The wind shifted again. Lira felt it like a hand on the back of her neck, cold and possessive. The reeds answered in a dry rush. She turned a little too fast and her foot slid; Callen caught her elbow, gentle and sure, and the contact hit her like static.

He let go immediately. She rubbed the place on her sleeve after, even though that was ridiculous.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket so quietly she almost missed it. Ezra.

Ezra: Library. Found something. “Fourth Night.” Where they die isn’t where they’re marked.

She typed back with cold-stupid fingers: What does that even— but the signal faltered, the message hung on sending, and then the screen went blank for a blink before returning with the battery percentage unchanged. The phone had the gall to act normal after that.

There were stories, she remembered—things she’d heard and not tucked into the part of her brain that kept facts. Old men in the diner, lights reflected on silver coffee, talking about the night the clocks went backward. People who walked into fog and came out on streets they didn’t start on. You could spend your whole life collecting superstitions and never need a single one until suddenly you did.

She and Callen climbed back over the fence and took the long loop that curved toward the edge of the industrial park. The warehouses rose out of the scrub like blocks left on the floor by a careless giant. The air tasted of rust and damp corrugation. Somewhere far off, a generator thumped an uneven beat. Twice on the path, Lira thought she saw their shadows move in the wrong direction. Twice she told herself it was nothing.

“Why are you helping?” she asked, when the quiet had built itself back up. “If the bell wants four and you know how it works. What do you get out of this?”

Callen considered. “Sometimes you move a stone and the water in the river goes a new way. If I can change where it runs, maybe what it drowns is different.”

“You talk like somebody’s grandpa,” Lira said, and then hated herself for how mean it came out.

“I am tired,” Callen said, and for once there was a crack in his voice she knew wasn’t on purpose. It made him sound more like a person and less like a problem handed to you by the universe. “I’m tired of counting.”

“You said you stopped being counted.”

He didn’t answer. For once, the not-answer didn’t feel like a dodge. It felt like a place with a door she wasn’t ready to open.

They cut through the skeleton of an old playfield, the metal bleachers slick with frost. Someone had spray-painted a crown on the topmost plank; the paint had run in long drips that now looked like icicles. When Lira climbed two steps to scan the street, the aluminum hummed under her feet with a note she felt in her teeth. She stepped down and the hum stopped a second after it should have.

“Maybe we should loop back,” she said. “If Ezra found something—”

“Text him to meet at the gazebo,” Callen said.

She did. The message sent cleanly this time. Weird how victory could be so small.

They crossed a lot where grass tried to take back cracked asphalt. A chain-link gate sagged open on one hinge. She thought of Ryke doing a dramatic bow here, kicking the gate to make it squeal for emphasis. He would have loved the acoustics. The thought made her chest hurt. It was easier to be irritated at him than scared for him, and that might be the worst thing she’d learned about herself lately.

Fog collected in the low corners of the lot, bright where light pooled and then dull as dishwater where it didn’t. A plastic bag bumped against the curb like a fish.

“Ryke!” Lira called again, because hope is a muscle and you have to keep using it or it goes slack. “Can you hear us?”

“Here!” The voice snapped from ahead, precise as a ping.

Callen stilled.

Lira ran for the sound. Asphalt and grit, a crunch, her breath stitching her side.

“Lira!” Closer. “Hurry!”

She focused on that, because focusing on fear just made it breed. The fog thinned in front of her and thickened behind, which meant nothing except that it made her feel chased.

“Ryke, keep talking,” she said. “Say literally anything.”

“Lira!” He obeyed. “Here!”

It wasn’t that he didn’t say anything else; it was that the voice didn’t seem built for anything else. She kept running until the world made a narrow choice for her: ahead, a low brick wall separated the lot from a slope of ditch and trees. She vaulted the wall—barely, badly—and landed hard enough that her breath flared with white stars. Callen dropped over a safer section without a sound.

The ground here was leaf-slick. Old beer cans flashed dullly under the leaves when her foot skidded them. The trees made a roof. The fog made a room. She could feel the bell in the bones of the place, a pressure as steady as blood.

“Ryke?” she said, softer.

His voice answered, very close. “Lira.”

She turned toward it, and realized—there was nothing between the sound and her ear. No room noise, no scrape of shoe or crunch of leaf, no human body using air. Just the word, perfect and empty.

“Don’t,” Callen said, not touching her this time. “Stay where you are.”

She didn’t move. It took everything she had not to. She thought of Ezra in the library, cataloguing horror like it would behave if you named it properly. She thought of Ryke cracking jokes regardless of scale. She thought of the crow with RYKE in its beak, its head turned as if listening for the moment she would be alone.

“Okay,” she said, to the fog, to Callen, to herself. “Okay.”

A sound like a chain dragged somewhere out of sight, the pull-drag rhythm that had threaded itself through their days. It struck sparks down her spine.

“Lira,” the voice said again, soft now, curious. Closer. Behind her.

She turned.