"Oh, good. If I have Saint Daniel on my side I'm sure I'll be in perfect shape in no time," she says, then looks deeply apologetic and mortified that she said it out loud. Sometimes she still forgets that other people can hear her. "Sorry. Being in a cage has made me edgy. I know you're trying to help."

She would have called him a friend. She liked to think that she was worthy of such friends, normal people from the real world, or at least, as normal as anyone who speaks at least ten dead languages is. Like she didn't have to surround herself with warriors and survivors and the deeply-damaged to find an easy balance.

But if anything, now she can only see the gulf between her and Daniel. Between his idealism and belief in human good, and her history of violence so extensive that torture and imprisonment feel more normal to her than the alternative. And she knows she can never get to the other side again.

He should have been her friend. She doesn't know what he is now. What she's made of their relationship.

"I'm sorry. For all of it." The library, the pancakes, the sound of cartilage collapsing under her fingers. "They attacked us in our home and I wanted to...I'm sorry."