~Annalyn POV~
I reached for Calix first. Not the bond mark, which had gone cold the day he died and had stayed cold in a way I had learned not to press on because pressing on it produced a specific kind of pain that had no productive direction.
I reached for the memory of him, the particular quality of how he existed in a room, the way he moved through difficult conversations with a patience that was not passive but deliberate, the specific warmth of his hand when he placed it over mine in the corridor with the black eyes and the contested ground and the body that had stopped responding to the entity's instruction.
I held that memory with everything I had.
Then I reached for Ezra.
Ezra was different. Ezra was precision and care in equal measure, the kind of person who studied things until he understood them completely and then used that understanding with a generosity that his formal manner never quite concealed.
