Seyun sat beside Ilyra on the sunlit granite step. Meanwhile, the stone ash cooled over his collarbone. He looked down at his own scarred palms and remembered the heavy snowfall below the Hollow Summit weeks ago.
That afternoon, after they had broken the outer vault door and escaped down the mountain in a blinding blizzard with five rescued testers, tester Senn—whose chest was still half-crippled from the black bronze pillar—had stopped in the snow and asked to walk back up into Chief Examiner Vaska Ren’s custody. Why? The Aperture Court knew where Senn’s two young children lived in the lower valley. Because of that, and Senn knew that if he disappeared with the rebels, the recovery squads would take his children as leverage.
“I felt that exact terror on the snow road when Senn turned around,” Seyun told Ilyra quietly. “Every instinct in my body told me to have Daro and Bel grab Senn’s arms, tie him to a wooden litter for his own good, and carry him down to the shepherd hospice by force. We had just bled on the summit to pull him off that pillar. Letting him walk back up into Vaska’s needles felt like throwing away the rescue.”
