Chapter 4 · The Zero Tag (2)

The portraits seemed to lean in.

"The dagger, Dr. Voss," Iris said, holding out her hand. "Give me the dagger, and I'll tell you how to finish what your family started. How to cut the chain. How to be free of the shadow for good."

Liora looked at the outstretched hand. Then she reached into her bag—and brought out the dagger, still in its sheath.

The blade hummed in her grip. Hungry.

Don't. You'll regret it.

"Free of the shadow," Liora repeated. "And then what? I become the blade that killed its own fated love, and the Star Realm pats me on the head and lets me live?"

Iris's smile flickered. "That's not—"

"Gerald Weiss," Liora said, "told me you recruited him. The body at the hospital told me your voice. The chain isn't about freeing me, Iris. It's about arming me. Someone built the corpses to feed me lies until I was ready to use this." She lifted the dagger. "Who's paying you?"

Iris's face changed. It was subtle—the way a lake changes when something moves beneath it.

"You're smarter than the last one," Iris said softly. "The last Starbound Bride believed everything the Keepers told her. She cut his heart out on their wedding night, and then she spent a thousand years regretting it." She tilted her head. "Do you want to know what happened to her?"

Liora's blood went cold. "…You."

"Me." Iris's smile turned sad. "I was her. The failed Keeper. The bride who believed the lies, killed her love, and woke up to find the Star Realm had used her as a pawn. I spent a thousand years trying to undo it. And now—" Her eyes sharpened. "Now I know the only way to break the chain is to arm the blade with the truth. The truth that the Star Realm is the monster, not your shadow king."

The door of the manor slammed shut behind them.

Rain hammered the roof. The portraits' eyes seemed to watch.

Liora stood in the dark hall, holding a blade that had just been offered to her by her own ancestor—a woman who had killed her own fated love, and spent a thousand years regretting it.

"Then why," Liora said slowly, "did you put the message inside Gerald Weiss's heart? He lies. He always lies. Trust the blade."

Iris blinked. "I didn't."

The silence between them was a live thing.

"…The bodies that spoke in my voice," Liora said. "You're saying that wasn't you."

"I built the chain to bring you here, to tell you the truth." Iris's voice had lost its warmth. "The whispers in the corpses—the ones telling you to kill him, to trust the blade—"

"Those are someone else's."

The lights went out.

Not the power—the light. Every window went black at once, as if the sky itself had been switched off. And from outside, through the rain, came a sound like footsteps. Slow. Measured.

Coming up the walk.

Iris grabbed Liora's arm. Her face was pale. "He found us. The one who's been feeding the corpses."

"Who is 'he'?"

"The Star Emperor's hand." Iris's voice dropped to a whisper. "The Reaper of Keepers. The one who erases anyone who might help you break the chain—starting with the Voss line." She looked at Liora with sudden, terrible clarity. "Dr. Voss. Your family didn't abandon this house in 1902. They were erased. All of them. Every Voss who ever got close to the truth."

The footsteps stopped at the door.

Liora's hand closed around the dagger.

The voice that came through the door was quiet, and almost kind: "Good evening, Number Zero. I've been waiting for you to come home."

And the door began to open.

Two weeks earlier, Liora Voss had been on a date.

It was, against all odds and all better judgment, at the planetarium. She had worn a dress she'd borrowed from Millie, because her own wardrobe was 80% scrubs and 20% funeral clothes. She had left the scalpel at home, because bringing a scalpel to a date felt like admitting she expected trouble.

And she had spent the first twenty minutes of the show not looking at the stars, but at the man beside her, who was watching the dome with the open, wondering face of a child seeing the sky for the first time.

"They're not real," he said finally.

"The stars?"

"Not the way I remember them." His voice was quiet. "The constellations are wrong. The paths are wrong. The sky I knew—" He paused. "It's been twelve thousand years. Everything I knew is a story now."

"Then you should make new memories." Liora's voice was softer than she'd intended. "That's what stories are for. The old ones get replaced."

"Can they be?"

She looked at him. At the red-eyed stranger who had left a corpse, a rose, a moonstone, and a threat on her doorstep, and who had just spent twenty minutes looking at a planetarium ceiling like it was the first beautiful thing he'd seen in millennia.

"I don't know," she said. "I've never tried."

"Neither have I." He turned to look at her, and the dome light caught his face. "But I'd like to try. With you."

"Kael."

"Liora." He said her name like it was the only word in the language that mattered. "I've waited twelve thousand years to sit beside you in a room full of false stars. I can wait a little longer for you to trust me. But I'm asking you to believe one thing tonight: whatever I am, whatever I've done, I have never lied to you about the only thing that matters."

"What's that?"

"That I'll always be early." He smiled. "That's a promise I've kept for twelve thousand years."

The show ended. The dome went dark. And in the darkness, very gently, Kael Ashveil took her hand.

He didn't let go until the lights came back on.

And Liora Voss, who had never believed in fate, who had built her life on facts and autopsy reports and things she could prove, walked out of the planetarium holding the hand of a man who had no records, no past, and no business existing—and did not let go.

Two weeks later, standing on her doorstep in the dark, with the door beginning to open, she understood that she had been walking toward this moment since the night of the rain.

The voice in the doorway spoke again, softer now, almost fond:

"Welcome home, Number Zero. We have so much to show you."