The streets get easier to traverse as they go. Less broken glass glittering underfoot. Less smoke staining the air. Even the shadows seem thinner, stretched out instead of crowded. Seren glances back just once, but the space behind them holds no torchlight, no echoes of soldiers giving chase.

  Aarav’s voice stays low. “We need to keep moving before it gets too dark.”

  She nods, though each step feels like her insides are twisting. Her mouth tastes like old dust. Her muscles scream with exhaustion. But she keeps pace. His steadiness anchors her, an unexpected kind of certainty, like he’s determined to carry them both through the night purely by will alone. She hangs onto that, even though doubt nips at her heels. People don’t help without expecting something in return. Someone always wants something.

  Maybe he’ll ask later. Maybe he won’t. Maybe, just maybe, not every hand reaching out is a trap.

  The houses crumble into ruins the further they go. A collapsed cart. A laundry line abandoned to the wind. A tiny shrine with no candles, no prayers left alive inside it. Slowing briefly she can feel her eyes burning as tears come suddenly at the sight.

  The air cools as a river draws near. Frogs croak somewhere in the muck, unseen. Hidden by long grasses and river plants. The ground softens underfoot, turning to thick mud that grips her boots.

  The river reveals itself at last, a dark ribbon cutting through what remains of the light, glinting like a blade wiped clean. Its bank rises steep, cluttered with weeds and running from a tunnel under the outer walls. Tall and made of large stacked rocks, it is not something she can see herself climbing over.

  Looking to Aarav, he is making his way down the bank and towards the tunnel. Choked by a mossy grate that disappears into the slow-moving water.

  Aarav guides her toward a section half-smothered in vines and broken fencing. He drops to a knee, brushes aside the ivy, and exposes a rough rectangular cut in the iron. Rust mottles its edges. The hinges hide in shadow. He grips it and pulls. The metal groans once before swinging open just enough for a person to crawl through.

  “Let's go.”

  Seren slides in, the grate scraping her shoulder. The smell of silt and stagnant water rises around her, heavy and sour. A narrow ledge clings to the inner bank. She waits on it as Aarav follows her through and pulls the gate shut. It blends back into vine and rust like it was never opened.

  They’re out. Finally out.

  No soldiers. No torches. Just the river slipping past like it’s minding its own business, carrying the night with it. Seren presses her back to the wall and lets her head fall against the cold stone. Her lungs heave, dragging in air like she’s been drowning for hours instead of running.

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  Aarav flicks a glance at the water, then at her. “If we travel a short ways west along the river, there's a way up. If they’ve thought to watch it, I’ll be impressed… right before we die.”

  She doesn’t argue. Just pushes forward. Too tired to even think of laughing at that stupid joke of his.

  The path is narrow, slick beneath their boots. Now and then her foot skids, but Aarav never slows. Stars prick through the sky above the trees, faint at first, then brighter. A cold witness to everything they’ve left behind. Out here the dark feels heavier. Real, in a way the city never let her feel before.

  Her hand drifts to her pocket again. The starfire pulses softly against her fingertips, wrapped in the torn strip of her robe. The last piece of the life she abandoned in the city. A life folded and left behind like an abandoned cloak in an alley.

  They hit a bend where the bank softens into grass. Aarav climbs first, quick and sure, then reaches down, catching her wrist and hauling her up. His hand is rough, warm. Not like the hands of the priests she has known her whole life.

  Beyond the grate, the land opens into rolling hills, soft shapes swallowed by dusk. He still holds her hand as they start up the slope, his grip unflinching. Her chest aches from the sprint, legs thick with exhaustion, but she matches him step for step. There’s strength in his hold. Steady, grounding. It presses against the fear still spidering through her.

  Without thinking, she leans into it. Into him.

  The realisation stings. She pulls her hand back, uneasy at how natural it had felt, how quickly her body reached for something she shouldn’t trust. Aarav doesn’t react. He just keeps walking as though she is expected to follow.

  The stars sharpen overhead as the darkness thickens. They walk until a stand of oak and alder rises from the meadow, a quiet clutch of trees waiting like old sentries. Aarav leads her into a hollow at the centre. With three sides shielded by trunks, the fourth open to the sky. A deer trail cuts across the grass nearby, flattened by hooves.

  “This should be safe enough for the night,” he says.

  Seren steps into the clearing slowly. The air is cool, damp with the scent of grass and earth. Safe isn’t the word, she knows that, but it’s far from soldiers and stone walls, and the distance feels like a kind of safety anyway.

  Aarav shakes out his cloak, spreads it on the ground, and sits without ceremony, legs stretched, hands loose on his knees. She stays standing. Arms wrapped tight around herself. Her body still humming with tremors leftover from the chase.

  She survived. The starfire is with her. She’s alive.

  But the ache behind her ribs refuses to shift.

  Her gaze drifts back to him. He hasn’t asked who hunts her. Hasn’t demanded answers or explanations or anything that resembles a price. That could make him dangerous. People who don’t ask questions sometimes are.

  But maybe not. Maybe it means something else entirely.

  The thought settles in her without permission, quiet and persistent. That his silence isn’t a threat at all. That maybe silence, his kind, the steady kind, is its own kind of safety.

  At last she lowers herself onto the ground. Knees pulled in, cloak gathered tight around her like it might hold what's left of herself together. The wind murmurs through the leaves overhead, a low restless breath.

  Neither of them speaks for a long while.