I woke up screaming again.
Same nightmare. Same ceiling. Same reaching — arms out, fingers spread, calling names that echoed off the walls and died there. Mrs. Ada was already beside me when my eyes opened. She didn't speak. She just pressed her hand to my hair and held it there, steady, until the room stopped feeling like a trap.
She does that every day.
She makes the world feel like it has a floor.
Noah had one week before school began. He felt nothing about it.
He ate when Ada put food in front of him. He slept when his body finally gave out. But underneath all of it, running quiet and constant as water beneath ice, was a single thought he couldn't drown: that he had no right to still be here. That living felt like something he was doing without permission — in a world where his parents had no grave, no stone, no place for him to go and come apart the way they deserved.
When Ada opened his door that morning, she wore the particular smile she kept for things she wasn't sure he'd like.
"There's someone here to see you. Her name is Anna. She's a therapist."
Noah pushed the hair from his eyes just enough to look.
The woman across from him was composed, unhurried, faintly impatient — the particular bearing of someone accustomed to being the most competent person in a room and quietly annoyed about it. He noticed a mark on her hand: 時. Time. She studied him the way people study problems they haven't decided are worth solving.
"Noah." Her voice landed without flourish. "I'm here to help you. Your mother told me about the nightmares. About the screaming." She settled back. "What you're experiencing has a name: post-traumatic stress disorder. It happens when something tears into you so completely that your mind can't stop returning to the wound." A pause. "I won't lie to you. No one can pull you out of this. Only you can do that. What I can do is help you find the door." Her eyes didn't leave his. "I think you're having thoughts of ending your life. I think something is waiting for you every time you close your eyes."
One of Noah's eyes appeared from behind his hair.
"Whatever you tell me stays here. I'm contracted to your mother — I answer to no one else." She opened one hand, palm up. An offering, not a demand. "So talk to me."
From the doorway, Ada caught his eye. She smiled — the real one, unperformed — and drew the door shut behind her.
Noah reached up and tied his hair back with the tie his mother had given him. Then he took a breath, and let everything out.
He told her about the island. His mother's hand going slack in his. The sound his father's head made against the ground. His teacher's body folding and going still. He told her about the terror, and about the thing that had grown inside it like a weed — the conviction, cold and absolute, that it was his fault. That he had been standing right there. That he was strong — stronger than most men twice his age — and he had done nothing. He had frozen. He had watched them die.
Every time he closed his eyes, he was back in that moment. Every time, he failed them again.
The therapist set her notebook down.
"That is devastating, Noah." The professional distance in her expression had gone quiet. "You've seen things that break grown men. And the only thing — the only real thing — you can do with that is learn to carry it without letting it carry you." She met his eyes. "People have probably told you this already. But your parents would always choose you. In any world. In any moment. They would always push you to safety before themselves."
"I know that." His voice broke on the word. "I know. But I'm supposed to be strong. I was supposed to be the one who — that's what I'm for—"
"You are a child." Her voice was precise, not cruel. "Grown men freeze in front of the Skin of Cain. You are not allowed to hold yourself to a standard that no one alive has ever met." She stood. The smile she gave him now was small and unguarded. "We'll talk again tomorrow."
She left.
Noah sat in the silence she'd made.
Then, alone for the first time, he stopped holding himself together. He cried the way children cry — formless, total, without architecture or shame — arms wrapped around his own chest, pressing into the absence of something that would never come back.
"Ma." Barely a sound. "I'm scared."
Then: "Dad. I'm scared."
He said it until the words stopped meaning anything. Until they were just breath.
When the crying ended, something in the room felt different. Not healed. Not even close to healed. Just — quieter, in the way a storm is quiet after it's finished with you.
He crossed to his sword.
It was a strange thing to look at up close. Old — genuinely, impossibly old — with engravings that ran from the tip all the way to the guard, every line still clean, the leather wrapping worn soft as skin. It should have been in a museum case behind thick glass with a card explaining what century had made it. But there was no rust on it, no brittleness, no sign that time had touched it at all.
Noah found the maintenance kit Ada had left him. He sat on the floor, back against the bed, and read by the faint blue light his own eyes gave off — a thing he'd stopped noticing.
Keep the stone wet. Angle to the edge. V-motion, top to bottom — never straight across. He turned to polishing. Tap the foam. Not too much. Keep it clear of the grip. He held up the small bottle and turned it in his hands. "Like animal fat," he said quietly. "Prevents rust." He glanced at the stack of books Ada had brought. "These are written like they want to be understood. That's rare."
He pulled on his gloves and began.
An hour and a half passed without him noticing.
Ada came in and found him in the dark, working quietly, his eyes the only light in the room.
"Tiny Ice Cube," she said softly.
Noah looked up. Removed his glasses. Offered her a smile that was mostly tired. "Oh — hello."
"I know you're busy." She was awkward about it the way she always was when she wanted something and wasn't sure she'd earned the right to want it. "But I had a sandwich made. I thought we could sit. Talk a little." A beat. "I didn't make it myself. The maids did."
Noah laughed — short and genuine, a sound that surprised both of them.
He set his tools down, pulled off his gloves, slid the sword home into its sheath. "I only need to polish it anyway."
She sat beside him on the floor and handed over the sandwich. He took an enormous bite immediately. He hadn't eaten in two days and his body had stopped being patient about it. "Thanks for everything, M—" He stopped. Adjusted. "Ada. All of this — the therapist, everything. You didn't have to."
"Money is a tool. When it needs to be spent, you spend it." She looked at him steadily. Then reached over and tapped his nose. "Not for me. For you."
He finished the sandwich. Wiped his face. Smiled.
Ada reached up and took his face in both hands. She drew him forward — not a gentle pull, a real one — and wrapped her arms around him the way you hold someone you are afraid of losing.
"A smile doesn't disappear when someone dies," she said quietly, into his hair. "It disappears when the people who loved them stop remembering. Don't let their smiles go, Noah. They live in you now."
Something in his chest cracked open.
"Ma—" He grabbed her back, both arms, the full desperate grip of a child in an emergency. "Dad—"
He cried until he had nothing left.
And then, for the first time since the island, he slept through the night without screaming.
Anna arrived the next morning and found him already at the table, moving through a stack of at least ten books. Two sat finished to his left.
"You seem better," she said, settling in beside him.
"Sort of." He turned a page. "I'm not sure how I feel."
"But better. I heard you slept."
"Something changed. I don't know what."
"You live. You love." She closed her notebook. "Those are just the foundations. But you're right — what is a therapist doing talking about love?" She tilted her head. "Science will tell you love is chemistry. A signal. A firing of neurons. I think it's the part of a bond that survives everything else — that a monster can't dissolve and grief can't fully bury." She looked at him. "You were never really afraid in those dreams, Noah. You were always trying to find a way to reach them."
Noah's eyes went wide. He looked back at his book.
"That's creepy." He turned another page. "You're creepy."
"What did you just say, you little runt?"
The smile dropped. She grabbed his ear.
He grinned straight through it.
"Mrs. Anna is so creepy," he said. "Thank you, Mrs. Anna."
Eight years of practice. She had never felt quite like this watching someone come back.
She found herself wanting to know who he would become. The question arrived before she could stop it, so she did what she always did with questions she couldn't answer through reason.
She activated her sight and looked into the future.
A man standing on a mountain of the dead. A sword raised, blazing, before the face of the Skin of Cain.
She composed her expression carefully before he could look up.
She would need to speak to Ada.