Phoebe was already at the theory wing junction when Ash arrived in the morning.

She had a folder tucked to her side with two coffees in a carrier in the other. Her reading glasses were tucked into her polo shirt.

"I didn’t know how you like your coffee so I just got you what I usually get." Phoebe said gesturing him to take one.

Ash took a small sip of the coffee. It tasted sweet, like it had several pumps of vanilla added into it.

"Thanks, it tastes good."

"He’s in the library," she said. "Second floor on the east like you said. He’s been there since it opened."

"How do you know?"

"Because I went there when it opened at six." She looked at him over her cup. "You texted me about a borrowed pen? How does this work?"

"I need contact. The pen is an excuse to get close enough. Then it opens."

"How long are you gone?"

"Seconds, from your side."

"And if something goes wrong on your side?"

"Get us both out of the library. Don’t let anyone crowd him while he’s still." Ash drank the coffee. "He won’t be afraid. He’ll just be still."

Phoebe nodded. "Alright. Let’s go."

The library’s second floor east was expectedly quiet at this hour. Early risers who came to read theory texts, reference journals, and complete work before classes started.

Willis was at a table near the window. His pen traced the same printed line in his open textbook, scratching back and forth across words already on the page, leaving no ink. His eyes sat above the binding, aimed at the wall.

Phoebe went to the reference shelves. Ash walked to Willis’s table, and leaned over the open page.

"Is this the Sunna reading?" Ash asked.

Willis didn’t look up. "Chapter four." His voice dead of emotion.

"I think I left mine in the dormitory. Can I borrow a pen? Mine’s dry."

Willis put his pen on the table between them. Ash picked it up, and when he set it back down his fingers crossed the back of Willis’s hand.

The hunger stirred inside him, lacking the absolute fire of the courtyard or the gravity-pull of the Gate. Patient. A deliberate ache, the void locating the Shade through the brief touch, the drain registering differently at this range. Up close it pressed against him like a wall that had been cold for a very long time.

The hunger reached. The realm opened.

The light went flat.

Ash was in a dormitory room. The structure was about right. A plain desk, wardrobe, bed, window, but every surface had been left in the sun too long. The walls were yellowed paper. The wood of the desk and wardrobe had split along the grain in hairline cracks that ran the full length of each board. The window was intact but fogged gray, the courtyard outside reduced to a blur.

He inhaled. The air scraped the back of his throat like dry paper. His chest pulled at it and got less than it should have. He took another breath and his eyes began to sting at the edges, the grit of air too arid for the fine tissue.

The Shade was already in the chair.

It had Willis’ face, but he looked like he was sixty years older. The jaw hung with a vacant slack, the facial muscles no longer bothering to hold a recognizable expression. Its hands were folded neatly in its lap. Back straight. It stared at Ash, seeing straight through him to the cracked wall behind.

You came from outside, it said. Everything outside is the same as in here.

"It’s not," Ash said.

It gets there. Flat. No investment in being believed. You’ll see.

Ash looked around the room. The wardrobe door hung slightly open, the interior was painted black. The desk was bare. The only objects on the shelves above it were a row of books with the spines bleached to nothing, and at the far end, a photograph propped against the wall.

"When did it start looking like this?" he said.

The Shade looked at the walls. At the cracked wood of the desk, the faded spines.

I don’t know, it said. It was gradual. One day I noticed I didn’t care about a thing I used to care about. Then another. Then I stopped counting.

"And that felt like relief."

The Shade looked at him. Its jaw held the same slack set, but a dull spark of recognition finally surfaced in its eyes.

Yes, it said. Each thing that stopped mattering made the rest easier to carry. Until there was almost nothing left to carry. The Shade’s eyes traced the hairline cracks in the desk.. That was the point, I think. That was what I was trying to get to.

"You’re not there yet," Ash said.

No, it said. Not quite.

He crossed to the shelf. Each step costing more than the breath it took to make it. Like a ledger running in the background, each movement charged against the air’s thin margin. By the time he reached the shelf his throat had the hollow dryness of a sealed room opened after months.

The photograph was slightly more there than everything around it. The fading had taken less of it.

He picked it up. In the image, was a girl and a younger Willis standing outdoors somewhere. The framing was slightly crooked, catching the woman mid-laugh, her hand pointing at a washed-out sky above them both. Neither was looking at the camera.

Everything erodes, the Shade said from the chair, not looking at the photograph, looking at Ash. I learned that young. It helped to know.

"Helped how?"

If everything erodes, nothing is worth holding onto. Its hands stayed folded. It’s cheaper to let them go early.

"She didn’t cost you anything," Ash said. "You just stopped paying."

The Shade’s chin lifted a fraction.

That’s still there, it said.

Its hands came apart in its lap slowly and it looked at them.

I didn’t know I kept that.

"She wrote letters," Ash said shuffling through the rest of the items.

I stopped writing back. Its fingers curled inward loosely and rested. It was easier.

"Was it?"

A long silence. The flat light of the room held. The cracks in the walls held. The Shade sat in its chair and for the first time, the Shade’s vacant stare broke. The certainty in its posture fractured, replaced by the quiet stillness of a man realizing a math error.

I don’t know, it said finally. I told myself it was.

The photograph dissolved at the edges. It didn’t do it all at once, but from the outside in, the image receding back to the level of everything else in the room. Ash held it until it was gone from his hands. The frame stayed. The image didn’t.

The Shade stayed in the chair with its hands open in its lap. It looked at where the photograph had been. Then it looked at Ash.

Will it matter? it said. Whatever you’re doing. Will it matter.

"I don’t know," Ash said. "The ones before you thought so at least."

The Shade held his gaze for a moment. Then its eyes dropped back to its open hands. It became quiet, the room’s pressure shifted as the air finally equalized, like a door opening somewhere deeper in the building. The cracks in the walls stayed. The color stayed yellow. But it had changed character. Less like a window. More like a person.

[ Ding! ]

[ Extraction Successful. ]

[ You have extracted the C-Rank Talent: Silca Rot ]

[ Silca Rot — Accelerates oxidation and erosion of silicon-based materials in contact or near-contact range. Desiccates organic matter on sustained application. ]

The library came back. The full brown color of it. The shelving wood, the jacket of the student two rows over, the early blue of the morning coming through the window. It was a stark contrast to the Shade realm’s gray.

Willis blinked. He set his pen on the table and rolled his shoulders, once, slowly. He looked at his hands. Then he stood and walked to the window.

He looked out at the courtyard. Willis saw the students crossing it getting to the auxiliary buildings. He didn’t look lighter. He stood there with his hands loose at his sides and looked.

Phoebe appeared at Ash’s elbow, coffees back in hand. She handed Ash back his coffee.

"That’s it?" she said quietly.

"I told you I wasn’t going to fight it."

She watched Willis at the window. "What does he look like to you?"

Ash looked at Willis. His shoulders had dropped from their rigid set at the theory wing entrance. The phantom weight he’d been bracing against was gone. The drop was maybe a centimeter, but it was visible.

"Like a guy who remembered he kept a photograph," Ash said.

Ash finished the last of the coffee, still sweet, still warm, and set the cup down on the table Willis had left behind.

"Hey." A voice from the end of the row. "Are you busy tonight?"