The tower door was unlocked.

It was always unlocked. He had known this since first year — Nyx did not lock doors because locks implied she expected guests, and guests implied she hadn’t chosen to summon them. He had come up twice before on his own. The second time she hadn’t been there. He had sat for a while and come back down and said nothing about it.

He pushed the door open and climbed.

The staircase was narrow and brutally cold, the stone holding the December dampness the way old things held things — completely, without negotiation. His breath misted in the lamp-light at the landing below the bell housing. The upper door was the same door it had always been. He pushed through it.

She was on the parapet.

Legs over the edge, lavender hair moving in the tower wind, the opal eyes already on him when he came through. The Dreamscape had felt him on the stairs. She always felt him before he arrived anywhere within its range, which from the top of the clock tower on a clear December night was most of the island.

She did not say anything.

He came to the parapet and sat beside her. The island was below them in the December dark — the Academic District’s lamps at their night frequency, the repair stone in the lower district sitting the same colour as the old at this hour, Villa 4’s kitchen window lit at the correct angle. The sky was the flat grey of a clouded winter night. No stars. The cold coming off it steady and complete.

She was looking at the island.

He looked at the island.

After a while she said: "The transmission component."

"Thursday," he said.

"Thorne designed it for someone with compound training." She turned the cup she was holding — something warm, held without drinking. "Most of the year doesn’t have compound training."

"He’s not testing technique," Vane said.

"No." She looked at the lower district. "He wants to see who adapted and who performed. The difference shows in the output." A pause. "You adapted."

He looked at her.

She was looking at the lamp patterns below with the expression she used for things she had been thinking about for a while. The opal eyes reading the island the way they read everything — nothing missed, everything filed.

He had been inside that frequency. Not the full version — the full version had put him unconscious for thirty-one days in first year and run through everything he had ever been without asking permission. What she had given him in Villa 1 was something smaller. A foundational piece, offered deliberately, guided into him with her arms around his neck and the Dreamscape’s violet light flooding his silver channels. Ephemeral State — the boundary between illusion and reality, manipulated at will. He had been running it since then the way you ran something that had rebuilt the architecture around it. It was not a piece anymore. It was part of the structure.

She had given it to him.

She had decided to and then she had done it, with the commitment of someone who did not do things they hadn’t decided to do. He had thought about this more than once across the months since.

"You’ve been watching from up here," he said.

"Since first year," she said. Not defensively. The way she stated facts.

"Villa 4," he said. "You said the kitchen window goes on at the fourth hour."

"It does." She looked at the window. It was lit, the lamp at its kitchen setting. "It has since January of first year. Before you moved in. The previous occupant kept different hours." She turned the cup. "You moved in and the fourth hour light became consistent. I noted it." A pause. "I have been using it as a reference point since."

He looked at the window.

She looked at the island.

He had known she watched him. He had known since October of first year — the Dreamscape staying on him forty seconds past the usual duration, then longer, the frequency at a quality different from what it ran on everyone else. He had filed it and said nothing for two years and she had watched and said nothing for two years and they had conducted the longest possible mutual observation without once acknowledging what they were observing.

Until Villa 1.

Until she had closed the distance herself because she had decided to and she did not do things she hadn’t decided to do.

"The second time I came up," he said.

She looked at him.

"You weren’t here. I sat for a while."

She was still for a moment. Something in the opal eyes that was not the reading expression — the reading expression was ambient, continuous, the Dreamscape running its maintenance. This was different.

"I was in the lower archive section," she said quietly. "I came back at the second hour."

He looked at her.

She looked at the island. The lavender hair in the tower wind. The cup in both hands, neither warm nor cold at this point from the December air. The parapet edge where her legs hung over a very long drop and she was entirely unbothered by it because she had been sitting here for two years and had long since stopped registering the height.

"Third time," he said.

She looked at him.

The distance between them was not the distance it had been at the start of the evening. It had been closing in the way distances closed on the clock tower — not through movement, or none that was deliberate, but through the accumulated weight of the island below them and the December above them and two years of watching each other across the dark and the point of all that watching landing precisely here.

He closed what was left of it.

It was not like Villa 1. Villa 1 had been hers — the deliberate weight of it, her arms around his neck, the Dreamscape opening with purpose, the quality of someone who had decided and was now doing. He had responded. She had led.

This was his. His hands and her stillness and the tower cold and the December island below them and the opal eyes closing. When they opened they were looking at him from a distance that was not the distance they had been at before, and the expression in them was not performing anything at all.

She looked at the island. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

After a while: "The fourth hour light."

"Yes," he said.

"It is a good reference point," she said.

He looked at her looking at it.

The Dreamscape ran at its ambient level. The island finished its night below them. The cold did what December cold did at this height, which was everything, without apology, patient as old stone.

Neither of them moved for a long time.