Chapter 132: Nowhere Left to Go

Rhovan was still doing compressions when Marek realized he had not let go of Mara’s hand.

Her fingers lay loose between both of his, damp from the reflecting pool and already beginning to lose the warmth he had been holding on to. Rhovan counted under his breath as he worked, his usual confidence gone from his voice. Each compression moved Mara against the pale stone, but nothing followed on its own.

Marek released her hand and shifted back toward her chest. "Let me."

Rhovan looked at his arms before moving. "Can you keep the depth?"

"Yes." Marek placed his hands over Mara’s chest and resumed as soon as Rhovan cleared the space.

The courtyard had gone almost silent except for his counting and the faint movement of water behind him. Broken pieces of mirror covered part of the stone near the pool, catching pieces of the walkway and sky without opening anywhere.

Marek kept the compressions steady, stopping only long enough to check Mara’s pulse and give her breaths before starting another cycle. Nothing changed.

His Ophiuchus Mark had not stopped burning since Mara fell. Marek let the pressure beneath his right shoulder deepen and tried again to find something he could define as a Case. Mara was still Mara Vale. His Mark recognized that much without hesitation, but nothing else opened with it.

He tried to define the problem as the heart that had stopped beneath his hands, but no Case formed around it. Marek widened the question to whatever had happened through Mara’s reflection. He had watched the woman reach into the glass and close her hand around something connected to Mara. The attack had crossed a route and produced a result. There had to be something between those two points that Ophiuchus could still recognize.

The answer appeared while he continued compressions.

[NO ACTIVE CONDITION IDENTIFIED]

"Wrong." Marek changed the boundary again. He treated Mara as the subject and her body as the Vessel, then searched for anything the attacker had left behind that did not belong there. Nothing formed. He tried to follow the route backward instead, but even that ended before a Case could take shape.

[NO OPEN CASE]

For several seconds, the words remained in front of him while Rhovan took over the counting. Marek had dealt with injuries and conditions that were still doing something to the person carrying them. Ophiuchus could separate what was happening from the person it was happening to.

Mara’s was different. Basically, nothing was happening.

He hated the thought enough to instinctively reject it outright.

Marek reached for her hands. The paired Gemini patterns across her palms had gone dull, and the lines that had extended farther toward her wrists during training carried no light now. He pressed his thumb against one palm as though contact might give the Mark another distinction to work with.

"W-Whatever she did, take it," he whispered, his breathing ragged. "P-Put it in me."

The Mark stayed hot enough to hurt, but none of the scales answered.

Rhovan watched him for a moment. "Marek... Ophiarch..."

"There has to be something."

Rhovan lowered himself beside him, close enough to take over if Marek’s arms gave out. "I know."

"No, you don’t." Marek returned to the compressions before Rhovan could answer, forcing his shaking hands back into the rhythm he had been taught.

He counted each compression under his breath because the procedure still obeyed rules. As long as his hands stayed in the correct position and he kept the right depth, there was always another one to perform.

Somewhere in the count, he remembered teaching Mara how to ride a bicycle.

Mara had been eight when she decided she could learn to ride a bicycle in one afternoon. The bicycle had once belonged to Marek and was still too large for her even after he lowered the seat twice, but she refused to let him adjust it again. He ran behind her with one hand gripping the back while she counted every push of the pedals as if reaching ten would make balance permanent.

She made him promise not to let go. Marek promised, then released the seat several seconds later when he realized she had stopped leaning against his hand.

Mara made it halfway down the lane before turning her head. The moment she saw him standing behind her, she steered directly into a hedge.

She came out scratched and furious, more offended by the broken promise than the crash itself.

"You said you were holding me!"

"You were already riding and doing good at it."

"Because I thought you were there."

At the time, Marek had laughed while helping pull leaves from her hair. Mara spent the rest of the afternoon insisting she would never trust him with anything again.

His hands pressed down on her chest now.

Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.

He stopped for breaths, checked again, and found nothing. When he started the compressions again, the memory stayed with him.

This time... Marek had thought he was there.

A faint crackle of silver light came from the mirrors behind him. He turned and saw Venielle standing beside the broken frame with one bloodied hand pressed against its surface. Thin lines spread from her fingers, reached the largest crack, and died there.

"Where did she go?" Marek asked.

Venielle kept her hand against the mirror. "I can’t reach her."

"Open it again."

"The route is gone."

"Then make another one."

She finally looked at him. "Not now."

Marek stood before he realized he had moved, and Rhovan immediately took his place beside Mara so the compressions would not stop. "Why?"

"Because the moment I open one, you’ll go through it."

"Then, open one that reaches her."

"And if she’s waiting on the other side?" Venielle asked. "You saw what she could do in a space she controlled."

"I don’t care."

"That’s the exact reason why I won’t do it," Venielle insisted.

The answer made him take another step toward her. "You recognized her. The moment she came through, you knew who she was."

"Yes."

"Then, tell me where she would go."

"I don’t know where she went."

"She came here to kill Mara because she wants someone else to be the only successor to the House of Gemini." Marek could hear his voice getting louder and did not care. "You know her. Give me something."

Venielle’s expression tightened. Blood had reached her fingertips and was dropping onto the pale stone below the mirror. "I know enough to tell you that chasing her through a route she chose would be stupid."

"So, let me be stupid!"

"Marek." Rhovan had spoken from beside Mara. Him calling Marek by his name alone spelled the gravity of their situation.

Marek went back to Mara and knelt beside her again. Rhovan shifted aside without saying anything, and Marek took over the compressions.

