They talked for hours, in the east building room that had become Corva's, the two of them working through sixty years of a single shared morning with the specific thoroughness of witnesses finally permitted to compare notes.
I wasn't in the room for most of it. Some things weren't mine to witness directly — they belonged to the two people who'd carried them.
But near evening, Corva came to find me.
She had something in her hand.
"Maren kept this," she said. "All this time. She said Elara gave it to her the last morning, before anyone understood what was coming. She said she never knew why she'd been given it — she'd assumed it was simply kindness, a gift from someone she barely knew, extended because Elara was like that. Generous without calculation." Corva held out her hand. "She's ke
