Chapter 12: Zane

The study door shut, and the whole keep went quiet around them.

Ambrose did not ask.

He stood at the window with his bare left hand pressed flat against the glass, and the gold in it pulsed slow and steady.

Linus sat on the edge of the desk where, a day earlier, he had been kissed breathless.

It was harder to look at than the Hall had been.

"I'm going to tell you something that will sound insane," he said.

"Tell me."

"My name is Zane Thorne."

The Marshal turned his head.

"I'm twenty-nine. Or I was. I was a soldier in a place that isn't here. Another world."

Linus kept his voice level.

"There was a ship full of people that was going to burn. I had power in my hands, the kind that gets used up. I used all of it."

"You died," Ambrose said quietly.

"I think so. I thought it was the end."

He swallowed.

"Then I was standing on a stage in a body that wasn't mine, with a stranger's name on a screen."

He made himself say the rest.

"The boy you saw on that ridge isn't me, Ambrose. I wasn't there. I've never seen Sere Station."

His voice dropped.

"The boy who lived in this body did that. And I don't know where he is."

The room was silent.

Linus waited for the Marshal to flinch.

He was braced for the flat voice, the formal question and the careful step backward.

Instead, the Marshal crossed the study and knelt in front of him.

He took Linus's bare right hand in both of his, the gold one and the plain one.

"Look at me," he said.

Linus looked.

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