Time became harder to measure after that. Someone kept track because Marek heard an answer whenever he asked how long it had been, but the numbers stopped feeling connected to the body in front of him.

Ten minutes could not belong to Mara. Neither could fifteen. The courtyard looked almost exactly as it had before the procedure began, which somehow made the passing time worse. Water still filled the shallow basin, and the mirrors Venielle had uncovered for Mara now stood cracked and dark on either side of it.

At seventeen minutes, Rhovan told him his arms were shaking again. Marek ignored him until one compression landed too shallow, then moved aside immediately and let Rhovan take over.

The mistake frightened him more than the exhaustion.

Marek sat on his heels beside Mara’s head and checked her carotid pulse even though Rhovan had checked only moments earlier. Nothing moved beneath his fingers. His Mark was still open, but instead of asking again about an injury or a route that might still be acting on her, he changed the question to the one word he had been avoiding.

Death.

The response took longer this time, or perhaps he only wanted it to.

[STATE IS NOT A TRANSFERABLE CONDITION]

"Why?"

No explanation came.

He tried to define what had changed between Mara standing in the pool and Mara lying beside it. If something had been there and was gone now, perhaps the absence could become the Condition. He tried the missing heartbeat first, then the breath that no longer came. He asked whether whatever had left Mara could be taken into him instead, making himself the Vessel if that was what Ophiuchus needed.

The Case still refused to open.

Marek closed his eyes.

Ophiuchus could take what was killing someone. He had built everything he understood about his Mark around that fact.

It could not take what had already killed them.

"Don’t stop," he said.

Rhovan kept working.

After another cycle, Dario crouched beside them. "If Venielle gets the route open, do we take her back to the shelter?"

Marek looked across the pool. Venielle still had one hand against the damaged mirror, but every line of silver light she sent into the cracks faded before it could spread.

"Not while we’re doing this," Marek said.

Dario nodded and moved away.

Another pulse check gave them nothing. By the time they passed twenty minutes, Marek’s knees hurt against the stone, and Rhovan had pushed his sleeves above his elbows. Sweat ran down the side of his face as he worked, but his hands remained steady.

"Let me."

"You need another minute."

"I’ve had one."

"You’ve had about thirty seconds."

"Rhovan."

Rhovan looked at him for a moment, then moved rather than waste time arguing.

Marek resumed.

There was no single moment when he accepted that they had lost her. The certainty came slowly from everything that failed to happen. Mara did not cough or drag in a breath. Nothing moved because she wanted it to. Whenever her arm shifted, or her head turned slightly against the stone, it was because someone else had moved her.

Marek continued regardless.

Venielle eventually left the mirrors and came closer, stopping several steps away. She did not tell him to stop. Somehow, that made him angrier.

"You promised me you would protect her," Marek said.

"I did."

"You said you would stop it if something went wrong."

Venielle looked at Mara before answering. "I failed."

Marek’s hands faltered.

He corrected the next compression immediately, but the words had already reached him.

He wanted her to argue. He wanted Venielle to tell him that the correspondence was more complicated than it looked, or that there was another route she had not found yet—anything he could cling to until she proved it.

Instead, she had only said she failed.

Marek kept going until Rhovan placed a hand near his wrist between compressions. "Your arms are going again."

"I can still do it," Marek argued.

"You can, sure." Rhovan did not pull him away. "But you’ve checked her pulse. You’ve asked your Mark the same thing every way you know how."

"Because there’s supposed to be an answer."

Rhovan’s hand stayed near his wrist. "Then find it without destroying your arms first."

Marek looked down at Mara.

Her wet hair had begun drying unevenly around her face. Someone had closed her eyes during the resuscitation, though Marek could not remember who. The repaired seam beside his pocket pressed against his thigh as he knelt there, and for a moment he remembered Mara ordering him to sit still while she fixed it less than an hour earlier.

His hands remained over her chest.

He could keep going until his arms stopped working and let Rhovan take over again. He could change the boundary one more time and convince himself that he had defined something wrong.

Even after all that, Mara still... would not breathe.

His hands stayed there for several seconds before he finally lifted them.

No one said anything.

He checked Mara’s pulse himself one last time and left his fingers against her neck long after there was anything to count. Her skin was not as warm anymore, and when he finally let the Mark close, the courtyard returned without anything layered over it.

There was only Mara in front of him.

Marek slid one arm beneath Mara’s shoulders and pulled her carefully against his chest. Her head settled awkwardly against him in a way that would have made her complain if she were awake, and for a moment he almost adjusted her before remembering there was no reason to anymore.

The thought broke whatever he had still been holding together.

Tears ran freely down his face as he lowered his head against her hair. His fingers tightened into the fabric at her back until his knuckles hurt, but Mara remained loose in his arms, giving him none of the irritated resistance he would have expected from being held too tightly.

Across the pool, Venielle stood beside the dead mirrors with blood drying along her sleeve. Rhovan remained nearby, close enough to reach Marek if he needed him, but he did not try to take Mara away.

Marek raised his eyes to the water.

The reflecting pool had gone completely still. Its surface rested beneath the pale courtyard light without so much as a ripple, carrying a calm Marek could not find anywhere inside himself. He stared at it for several seconds as though simply looking at something so quiet might help him breathe properly again, but his chest only tightened harder around every breath.

He had spent days following records, roads, strangers, reflections, and every trace that could tell him where his family had gone. Every time Mara disappeared from one place, there had always been another direction to take, another person to ask, another road he could force himself to keep walking.

This time, Mara was already in his arms, limp and lifeless.

Since Day 367, whenever she had been beyond his reach, Marek had always been able to keep looking.

Now, there was nowhere left to go.