Kael's POV
The fourth floor was empty. I stood in the doorway for a moment and looked at the space and the absence of him in it was more present than it had any reasonable right to be.
The equipment was where it always was. The floor was clean. The light was the same light. Everything was exactly as it should have been and the thing that was wrong about it was simply that he wasn't there.
I walked in anyway.
I sat against the fence post along the near wall, which was where I always ended up eventually, and looked at the empty training space and did not think about the corridor two nights ago.
The forearm across his chest. The way his voice had said his name… my name… with the particular voice it had sometimes that I had been carefully not examining. The image I had been carrying since Reiss handed me the incident report, the one I had constructed from Jen's notation and the mana monitor data before I pulled it from the review queue.
