They found them in the side room off the main corridor. The one Sister Prudence used when she needed to have conversations that weren't meant to carry through walls.
The door was slightly open.
Lysander stopped outside it. He could hear voices — Sister Prudence's even measured tone, Sister Mercy's softer one, and underneath both of them the low deliberate register that belonged to Ha'ken. He couldn't make out the words clearly but the quality of the conversation was obvious even through a half-open door. Something important was being discussed carefully by people who understood the weight of it.
He looked at the door.
Then he looked at Eve.
Eve looked back at him and said nothing, which was normal for Eve, but her expression said go on in the particular way her expressions said things when she'd already decided something and was waiting for the other person to catch up.
Lysander's mouth pressed together. His hands found each other in front of him in the way they did when he was working up to something.
Eve nudged him.
Not hard. Just a small, deliberate nudge with her elbow. The kind that said now without making a production of it.
Lysander straightened up.
He pushed the door open and walked in.
The three of them looked up.
Sister Prudence was seated at the small table near the window, her hands folded in front of her in the way she held herself when she was thinking seriously about something. Sister Mercy stood near the wall, her arms crossed loosely, her expression carrying the particular weight of someone who had been in a difficult conversation for a while. Ha'ken stood because Ha'ken always stood, taking up the corner of the room with the unavoidable presence of a Space Marine in a space not designed for one.
All three of them looked at Lysander.
Then at Eve, standing in the doorway behind him.
Then back at Lysander.
He stood in the middle of the room with his slightly-too-big boots and his hair still not entirely settled from the morning and his hands clasped in front of him. He looked at all three of them with the expression of someone who had prepared for this and was now in it and was discovering that prepared and ready were not exactly the same thing.
A short silence.
Eve nudged him again from the doorway. Barely perceptible. Just enough.
Lysander took a breath.
"I want to go with Lilith and Eve," he said. Loudly. Clearly. With the particular boldness of a child who has decided something is right and has committed to saying it out loud regardless of the audience. "To Nocturne. Or wherever they're going." He paused. "Because I promised someone I'd protect Lilith and I can't do that from here."
The room was quiet.
Sister Mercy's expression moved through several things quickly before settling into something soft and complicated. Sister Prudence looked at him with the careful steadiness she looked at most things, reading him the way she read everything. Fully and without rushing.
Ha'ken looked at Lysander.
He was quiet for a moment in the specific way he was quiet when something had surprised him. Not visibly, not dramatically. Just a stillness that was slightly different from his usual stillness. He had expected, if these two appeared in a doorway, to find the same request he always found when children encountered a Salamander long enough to form an attachment. He knew that request well. He had answered it many times, in many places, with the care it deserved. Honest but gentle, firm but not unkind, leaving the dream intact even when the answer had to be no.
He had not expected this.
Protect Lilith, he thought. That's what he said.
He looked at the boy more carefully. At the set of his jaw, which was doing its best. At the hands clasped in front of him, which were not entirely steady. At the eyes, which were nervous but not uncertain. There was a difference, and this child had somehow landed on the right side of it.
He means it, Ha'ken thought. He doesn't entirely know what he's saying yes to, but he means it.
Sister Prudence spoke first.
"Lysander," she said. Her voice was even and not unkind. "What you've walked into is not an unrelated conversation." She looked at him steadily. "We are discussing you. Specifically, where you go from here." A pause, measured and careful. "What happened yesterday is known only to the people in this room, Sister Marian, and Lilith. That is a very small number of people who know a very large thing, and what we do with that — where you go, who has responsibility for you — is not a simple question."
Lysander looked at her.
He understood, Lilith had often noted, more than he let on. He processed things behind the brightness and the chatter and the enthusiastic commentary on debris shapes, and sometimes what came out afterward showed that he'd been quietly absorbing something serious the whole time.
He nodded, once, and said nothing. Which was unusual enough for Lysander that it carried its own weight.
Sister Mercy looked at him with the expression she wore when she was feeling something she was trying to hold at a professional distance and not entirely succeeding.
Ha'ken looked at the boy for a long moment.
Then he moved. Not far, just enough to bring himself lower, one knee coming down to the floor so the distance between his eyes and Lysander's was considerably less than it had been. Lysander watched this happen with wide eyes and the expression of someone receiving something unexpected and very significant.
"Your request," Ha'ken said, quietly and evenly, "will be considered."
Lysander blinked. "Considered means—"
"It means I hear you," Ha'ken said. "It means what you've asked is not nothing. It means I am taking it seriously." He held Lysander's gaze. "But it also means I can't answer you today. What you're asking, bringing you to Nocturne and placing you under the chapter's care alongside two children who are already—" He paused, choosing words. "Unusual. That isn't a decision I make alone. It goes to people above me, and those people will need to be told things that have not been told to them yet."
Lysander was quiet, processing this.
"Can they say no?" he asked.
Ha'ken looked at him.
"They can," he said. Honestly.
Lysander's jaw tightened slightly. The same expression he'd had in the orphanage room when he'd said Promise. Not childish stubbornness. Just the real and uncomplicated determination of someone who had decided something mattered.
"But you'll ask?" he said.
Ha'ken was quiet for a moment.
"I'll ask," he said.
Something in Lysander's face settled. Not relief exactly. More like the look of someone who had needed to hear a specific thing and had now heard it and could proceed accordingly.
He nodded. Serious and complete. The nod of someone accepting terms.
"Okay," he said. "I'll wait."
Ha'ken held his gaze for one more moment. Steady and unreadable and carrying, beneath the unreadability, something that might have been the particular regard of someone who had just looked at a small person and seen something in them worth looking at carefully.
Then he stood.
"Wait with the others," he said. "And don't tell Lilith we spoke."
Eve, from the doorway, made a sound that was almost certainly the closest she came to a quiet laugh.
Lysander looked back at her with bright eyes.
Then he looked back at Ha'ken with the expression he always wore when a Space Marine was nearby and he was trying very hard to be appropriate about it. The expression of someone sitting on a great deal of enthusiasm with both hands.
"Brother Ha'ken," he said, very seriously.
Ha'ken looked at him.
"You do have a very good face," Lysander said.
Sister Mercy made a sound into her hand.
Sister Prudence looked at the wall.
Ha'ken said nothing for a moment.
"Go," he said.
Lysander went, with Eve right behind him, and the door swung most of the way closed after them. The corridor outside carried the quickly fading sound of Lysander's boots scuffing away at speed, and then silence.
The three of them stood in the room.
Sister Mercy looked at Ha'ken.
Ha'ken looked at the door.
"He's six years old," Sister Mercy said, quietly.
"I know," Ha'ken said.
"And he walked in here and said that."
"I know," Ha'ken said again.
Sister Prudence unfolded her hands and refolded them, looking at nothing in particular. "You're going to ask," she said. Not a question.
Ha'ken was quiet for a moment.
"Yes," he said.