Turn 2 of 7

Reach for the key.

You reach for the key. Your hand moves slowly, the way you would reach toward a sleeping animal, and Yrenne does not stop you. She watches. Her fingers stay flat on the bench, nails pared short, knuckles mapped with the pale scarring of old burns — the particular landscape of a life spent handling things that resist being handled. The key is colder than the air warrants when your fingers close around it. Colder than iron should be, as though it has been stored somewhere without warmth for a very long time.

The weight of it surprises you. Not heavy — dense, the way a small stone can be dense, the way a word can be dense when someone has been holding it back for years. The teeth are worn but intricate, a shape you do not recognise, and the bow is marked with a single character you cannot read. It sits in your palm like a question that has been waiting to be asked. You become aware that your breathing has gone shallow.

"That opens the ninth room," Yrenne says. She says it the way she says everything — plainly, without emphasis, as though the words are tools and she is placing each one where it will do the most work.

"The rooms open in order. You understand why. You've earned the first door, and you'll earn the rest, or you won't. I won't pretend the process is kind. It isn't. It's necessary."

You ask what is behind the first door. She looks at you for a long moment, and you watch her decide something — whether to answer plainly or to let you walk in blind. Her jaw works once, a micro-movement, the only tell she has. Nine years of watching her have taught you that much. She reaches past you and lifts the bowl of not-water from the bench, holding it between you with both hands. The false stars in its surface drift and settle.

"What's behind the first door is a question," she says. "What's behind the ninth is an answer. Whether it's the answer you want is not something I can tell you, because I don't know which question you'll be carrying by then." She sets the bowl down again. The liquid does not slosh.

"The eighth apprentice carried a different question than I expected. It broke something in him that I could not repair. I would prefer not to make that mistake twice." Below your feet, Cassiel's weightless footsteps pause, then resume, as though listening through the glass.