The Dividir river winds a lazy path under the bridge. Malina leans up against the stone edge, watching the water curl and flow in eddies by the shore, washing up leaves and sticks. The hot summer air presses in on her, hot and muggy but strangely divine. If she closes her eye, she can picture Muros and its stone walls, the temples scented by incense and myrrh, the ladies hidden behind their lace fans. Her chest aches with longing.

"Malina?"

She looks over at the end of the bridge. Darl shifts from foot to foot, staring at her with his big brown eyes. Behind him, the city of Migos exhales steam and smoke, the collective cloud of noise slowly drowning itself out as the sun sets.

She gives him a lazy wave. "Hi," she says simply.

"Can I join you?"

"Of course."

Darl crosses the bridge, ambling over to her with his hands clasped behind his reedy back. He stands a respectable distance from her, taking to looking out over the river too.

"She's feeling better," he informs her. "Aizel."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"You did another miracle, right?" He flashes her a grin, holding out his hands, curving his fingers. "Did you force them to let you in?"

Malina rests her chin atop her fist. "I might've."

His grin grows. "Wicked! I bet the Sentinels fell to pieces. No one's tough enough to stand against you."

Malina laughs at him. "That's a big claim."

"I guess I just wanted to thank you again. You know, for the medicine and the place to stay. And for saving my life," he adds. "No one really cares about us. Even the mestizos that come from Tondo to learn at the colleges here barely spare us a passing glance."

"That's the way of the world," Malina says.

Darl fidgets with the hem of his shirt. His eyes flit over the wide expanse of the river, going from bank to bank. Malina isn't sure what he's more interested in: the commercial district to the left, in the direction where he came, or the factories to their right, spewing smog into the junio air.

"Was it your mother or your father that was Tondan?" he asks her timidly.

"My mother," she responds.

"Where are your parents now?"

"Dead."

He flushes. "I'm sorry."

A carriage passes behind them on the bridge, horse hooves clopping away into the gathering dusk.

"Don't be," she tells him finally. "I never knew them."

"Do you have any family then?" He watches her. "All I have is Aizel."

"I have an uncle. You might meet him someday." She's still unsure why he stayed corporeal last night. Why didn't he emerge from the shadows? He hasn't appeared at the residence in Valpara, though Malina's searched for his telltale skeins of shadows. "Two, actually. Both are here in Edeiros. My mother's brother and my father's."

"Have you met them?"

"My mother's brother raised me. Sometimes I wish I'd never met him at all. He's such a killjoy most of the time."

"And your father's brother?"

Malina shakes her head. "I don't think he'd like me very much. You know how Edeirans can be to mestizos sometimes."

Darl nods knowingly. "So... that's quite a nifty power you have. You have the Sight, right?"

"A variation of it," she admits.

"I've never met anyone who can touch the weave."

She smiles at him. "Me either."

"You're like the Head Sentinel. He has the Sight too."

Malina raises an eyebrow. "Really?" Uncle Paolo didn't tell her that. What had he said about the Head Sentinel, anyway? That he was a boy, young and inexperienced, and barely eighteen?

She recalls the boy at the hospice last night. The boy that touched her.

I felt nothing.

That must've been the Head Sentinel. How had he known she would be there? A shiver courses over her at the memory of those glowing blue eyes lighting up the night. So that's how it is to be touched by someone disconnected. Someone frayed, like me.

"What do you know about the Head Sentinel?" she asks.

Darl threads his fingers together behind his neck. "Not much. I've heard he's from a noble House. People say he's the king's nephew. His aunt was queen a few years ago, before she passed."

"I see." Her heart bumps against her ribcage. She's never met anyone like her before, not once in her life. The only people she's ever been able to touch without fear of pain are her uncle and lola Diwa, and they're a different breed of person entirely, handpicked by the gods to carry out their divine bidding. No one she's met has had the Sight, and now, suddenly, a boy with the Sight has touched her.

She's not sure that it's all coincidence.

"I have to be straight with you," Darl says. "I came to ask you another favour."

Another carriage rolls by. Malina fiddles with the strap of her eyepatch.

"What do you need from me, Darl?"

"There's going to be a party at the palace tonight. Everyone that's important will be there."

"And?"

"Alejandro Lopez will be there too," he mumbles. "He's a merchant prince's son. He lives in the Cruce district. He was my master."

Malina's lips part. "Darl..." she begins.

"I know it's not fair of me to ask you to... to do anything to him, really, but he was always beating me if I didn't do a good enough job. Aizel just wanted to get us out of there, you know? She didn't think about the consequences. You should've seen the look on her face when he took that axe to her wrist. It was-" He shakes his head back and forth. "Malina, it was horrible. He seemed so satisfied with himself afterwards. He's a monster."

