"Lack of evidence never stopped you from gross confabulation before," Harrow says, remembering finding Gideon sitting by a niche at five, twelve, seventeen, telling the bones within every mediocre detail of her life. Of arguments that burst into fights, Gideon's Maybe they were important answered by Harrow screeching Prove it and raising skeletal hands to drag her to the ground.

She'd never expected Gideon to be right; even now, the idea seems impossible. Slowly, Harrow worries her cuticle with the bitten edge of a fingernail. "But I can...see how just a crumb of the truth could never be enough. Learning it now, when there's nothing to do but know it."

Harrow can hear Gideon breathing behind her, slow and even, quiet in the moments after her suggestion--or offer, or request. The scant few inches of space that lie between the two of them are a thing she's keenly aware of, a void easy and impossible to cross. The danger she'd feared here, in her vulnerable state, hasn't come to pass--but in concentrating on that she'd made herself blind to other hazards.

"I'm fine," she says, staying still and hunched, her face aflame.