I almost said her name again—to slow her—but she was already crossing the alley. She sheathed one dagger without looking and lowered herself to a knee, careful, hands open, palms empty.
"Hey," she said, voice not quite steady and not pretending it was. "You're alright. I've got you."
The girl flinched. Not at the closeness. At the color. Lyra's hands were red to the wrists, and the child's gaze stuck there like frost. Lyra saw it too. She stilled, breath caught, then wiped her palms on the black of her cloak until the worst of it was gone.
"See?" she whispered, showing them again. Clean enough. Not perfect. Honest.
The child's throat worked. A raw, wet sound came out—broken at the edges. No word. Not possible. The place where a scream should live had been taken from her.
Lyra's face changed. Softer, like she set something heavy down so she could kneel lower. "Alright," she said, quieter. "We can do this another way."
She didn't reach for the girl. She turned her own wrists instead, held them out, and let a breath of fire bloom along her skin. It came small, blue-white, the way a hearth might be coaxed from coal. The shackles around the girl's wrists flared, heated, and cracked. Lyra blew on the metal to keep it from biting flesh and used the point of her dagger to pry it open.
"Almost," she murmured. "Almost—there."
The iron split. The girl didn't run. She swayed, lifted her hands as if they were foreign, then looked up at Lyra and tried to make a sound. Nothing came. Panic shuddered through her slight frame.
"No," Lyra said. "No more trying. Just breathe."
She held out her arms. The invitation was simple as a door left open.
The girl fell into her.
Lyra caught her like something breakable and held on. The child's fingers clutched at Lyra's cloak, at the leather of her shoulder harness, at anything that proved someone would not let go. A small, raw noise shook out of her with every breath.
Revik looked away. Muir did, too. I didn't. I couldn't. Not because it was painless to watch, but because it wasn't, and because a part of me needed to see it.
"We go," I said, when the first shouts of boots on wood reached us from the main pier. "Muir, take the girl and Lyra front. I'll take the cargo."
"No," Lyra said, without looking up. Her voice wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. "I'm front."
She stood with the child gathered against her, light and fierce all at once. I nodded and shifted the merchant onto my shoulder; he groaned into his gag and learned a new definition of silence.
We moved.
East stairs, down and under the lip of the quay where kelp clung and old ropes lay forgotten. The cooper's yard was a black-toothed gap, barrels stacked like vertebrae in the dark. We ghosted through it—four shadows and a fifth carried—while the dock behind us opened its eyes and started telling stories about fire.
Twice we paused, tucked behind stacked timber while guard helms bobbed past. Once we stilled because a group of men with pikes charged the other way, toward the wrecked ship and the screams that were already only steam. Revik kept rear, blade loose, his breathing even and eyes everywhere. Muir watched for corners and cutpurses with the distracted attentiveness of someone who could turn a puddle into a noose if asked.
Lyra didn't stumble. The girl's weight was nothing. The weight inside her was not. Even from behind I could see it working under her skin—something crawling.
We reached the lane that climbed behind the cooper's wall to the high road. It was narrow enough to bottleneck a regiment and blind enough to lose one. Our kind of path. At the top crouched an abandoned cart; we slid the merchant into it, threw a tarp, and added two junk crates for guiltless noise.
Muir hopped the other side, took the bar, and grinned without humor. "I always wanted to be a mule."
"You're overqualified," Revik said.
"Overqualified and underpaid," Muir replied, and started the slow drag.
Lyra didn't put the girl down. She didn't look back. The child's face was tucked under her chin, breath hot against Lyra's collarbone.
We made the ridge and turned into the wind, which tasted of iron and distant pine instead of harbor rot. The town fell away in layers: first the red behind us, then the voices, then the clatter. Quiet found us out there, thinned by frost and the sound of cart wheels over frozen ruts.
Only then did Revik speak to Lyra, too lightly, trying: "You realize subtlety is a skill we could practice together."
She glanced at him. Not a smile. Not nothing. "Later."
He nodded, something like relief and worry both in the angle of it. "Later."
We took the long way to one of Muirs safehouse. The cottage was a smudge of dark under a heavier dark. Revik went in first, checked windows and floor and the hollow under the hearthstone. He gave me a hand sign I trusted with my life.
Inside was small and clean in the way of places left to wait: one room, one cot, a table, a basin, a wall peg for a coat that wasn't there. We put the merchant on the table and bound his ankles; Muir checked the gag and, with professional cheer, tightened it enough to bruise.
Lyra sat on the cot with the girl still in her arms. She leaned back against the wall, eyes closed for one breath, then two. The rage in her had quieted, but it hadn't gone.
I rinsed blood from my hands in the basin and watched the water turn pink, then clear, then pink again. When I looked up, I caught it: a flicker at Lyra's temples, a fine tension along her jaw that wasn't pain. Something working. Something waking.
"Rai?" Revik said low, near my shoulder.
"I see it," I answered.
He nodded once, mouth a line. He didn't ask. He wouldn't—not here, not now, not with a child asleep on Lyra's heartbeat and a man on our table who would talk when I asked him the right way.
Muir sank onto the floorboards with a dramatic groan. "If anyone would like to compliment my hauling, I'll accept offerings in coin or kisses." He glanced at Revik, then away, and for once let the joke die on its own.
I went to Lyra last.
The girl had finally drifted; the soft, uneven breaths hurt more than any cut I'd taken tonight. Lyra's eyes opened as I approached, violet in the dim, and found mine without searching.
"You knocked him out," she said. Not an accusation. A marker in the ledger.
"He was waking the town," I said. "And calling you crazy."
A corner of her mouth moved. "He wasn't wrong."
"No," I said. "He wasn't."
We left it there. She looked down at the child and smoothed a curl back from a soot-streaked cheek with a touch so careful it made my chest ache.
"We'll get her warm," I said. "We'll get her fed. We'll find her a voice that doesn't need a tongue."
Lyra's throat worked. "And him?"
"Tomorrow," I said, and felt the weight of it settle into place—a clean, familiar heaviness. "Tomorrow, he talks."
Silence stretched. Not empty. Full in the way of a room where nothing more needs saying because everything has been said and no one wanted it.
I turned away last, to the window's thin slice of night. The fire on the horizon had guttered to a dull stain on the sky. My hands were steady. My breath was even. The work was set in tidy rows in my head: where we moved next, who I spoke to first, how long the merchant could hold out against the particular order of questions.
And under all of it, the thing I couldn't set in rows.
Something in Lyra was changing.
Not her dragon…something darker.