In Azad, a writer learns that the people she wrote in Zavet were real before she ever wrote them. Some have crossed over to find her. In Tangier, one of them, an archangel who was once a soldier, asks her to explain the family she gave him.

在《Zavet》的世界里，一位作家发现，她笔下的人物在她落笔之前就已真实存在。其中一些人跨越而来寻找她。在丹吉尔，其中一位——曾是军人的大天使——要她解释她给了他一个怎样的家族。

When I look up, Wolfgang is watching me from the doorway, broad shoulders filling the frame, that composed stillness of his never quite disguising the alertness underneath. I stand, cross the room, and fold myself into his big, lean body. His arms close around me, the familiar weight and warmth of him so comforting it steals, for a moment, the chill from my thoughts.

He surprises me then, his voice a low grumble into my hair. “Ma’am… Mikhail is in the patio. He wants to talk with you. Alone.”

I draw back just enough to look up at him. It isn’t only that he’s slipped back into calling me Ma’am, formal and distant, like the first months we knew each other. There’s a tightness in his jaw, a tension coiled in his voice that sets every old alarm ringing.

“All right,” I say quietly. “Tell him I’ll be a minute. I have to get dressed.”

Wolfgang doesn’t move.

“Well, go on. Let him know.”

“First I want to see you change.”

“No time for that, naughty boy.”

He turns, rumbling something about the art of concealment, and how he’ll master it. I pay it no heed.

I feel him before I see him.

When I step into the sahn, cool tiles under my soles, the fountain murmuring at its centre, his silver eyes are already on me, holding me in place as cleanly as any command. My heart does something I decline to examine.

“Walk with me,” Mikhail says.

I don’t ask where. I fall into step beside him.

Three turns out of the riad, the tiled calm gives way to the layered noise of Tangier: the narrow streets of the medina, whitewashed walls stained with time, the air thick with spices, exhaust and sea salt. Voices jostle around us, vendors calling, scooters whining past, laundry fluttering like flags overhead.

“Explain to me,” he says quietly, eyes forward, “what this project is exactly about. And while you tell me, feel the eyes tracking us.”

I turn to him, a protest already shaping itself. Before it lands, Mikael catches my hand and pulls me in, one smooth, impossible motion, and his wings unfurl, silver-black, folding around us like a living cloak.

“Mikhail!”

“Don’t worry,” he murmurs against my ear. “We’re in a dimensional pocket now. They can’t see us. But we can see them.”

Through the thin, shimmering veil of his feathers the street is still there, only distant now, as if seen through water. A few metres away, two men in too-neat jackets have stopped dead. They talk urgently into their wrists, fingers at their earpieces, turning in tight circles, scanning the crowd for a couple who vanished in plain sight.

I watch them until my pulse steadies.

“Start with this ‘project,’” he says. “But you and I both know that’s not the real knot. There is… an elephant in the room, as the English say.”

A dry laugh catches in my throat. “Of course there is.”

He waits. He has always been good at that, holding silence until it turns into confession.

“All right. You remember the corridor that wouldn’t end. You and Elena.”

His silver gaze doesn’t waver.

“Somewhere between those worlds, you conceived a daughter.”

“You and I.”

“No. You and Elena.”

“You are Elena.”

“In a way.”

He draws me closer against him. “I can smell you. My sight does not betray me.”

I let that pass. “Kendra slipped out of your arms in another jump. We lost her between worlds. And Indra is Elena’s too, Tarmo’s daughter. She was the one nearly swallowed with her father when the python god took him. Karim pulled her out of that monster’s throat, quite literally, while you flew her up out of the lake.”

He flinches, just once, at Tarmo’s name, then stills again.

“Sandi took Indra after that. Out of necessity, not malice. Hid her, moved her. Elena was half broken, and you were at the mercy of the whims of the universe.”

His jaw works. “And the other one. Kendra.”

The answer is in Quantum Gravity.
答案在《Quantum Gravity》里。

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© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange, published by CYcrds OÜ