s not so great a cost,” she hastens to add, in case Phosyne wouldn’t offer an ear, or a finger.

(What did she offer to receive this?)

Treila knows better than to trust, but she can’t do this alone. Not anymore. And Phosyne—Phosyne is not Voyne. She doesn’t trust Phosyne guilelessly. Phosyne is a tool. She just needs the tool to have its own motive force, for just a moment, until she catches her breath.