Sister Prudence had said yes, which Lilith had not been entirely certain she would.

  She'd made the request carefully — not as a plea, just a straightforward ask. Lysander hadn't done anything wrong. He was six years old and his only crime was being friends with them, and keeping him away felt like one unnecessary thing too many. Sister Prudence had listened, said nothing for a moment, and then said yes in the tone she used when she'd already considered something and simply needed to be asked properly.

  So when the afternoon came — after chores, after the droning tech-priest's lessons, after everything the orphanage required before it released its residents into the small freedom of free hours — Lysander appeared in the doorway looking slightly out of breath, his hair a little messy, holding a book out in front of him with both hands like he was presenting something very important.

  "I brought you this," he announced, to Lilith specifically, very serious about it. "Because you can't go outside and I thought you'd be really bored and there's nothing worse than being bored, Sister Mercy said so once, and this one is about Nocturne and it has pictures of the volcanoes in it and I already looked at all the pictures so you can have it."

  He said all of this in one breath.

  Lilith took the book.

  It was thin and worn, the cover soft with handling, the title pressed in faded letters: The Fires of Nocturne — A Catechism of the Salamanders Chapter and Their Homeworld. Probably propaganda. But thoughtfully chosen propaganda, picked by a six-year-old who had noticed she was stuck inside and wanted to do something about it.

  "Thank you, Lysander," she said.

  He nodded very seriously, satisfied with this, and then immediately turned to Eve with entirely different energy. "Eve! Do you want to play? I made up a new game. It's better than the counting game. Well, it uses counting but also you have to jump and I think you'd be really good at it."

  Eve looked at him. "Is there a book?"

  "No it's a jumping game."

  "Show me," Eve said.

  Lysander's face split into a grin and he immediately began explaining it with his whole body, arms going, completely committed, and Eve watched him with full attention the way she always did when Lysander was explaining something, following every word like she was memorizing it.

  And that was that.

  Lilith sat on the bed with the book in her lap and watched them.

  The jumping game turned out to involve a specific sequence of numbers called out in a specific order, and if you got the number wrong you had to jump in a circle, and if you got it right Lysander apparently made a sound that was somewhere between a cheer and a honk, which Eve seemed to find confusing but not unpleasant. They played on the floor with the focused enthusiasm of two people who had decided this was the most important thing happening in the world right now.

  Lilith watched them and didn't read the book.

  Next week, she thought.

  The word had been sitting in her chest since Ha'ken said it. One week. Seven days. And then they would be leaving Armageddon entirely — leaving the orphanage and the gray courtyard and Sister Mercy's crooked coif and the worn ball from Sister Marian and the particular smell of this place that she'd stopped noticing until she started thinking about not smelling it anymore.

  Leaving Lysander.

  She looked at him now. He'd gotten a number right and was making the honking cheer sound at full volume while Eve sat very still and watched him with the expression of someone trying to understand whether this was a normal human response to numbers. He was six. He had lost his whole family already. He had found them, and now—

  Don't, she told herself.

  But the thought sat there anyway, quiet and uncomfortable, the way true things did when you didn't want them to be true.

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  What happened to Lysander after they were gone?

  She was still sitting with that when Lysander looked over at her mid-explanation of the next round and stopped.

  "Lilith," he said.

  She looked up.

  "You have a sad face," he said. Straightforward. Completely without judgment, just observation.

  Eve was looking at her too now, with the expression she got when she'd noticed Lilith had gone somewhere in her head.

  "Sorry," Lilith said. "I was thinking."

  "Thinking about what?"

  She looked at him. His open face, waiting, hair still messy, completely present the way children were present when they were actually paying attention.

  Just say it, she thought. He deserves to know before it happens.

  "We're going away next week," she said.

  Lysander's face did something immediate. The brightness dropped out of it all at once, like a light switching off — simple and sudden and very honest, because Lysander didn't really know how to be dishonest about what he was feeling.

  "Away where?" he asked. His voice had gone smaller.

  "Nocturne," Lilith said. "With Ha'ken. It was always going to happen eventually. It's just — happening sooner than we thought."

