Grudgingly, I finished cleaning myself and climbed out of the tub. Then I noticed it: water steamed off my skin, and before I had finished wrapping myself in one of the plush towels, I was dry.

A shiver of unease worked through me, but I put on my nightgown and wrapped my hair in a square of cool silk.

In the bedroom, Zara was already sleeping, the covers twisted around her and half spilling onto the floor. One leg was stretched onto my side, but if I moved her, she’d wake. Zara only looked like a deep sleeper; if my experience these last few days was anything to go by, she startled awake at the slightest touch.

Or maybe that wasn’t normal, and she was only like this now because she was terrified.

I watched her a moment longer, my heart softening—and then she grabbed up all the blankets and hugged them to her chest. Greedy. This was why I always tried to go to sleep before her.

I hesitated, then went into the parlor. I could stretch out on the sofa and sleep.

The noorestones had been covered already, so the space was all shadows when I entered. But one shadow seemed off—not a sofa or chair, but a person, I realized, as my eyes finished adjusting to the darkness.

Aaru.

I kept my footfalls as soft as I could make them, but of course he heard me. He looked up, eyes round with questions. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even tap in the quiet code. He just . . . looked.

“May I sit with you?” I kept my voice to a whisper, but even that seemed too loud in the strange hush that smothered the city.

He moved a pillow to make room.

Carefully, as though he might run, I perched on the edge of the sofa. “My sister was taking up the whole bed, and I didn’t want to wake her. I thought I’d be less of a bother out here. I didn’t realize you had already claimed it.”

He glanced at the door to the room he and Hristo shared.

I wished I could interpret that look. Did he mean he might go in there now, leaving the parlor for me? Or was he saying he had come out here to be alone? My heart wrenched with not knowing. “Aaru,” I whispered, and brushed my fingertips across his chin. “I wish I could help. I wish I knew what you needed.”

Grief crashed over his expression, so raw it hurt to look.

There were so many things I wanted to know. What did it feel like to have one’s god abandon the world? Empty? Hollow? Or like some incorporeal and previously unknown limb had been ripped off?

At home, I’d sometimes felt a pull toward the earth, deeper into Noore, where my gods rested in the seabed. I’d sometimes felt rooted there, filled with a powerful sense of belonging—not to the people around me, but to the very gods whose bodies gave us life. I couldn’t bear the thought of never again feeling that—of knowing there were places lost to me forever. The sanctuary. The temple. Because, yes, terrible things had happened there—the sanctuary had been plundered and the temple was where I’d been arrested—but those places still existed. I could make new memories in them.