“You’ve got a damn good mind, ringlet.” Prisoner said, leaning over the table and tapping Sechen on the forehead. “Don’t waste it wallowin’ in self-doubt and what could’ve been. And don’t let anythin’ tell you you don’t deserve what you have.”

Sechen grabbed Prisoner’s wrist and glared at him. “No. No, you’re giving me a better explanation than that. You aren’t just going to disappear tomorrow, are you? You promised to help Paui and Gilt. And me.”

“I’m not goin’ anywhere.” Prisoner said gently. “And there lies the problem. If we don’t deal with Hoalt’s problem soon enough, we could lose a powerful ally. He won’t move until he’s sure all his people are safe and sound, and if the city below somehow gets a hold on this place, he won’t raise a single talon to help us. A month of inactivity could set us back for a decade.”

“And you can’t leave here.” Sechen said with dawning understanding. “You were banking on Metea/Irric getting better by this point, but she got worse. What happened between last night and right now?”

“She won’t leave. Won’t climb another floor, won’t go to Novia’s. She’s intent on dyin’ here, ringlet. I can’t let that happen. Even if sleepy manages to make it up through the tens and twenties on his own, it’ll be too slow. The wolf below will have his dripping paws around the Gilded Night’s throat. You, Paui, and Gilt need to move. I’ll work on makin’ cloudy better, even if I have to go into her head and play mediator for both Metea and Irric.”

“If you can do that, it seems like it’d be a pretty easy solution.” Sechen said. “Why haven’t you already done it?”

“Because the process is messy, dangerous, and she’ll never trust me again if I go through with it. It’s my last resort for when I’m in the process of watchin’ the last spark of cloudy’s life snuff itself out.” Prisoner snapped his fingers, and the statues shrank to the size of chess pieces. A case of white marble appeared in Sechen’s lap, latched closed with a metal hinge decorated to look like twisted branches. “I know they ain’t a substitute for a real teacher, but with the notes I gave you they’ll help you push through to the point you can compress your container. I know it’s gonna be hard, and I’m real sorry I can’t be there with you for this, but you’re strong now, sister. You’ve got a body that can handle the strain of your intense Issi, and you’re free of Revelation’s interference.”

Prisoner pushed himself out of his chair, and Sechen found herself unable to take her eyes off of him. For once, he seemed ancient. There was no cheer in his face, just the visage of a man who’d lived through too much and wasn’t anywhere near ready to die. “You ever find yourself in real trouble, yell out to the heavens that you’re invokin’ the right to exist. I can’t tell you what’ll happen, but it’ll save your skin once. And only once, you hear me? I need to hear you say you hear me, Sechen.”

Sechen snapped out of her trance at the mention of her name. “I hear you. Are you leaving now?”

“I scouted out this entire floor. There’s a place I can keep cloudy while I scour every page I’ve got in my archives. Maybe it’ll take a few days if I’m lucky. If I ain’t, I might not see you three until you’re as strong as I am. I leave in thirty hours to be there when it opens.” Prisoner put a hand on Sechen’s shoulder, purple and silver Issi sliding across her skin like wet tendrils. “I still gotta have a chat with Paui and Gilt, tell them what I told you and give them their own substitutes. We didn’t have a fluidity Issi practitioner with us, so Paui’s ain’t gonna be as on the nose as yours was. And a composite wisp like Gilt might not even need anythin’ from me, but I ain’t leavin’ him out. He’d have my hide if I tried that.”

Prisoner chuckled sadly at his own statement, and Sechen found herself wanting to trust him. But she barely knew him. Maybe… just maybe that was the reason. Prisoner wasn’t doing what he was doing out of pity or out of a sense of obligation. He saw something in her, and he wanted her for exactly that something. There was no way he didn’t already know what she was, so why was she keeping it a secret anyway?

The shadow of a voice laughed in her memory, reminding her exactly why she was keeping it a secret. Her hands trembled, even through her Issi reinforcement, and she spared the briefest glance into her headspace. It hadn’t changed in the slightest since she became Sechen. It needed to change if she was going to get stronger. She ground her teeth, and against the fear holding her voice in, called out for Prisoner to wait. He turned around, eyebrows raised at the fearful tone that had scraped out of her throat. If she didn’t say anything now, her voice would fail her forevermore.

“I need to tell you something about who I am.” Sechen ground out against everything in her body screaming at her to stay quiet.

“Everything started when I first got my wisp. And I don’t mean that in the ‘start of the story’ way, but in the ‘I don’t remember anything before that’ way. I remember standing in the middle of a dark room, feeling Issi running through me for the very first time, and a sort of fog lifting from my head before I started seeing and feeling things. My container and headspace popped into existence, and the darkness cleared. My thoughts didn’t feel right, though. I saw things, and I felt things, but I didn’t react to them. And that was the way I was.”

