My mum turns her eyes from her SCARS team to my friend, her features softening. “Camelot Ward, right? I knew your parents.” She smiles slightly, looking between Cami and Ward as she says, “You can do whatever you want. Your role in all this is over.” She glances around the room and adds, “I mean, I’d really appreciate it if you’d agree to a voluntary debriefing so we can discuss what happened here, not to mention at Lengard over the last few years. But it’s entirely up to you.”

“I think we can do that,” Ward says.

His voice. My body freezes at the sound of his voice, the first full sentence he’s uttered since being free.

Enzo gives me a nudge, sensing my reaction, but I ignore the wolfish grin he sends me because Ward hasn’t finished speaking.

“We need to do some cleaning up at Lengard,” he says, “and figure out a few things there. But we’ll be happy to liaise with SCARS in any way we can.” Ward glances at Enzo, brows raised as if to say they’ll also be having a very long discussion later, before he turns back to my mum. “And it’d be good to learn more about you—what you do.”

I close my eyes slowly at the tentative hope I hear in his voice. When I reopen them, it’s Cami’s gaze I meet, Cami’s tears I see, and I know that she, too, is recalling what we spoke about, the future we envisioned.

If you want, we can dream it together, I told her, only for her to reply, Not just dream it. We can make it happen.

Looking at her now, I see her mouth a single word to me, as if in reminder of a promise: “Together.”

I send her a watery smile in response, both of us knowing that the path ahead won’t be easy. Maybe one day there will be no need for three separate Speaker groups, for SCARS, Lengard, and the Remnants, but for now, they offer more than a refuge for people with abilities—they offer a family and friends who will guide and teach and protect. And with the right leadership, healthy leadership, we can hopefully all come together under one banner, one mission. A legitimate mission. One that means Speakers can relocate elsewhere if they so wish, but they can also choose to stay at Lengard, to stay in the catacombs. They can be part of something greater than themselves in the place where they feel most safe—whether that’s aboveground or hidden beneath the city.

I hope … I hope they will choose to leave. That they will choose freedom. But as long as they know they have the freedom to choose, that is enough.