  Lysander looked at Eve. Eve looked back at him steadily.

  He looked back at Lilith.

  He was quiet for a moment, which was unusual for Lysander in a way that made it heavier. He looked down at the floor and his hands found each other in his lap and he was quiet for just a little longer.

  Lilith watched him and felt the discomfort in her chest settle in and stay.

  Then Lysander looked up.

  The brightness was back. Not fake but rather real, arriving from wherever Lysander kept it, which seemed to be somewhere bottomless and genuinely his own. He sat up straight and looked at both of them with the expression of someone who had worked something out and was very pleased with the solution.

  "Okay," he said. "Then we have to do lots of fun things before you go. Like — everything fun we haven't done yet, we do it this week. All of it. So we have lots and lots of happy memories." He nodded firmly at his own logic. "And then when you're far away you can think about the happy memories and it'll be like I'm there. And I can think about them too. And it'll be okay."

  Lilith stared at him.

  Six years old, she thought. He is six years old.

  She genuinely did not have words for a moment. Everything that came to mind felt like too much or not enough, and meanwhile Lysander was looking at her with that bright expectant face, waiting for her to agree because to him the solution was obvious and straightforward and why hadn't she thought of it.

  Eve was looking at Lilith too. Her expression was doing the quiet thing — the one that didn't have a name but meant she was feeling something she didn't have vocabulary for yet.

  I don't want to leave, Lilith thought. Not out loud, just for herself. Not the orphanage specifically — but this. This small stupid wonderful circle. The jumping game and the book about volcanoes and a boy who showed up with both hands full of something he thought she needed, and her sister on the floor learning to count and jump at the same time.

  She reached out and put her hand on Lysander's head. He went still, surprised, and then just accepted it the way children accepted things — completely, without making it complicated. Her other hand found Eve's head too. Eve didn't pull away. She just went still and present the way she did when Lilith touched her.

  "Alright," Lilith said. "Happy memories."

  Lysander's face went fully bright again. "I already have ideas," he said immediately. "I made a list in my head on the way here. It's a really good list."

  "Of course you did."

  "Do you want to hear it? It has seven things."

  "In a moment," Lilith said. "First we're going to make something. Just the three of us." She looked between them. "A secret."

  That got Lysander's complete and total attention in an instant. He leaned forward. "What kind of secret?"

  "A word," Lilith said. "From a language I used to know. A language from somewhere very far away from here." She paused. "Where I came from, this was one of the most important words people had. You said it when you really meant something. When you wanted someone to know you weren't just talking."

  Lysander was nodding rapidly. Eve had gone very still with attention.

  "Promise," Lilith said.

  The English word came out plain and simple and entirely new in a universe that had never heard it before.

  "Promise," she said again, slower. "It means you mean it. Really mean it. Whatever you're saying when you use that word — you're holding onto it. You're not letting it go."

  Lysander whispered it to himself quietly, trying the shape of it. "Promise." He looked up. "Only us three know it?"

  "Only us three."

  He thought about this very seriously for a moment, looking at the floor, and then he looked up with the expression of someone who had made a real decision.

  "Promise," he said, and looked straight at Lilith when he said it, and it was so earnest that it was almost hard to look at.

  Eve said it last. She said it carefully, the way she always said new words — placing it accurately, making sure she had it right. "Promise." She looked at Lilith, and everything she couldn't say yet was in the look.

  The afternoon light sat quiet in the room.

  Lilith took her hands off their heads. For a moment none of them said anything, the three of them just sitting with the new word between them like something they'd agreed to carry.

  Then Lysander straightened up very suddenly and pointed at Eve.

  "Okay, NOW back to the jumping game," he said, at full volume again, the solemnness entirely gone, "because you still don't know the part where you have to spin and I've been waiting to teach you the spin part this whole time."

  Eve looked at him. "There's a spin part."

  "There's ALWAYS been a spin part, I just saved it."

  "You didn't mention a spin part."

  "It's a SURPRISE spin part, Eve."

  Lilith picked up the book, and she smiles as she look at the two.