Jhed crouched down close.
The girl's head snapped up.
"Oh—" Jhed stumbled backward, heart lurching. "You scared me."
He steadied himself, then looked at her properly for the first time.
"What are you doing here?" He offered a small, awkward smile.
She buried her face in her knees again.
Then — just as suddenly — she looked back up at him.
"Are you alive?"
"If I'm talking to you," Jhed said, "then yes. Probably."
She didn't answer.
Was that too much.
The smell hadn't gotten any better. Jhed kept one hand loosely over his nose and waited.
They sat in silence for a while. Long enough that it stopped being uncomfortable and became something else — just two people in a dark room, not ready to speak yet.
"He left you alive too," she said finally. Not a question.
"No, actually." Jhed's voice came out surprisingly light. "He tried very hard to kill me. It just didn't work."
She narrowed her eyes. "You're lying."
"Why would I lie about that?"
"Then why are you alive?"
"That," Jhed said, "is something I've been wondering for fifteen years."
Another silence.
"He left me alive because I was the king's daughter," she said quietly. Like a fact she'd stopped feeling anything about.
Jhed went still.
King's daughter. So her father — Luccos. The man in the throne room, begging Miruth to stop.
He looked at her properly now.
Her hair was partially red, partially black. Dark eyes. A small mole beneath one eye. Dry, cracked lips. Dark circles carved deep under her eyes — the kind that came from not sleeping, or sleeping wrong, or both. Dried blood on her clothes. Dirt on her skin.
Seventeen, maybe. Possibly younger.
She's been in this room for a while.
"Do you know about the prophecy?" Jhed asked.
She laughed — short, humorless. "The prophecy. Yes. I know it. A hero will come and save the world." She shook her head. "How childish. I don't understand how anyone believed it. My father talked about it constantly — 'one day the hero will come, one day we'll be free.' Eighteen years. No one came."
"Maybe they're running late," Jhed said.
She didn't smile.
"No one's coming to save us," she said. "We have to save ourselves."
Jhed looked at her.
She's right. She's completely right. And she figured it out faster than most people do.
"I'm Jhed," he said. "And you?"
"Nain."
Jhed leaned back against the wall beside her and let himself think.
I've been in this world for fifteen years and I still know almost nothing about it. Linea kept me inside, kept me safe, kept me ignorant. I don't blame her — she was trying to protect me. But here I am, in a jail cell full of dead children, with no plan and no information.
The people outside this room — the ones in the mine, the ones in the houses — they don't have healing. They don't have what I have. Every day is a gamble for them. Every day they could become one of the bodies in this room.
That's not fair. That's deeply, completely unfair.
He looked at his hands again.
Why do I heal? Why was I given this? What am I supposed to do with it?
He thought about his first life. The apartment. The dark room. The game running on his phone while everyone else moved through the world without him.
If I were still there, I'd be playing Linux 3D Pro right now. Or watching her — that actress he'd liked, whose face he was starting to forget. She'd been twenty-nine when he died. She'd be older now. He'd never actually met her. He'd always been too afraid to go outside, too afraid of being seen, too afraid of everything.
Fear kept me in that room. Fear kept me small.
And then I ended up here.
He almost smiled at that.
A whole other world, and I'm still trying to figure out how to walk out a door.
"If you can think it," Jhed said quietly, mostly to himself, "you can reach it."
Nain looked at him sideways. "What?"
"Something someone wise said once." He paused. "Maybe I can get back to my old world someday."
"There's no way back," Nain said flatly.
"Maybe." Jhed looked up at the ceiling. "But I'd rather believe there is."