"I'm not going to kill someone for you, Darl." She can still feel Clara's threads in her hands, the morbid finality of pulling them apart. Thanks to Clara, she doesn't even bare a scar. Thanks to Clara, she's alive. Clara probably had friends. Family. A lover, even. And Malina ended it all in a bid for her own life. So what she means to say, really, isn't I'm not going to kill someone for you. It's I'm not going to kill someone for you again.

Darl shakes his head, waving his hands around. "No, no, that's not what I was asking you."

"You want me to take his hand," she murmurs. "Don't you."

"I'd do it if you didn't."

"It won't solve anything-"

"What are you talking about?" He stares at her like she's crazy. "It'll solve everything!"

"I mean that it won't bring your sister's hand back, Darl," Malina snaps. "It won't make her whole again."

He gapes, hands curling into fists. "It would make me whole again."

Malina looks over him for a long moment. "You remind me of a boy I met in Muros. He wanted revenge too. Not for himself, but for the mother that he'd lost." She lets out a scoff. "I'm telling you right now that it'll get you nowhere. It won't change anything. You'd just make everything worse."

"But you got us the medicine. You helped me escape those Sentinels. I just-" Darl turns away. "I thought you'd be on my side."

"I helped you escape because they would've gutted you like a dog if they caught you. I got your sister those antibiotics because she would've died otherwise. I'm not a mercenary. I'm not an assassin. I'm just a... a..." She scrambles for the right word. All that comes out is, "... a girl."

Darl's fists clench harder. She manages a weak "Don't do it..." before he stalks off the bridge, determination radiating from his every pore.

She could put her fingers into the weave and hold onto his strings. She could stop him from doing it, she could. What a spectacle that would be. People would start to gather. They'd point and stare.

But more than that, she wonders if it's all worth it. I've done all that I could, she thinks to herself. I've helped them. Maybe it's time we part ways. She stares into the water, searching for an unnatural shadow moving through the waves or splashing onto the shore with river foam, hope tugging at her heartstrings.

"Uncle?" she calls out tentatively. "Uncle Paolo?"

A carriage rolls by. Then silence.

She pushes away from the rail, clawing her fingers into her hair. "Ugh! It's useless!" Gods, he always seems to disappear when she needs him most! First her parents, and now him? The only person that never would have left her alone- had never even tried to- was-

"Yul," she sighs miserably. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

*

They met in Muros four years ago. They came upon each other by chance, both trying in vain to pilfer the same chest of jewels from a visiting Don's villa. Like all people Malina seemed to gravitate towards, he was completely and undeniably alone.

She held his threads tight in her hands, ready to sever them at a moment's notice. Her uncle hadn't taught her everything about her command over the strings, but one of the first things he schooled her in was splitting the strings apart.

He put a hand up to shield himself. In between the spaces of his fingers, she caught a glimpse of the shameless beauty in his eyes. His long black hair slipped like silk over his shoulders as he fell to the ground, the moon revealing every inch of his face.

"Do it," he told her, panting, voice tinged with a heavy accent. "I have nothing to go back to. I have no one. Do it."

In her moment of hesitation, his threads slipped away. He rebounded on her with such cruel force. His blade pressed to her neck and she cried out- not from the cold of the metal, but from the searing touch of his hands. Of all the things uncle Paolo used to warn her about, the touch of a mortal was the most dangerous of all.

"Show me how you did that," he hissed. "Teach me."

Even in her agony, she was fascinated by his eyes: amber and more beautiful than any of the jewels in the chest that lay open before them in the empty room.

"You can't-" She choked on air. Something hard in his expression faltered; perhaps seeing that she was a girl, younger even than himself. He released the pressure of his blade on her throat, and after a second of observing her, he let go of her skin, too. "-see it."

"See what?"

She motioned to the air around her, coughing. "The weave."

Understanding flickered in his amber gaze. "You have the Sight."

"Sort of," she admitted, sitting up just to stare.

He was close, kneeling in front of her. They were face to face, having just tried to kill each other, and neither of them cared. She could feel the heat of his breath on her skin, smell the mild, oddly pleasant scent of him, like something between milk and the sweet scent of burning wood.

"They're everywhere. Strings." She reached for his, gingerly, pulling so that his arm moved with a twitch of her finger. "They're all connected to something. Like you."

He reached out. At first Malina had thought he was going for her right eye. She flinched away, but he reached farther, searching for something he'd never be able to see, touching the air just past her shoulder. His face twisted into an expression of melancholy. He could make any expression look dazzling, Malina knew. He could cry and scream and rant and rave and he would still be beautiful.

He was alone, like she was, with hardly anything to return to.

But he wasn't quite like her.

No one ever was.