Plans covered the terrace. Figures coiled like springs; pencil lines made arguments sharper than blades. Perturabo kept himself a degree apart—as if closeness were a siege ladder left against his walls. Feeling lingered in him like furnace heat: anger banked, pride deep‑rooted, a hard egotism that refused to rust. Yet some strand in him wished to be seen by her—seen as more than what he had become, or what his father had made of him.
"Windows are liabilities," Perturabo said without looking up.
"Unless they're calibrated traps that also let light in," Aurelia answered, sketching a bench inside a killing field.
He regarded the drawing until irritation softened into interest. "A niche that looks like hospitality and is in fact a refusal." He added a note: light preferred; murder optional. It might have been a joke. It might have been a new doctrine.
"You are more than other people make you," she said, not unkindly. "More than walls and defences, more than orders—even more than what our father has set his hand to. But that only becomes true when you wish to be more."
He did not reply. The pencil halted, then moved again with exactness that looked like fear disguised as control. The words were too close to others he had heard long ago from a sister named Calliphone, and that frightened him. He drew a counterscarp that doubled as a promenade and, not quite smiling, conceded a view.