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“You can. Help me to change the minds of the Council. We can make them reconsider.”

“Adrik will not even let me attend a meeting, Ryon.”

“FuckAdrik!” Ryon spits. “He is not the only one with influence.”

“No,” Dawsyn says, “there isyouas well.” She takes a deep breath, preparing herself to ask. “Youcan change their minds. It might take some time – years, even. But you, perhaps even Tasheem, can sway them eventually.”

Ryon growls, turning his face to the sky. “And you?” he asks. “What of you?”

“I will live on the Ledge, free from the threat of Glacians. There will be no Selections. I will try to teach the others the truth,” she lets her eyes delve into his. “I will tell them that one day, a Glacian such as they have never seen before will fly over the Chasm, and he will not come to steal us away. He will come to free us all.” Dawsyn almost goes toward him. Almost. “I will prepare them for the day we will be saved by your kind. And on that day, they will go willingly.”

Ryon closes his eyes for a moment, and Dawsyn knows that he sees the sense in it. It is, at this moment, all they can do. They can bide their time. Try again.

Pain returns to his features – lethally sharp. “And if you die before then? From sickness? Hunger?”

She cannot bring herself to be flippant. “All I know,” she says, “is how not to die.”

If there are truer words within her, she is yet to know them.

“Dawsyn,” Ryon says softly, the word seeming to escape him unbidden. “I… Please stay.”

But she won’t. She does not want to. Dawsyn cannot fall into him again, as she did before, and forget herself. She doesn’t want to lose the knowledge thatsheis all that she needs. To wake up, to continue.

She desperately does not want to return to the Ledge, where she knows every tree and rock and cabin. She does not want to fight the mountain each day, staying the frost. She cannot stand to watch the Chasm. But Dawsyn and Ryon both have rarely been handed what they wished. There is no other way. No other place.

“If you tell me you want to go, I won’t believe you,” he says.

Dawsyn turns her face to the ice, to look at anything but him now. “Not a person living or dead could everwantto go.”

“Then–”

“No,” she says, louder than she intended. “I can’t stay here for you.”

She hears him breathe in and out, and it sounds like it isn’t without effort. Still, she does not look up.

“With all that was done to us,” Ryon says, and it sounds like begging. “And all that we did… I do not think we were meant to part.”

Dawsyn gives a pained smile to the night, the iskra tries valiantly to claw her apart, and she softens the words as she says them, as though it could lessen the wound. “We were never meant to be together,” she says. And then she walks onward, alone. As she was made to.

In the palace, Dawsyn enters the bed chamber once more and shuts the door behind her. She sighs deeply, feels weariness leak into her limbs, and leans back against the wooden bedhead.

Her chest hurts.

Dawsyn had thought she was familiar with most pains of the body. Aches of arms and legs were easily recognised and remedied. Pain in the back or the neck took longer. Pain in the head, or in the heart were the worst, she knew. She had learnt as much when her Grandmother had breathed her last and has known it several more times since.

This pain, though, is different. It is constricting. She thinks of Ryon and it cinches tighter. She feels a strange urge to break into her own ribcage and slice it free, this thing that steals her breath.

She shakes her head. Banishes her thoughts.

On the window adjacent, a mark remains from where she had rested her forehead earlier. The view beyond the glass has changed since then. The first fingers of day reach to caress the dark. The bleak grey that precedes dawn dulls the white of the snow. There are no more candles burning in the Colony. The world sleeps.

Dawsyn lays her body down on the bed, the cloak billowing out around her. She lets her muscles melt into the absurd comfort of the downy quilt and tries to relish in it. Soon, she will return to the shelf she not long ago escaped, where nothing is soft, and comfort is scarce.

She wonders what she will find when she is reunited with her den of girls, her family’s cabin. Who will have occupied it in her absence? She is not fool enough to think that someone hasn’t taken what she left behind. She has never known a cabin on the Ledge to remain empty. She only hopes that whoever claims it now is alone, and that they are smart enough to leave.

Only the stupid need die,her grandmother would say.

How wrong she was.