Sechen shuddered, remembering the cold hands grasping onto her shoulders that led her everywhere she needed to go. “The facility was cold and dark most of the time, only lighting up whenever the caretakers came to check on me. On… us? I think there were more kids like me, but I don’t really remember. We were fed almost nothing, given enough water so that we wouldn’t feel thirsty all the time, and barely ever moved from our rooms for a long time. A really long time, I think, but I didn’t have anything to tell me how much time had passed. I just… sat there. Stood there. Lied there. Moving only when the cold hands moved me, looking only where they placed my head to look. I think I slept, but it could have just been the dark of my room staring back at me instead of my eyelids.”

“They never gave me a real bond. All I had was my wisp, and the little bit of Issi I got through our initial bond. It was enough to push away the pain I now know I should have felt, and nothing more. And then things changed. I was brought into a blindingly bright white room, strapped into a metal chair that was warmer than anything I can remember feeling, something sticky coating wherever my skin touched it.” Sechen balled her fists, crushing her thumbs against her palms. “The only reason I know I wasn’t alone down there is because of all the blood. The smell of burnt flesh was more delicious than anything I’d ever smelled before. And I didn’t even react as a manifestation that was bright blue leaned over me and shoved something sharp in my face, then I woke up completely different.”

Sechen paused to take a breath, Prisoner waiting patiently for her to continue with concern written plainly on his face. “You need a minute, sister?”

“Just… just gathering my thoughts.” Sechen said, trying to force a smile. She knew it didn’t come out right, but Prisoner returned a small smile in sympathy. “I haven’t told this to anyone. Not even Revel. It hurts to remember, but I think it’s hurting more to try and forget.”

“Mmhm. You ever want to stop, you stop, alright?”

“I will. Thanks.” Sechen took a deep breath, trying to steady her heartbeat. “Okay. When I woke up, I could think. It was still dark, but I could make out patterns on the wall through the darkness. Constant lines and angles over my entire room with a single slash through them from the upper right of the wall to the bottom left. I tried to stand up, but my body barely listened to me. It hurt to put my feet on the floor, my muscles screaming with just the effort of standing. Just like when you first made me turn off my Issi.”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I need to ask this before you go further. Can you remember what the lines on the wall looked like? Any identifying features or oddities?” Prisoner asked.

Sechen shook her head. “No. My eyes weren’t very good back then, and I couldn’t focus through all the new sensations.”

“Dang.” Prisoner shook his head. “Alright, carry on. Sorry for interruptin’ you.”

“My bones crushed against the floor, my knees and hips grinding against themselves without the muscle to keep them apart. I tried to walk towards the open door, but fell flat on my face with the first step. I couldn’t breathe for what felt like minutes, lying there on my stomach in pain but also the slight relief of not being on my feet anymore. Someone must have heard me fall, since a person in white scurried into my room and lifted me up by my armpits, gently setting me back on the bed with their freezing cold hands. I didn’t want to go back, but none of my punches or kicks had any kind of force behind them.” Sechen grabbed her bicep, raising an eyebrow as her fingers didn’t connect around it. “The person held me down and called for someone else, who came rushing in with a blanket. It crushed me down into the bed as they set it over me, and I couldn’t move at all. It was too heavy.” Sechen laughed humorlessly and shook her head. “A blanket. I was so weak they trapped me with a blanket.”

“They left me there in the dark for days. Now that I could actually think, it was utter torture. They never brought me anything to eat or drink, just pumped in some Issi that felt like oil running over my skin and made me live on that. I didn’t have an Issi seed from any bond at that point, so it did some real damage to my container and headspace just keeping it in there so I could stay alive. My arms stopped hurting when I pushed Issi around into them, but I couldn’t spare enough to make the pain go away completely. It was the only thing keeping me alive, but the longer it went on, I wasn’t sure why I was holding on. I don’t know how many times a day they pushed Issi into my room, but I remember taking it in two hundred and eleven times before the people in white came to see me again.”

“They wanted to know what was going on in my brain.” Sechen tapped her temple. “Apparently I was the only one who’d regained some sense of self. An anomaly, but the kind of anomaly that they were looking for. They dragged me to that chair again, but there was no blood this time, and strapped me down and cut me open and played around with my brain and ticked the back of my eyes with long metal needles that made me smell rusting iron and taste the feeling of metal ripping into my cheeks and see the colors of death on a beach of black sands until they hit something and I screamed so loud and long that the blue person put a hand around my neck and squeezed until everything went fuzzy and stuck a needle in my arm that made the pain so much worse but kept me quiet…”

A convulsing sob wracked through Sechen’s body, tears running down her cheeks as she rambled. Her arms were tightly wrapped around her torso in an attempt to be as small as possible, the memories cutting through her like broken glass, letting all her bottled up emotions come spilling out. Prisoner didn’t say a thing, standing from his chair and walking over to sit next to her. His arms wrapped around her shoulders, and her sobs continued unabated for a dozen minutes. Silver tears joined her own, and Sechen looked up to see Prisoner’s face twisted into a mask of sadness.