The sylph at Boula's ear trasmitted perfectly her sister's suspicion. "He disappears suddenly...and his room is dim? Doesn't he have a job to take care of?"

"Right, at The Libra."

"And didn't you say you didn't particularly know if he even had anyone else that he was close with, other than you?" The sylph even snorted in derision, rustling its body against the skin of her ear. She repeated, "And the room was dim?"

"Yes."

"Then...wouldn't it be likely that maybe...if maybe for an instant, the lights failed —"

"No," Boula said stiffly. "It wasn't that. There weren't signs of struggle, or signs that the room had been dark at all. He really just...disappeared. He doesn't even necessarily have that room anymore — I took all his stuff."

"You took all his stuff?"

"Well — most of it — letters and things, not the furniture." There wasn't any place to put it.

"Do the letters say anything?"

"I haven't opened them," Boula said with pursed lips. "Leu, come on, that's illegal."

"Who cares? He's not there to read it. I mean, according to you and your darkest fears, he might not even come back at all, right?"

"Leu. They're mostly bills and stuff anyway. From High."

"If it's just bills and stuff, that's all the more reason why there's no point in not reading them. Maybe that's where he went," she snorted, attempting some humor. "To pay bills. Anthem High."

They were quiet. Boula stared at the scratchy false gold frame of the compact mirror, letting Leucan's face look at her, frozen with furrowed brows and tongue partly sticking out from a mouth in mid word.

"Bou?" Leucan said finally, and Boula dragged the back of her hand across the mirror, wiping off the condensation into a new image of Leucan, looking dismayed.

"I'm alright," Boula told her, knowing that Leucan would see through it. "I just needed to talk to someone. But I'm hungry now, so I'm going to get something to eat. Let Mother and Father know I'm alright."

"Right," Leucan said, sounding relieved. "Ah...contact me later...if anything new comes up, alright?"

"Of course."

Boula clipped the compact shut and tossed it on her bed. That was Leucan — slow and awkward to comforting. In some ways Boula only felt worse than she did before.
She went to the window and looked outside, across the expanse of the city, lit in grids and webs of opalite wire. Somewhere out there — in the shadows, in a building — there was Seph. Safe, hopefully. No way to tell that he really hadn't just run off and was perfectly fine. No reason to feel that he wasn't fine except that her feeling that somehow, he definitely wasn't.

She glanced across the city, and then upward. Perhaps not in the shadows or buildings at all.

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