Chapter 139 SLEEPWALKING

Chapter 139 SLEEPWALKING
THIRD PERSON

Yvaine looked at the ankle. It was more swollen than it had been before sleep, the wrapping had done what it could but the walking had undone some of what the rest had been building. She looked at Kai again.

“I’ll get Coraline,” she decided.

She left without waiting for a response, pulling the door behind her, and then it was the two of them in the dim room and Lyra propped against the pillow.

Kai sat on the edge of the bed.

He looked at her face properly, the tightness around her eyes from the ankle, the slight unfocused look since she woke up. He had been looking at this face for years and what he was seeing right now was not simply pain and disorientation.

There was something else, he could not name precisely. This was more like a residue. Something left behind by whatever had happened in the corridor.

“Why did you get up?” he asked, keeping his voice even.

She looked at him with her brows drawn together. “I didn’t mean to,” she explained. “I mean, I didn’t decide to. I was in bed. I remember being in bed. I remember Yvaine sitting in the chair.” She paused, pressing her lips together. “And then I was in the corridor, my ankles gave out and you were there” She stopped on the inhale again.

“Take a breath,” he urged.

She breathed.

“You were sleepwalking,” he suggested, keeping his voice neutral. Offering the explanation.

She looked at him. “Do I sleepwalk?”

He thought about the answer to that honestly. He had known her almost all her life childhood and adolescence and every year between, the summers and the winters. Lyra Voss did not sleepwalk. She never had. She slept with complete unconsciousness and she woke and there was nothing wondering.

“No,” he answered.

She looked at him steadily. “Then what was that?”

He did not have an answer. Concern and a growing sense of wrongness twisted together in his chest.

The ankle should have woken her. That was the thing he kept thinking of. The moment weight was placed on that ankle in any normal state of consciousness, the pain would have been immediate. He had watched her hiss and tighten her jaw at movements considerably smaller than the sustained walk she had apparently taken through the Academy corridors and out onto the grounds. The ankle was not a minor sprain that could be walked on in a half-conscious state without producing a response. It was a significant injury. It should have woken her the moment she stood.

It had not woken her.

She had walked on it all the way to wherever she had been going to and she had been coming from that direction when he found her, without any pain response at all.

It was not sleepwalking.

He did not know what it was.

“I don’t know,” he admitted honestly, because lying to her about this on top of everything else was not something he was willing to do. “But you shouldn’t have been able to walk on that ankle without waking up. The fact that you did—” He stopped.

“Concerns you,” she finished.

“Yes,” he confirmed.

She looked at her hands in her lap. The lamplight was casting an amber shadow, making everything in the room look slightly more significant than it might in broad daylight.

“I was walking toward the field?” she asked.

“From the direction of it,” he confirmed. “The entrance to the lower grounds.”

She frowned. “Why would I go there?”

“I don’t know.”

“In the middle of the night. With my hurt ankle without even waking up.” She shook her head slightly, caught herself, and stopped. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t.”

She looked at him, and in her eyes was the thing he had been watching since she woke up, she was searching, trying to access something her forgotten memories. “Is there something about the field?” she asked. “Something I should know? Something connected to why I’m here or how I got hurt?”

He held her gaze.

The lie was right there. The same one he had told earlier, carefully constructed and all he had to do was repeat it and be convincing enough that she accepted it again.

He looked at her face. A quiet refusal to add another layer of deception settled over him.

“You need to rest,” he told her instead. “Coraline is coming. Let her look at the ankle before we talk about anything else.”

She studied him for a long moment.

She waited.

“Alright,” she conceded, quietly. The word was a temporary concession rather than an agreement, and he understood that the question was not dismissed, only deferred.

They sat in the dim room without speaking, and the silence between them was not uncomfortable even without the year she had lost. Even with his face as the only anchor she had in a room full of unfamiliar things, she sat in the silence with him the way she had always done. The familiarity eased something tight in his chest.

He looked at her.

She was looking at the window.

He thought about the field entrance. About the direction she had been walking and what was at the end of it. He thought about what the training field represented, the marks in the earth from the crash, the place she had been standing on when everything had gone wrong.

He thought about why any part of her, even the part that was not consciously accessible right now, would be walking toward it in the middle of the night. A deep, unsettled worry settled over him.

The door opened and Yvaine came in with Healer Coraline behind her, the healer already reaching for her kit.

Kai stood to make room.

He stepped back to the wall and watched Coraline examine the ankle with gentle hands and listened to Lyra answer the healer’s questions.

Coraline worked in silence for the most part.

She unwrapped the ankle, examined the swelling with careful hands, asked Lyra to describe where the pain was concentrated and how it had felt when the weight went on it.

She rewrapped it with fresh bandaging, tighter than before, and set it back on the pillow with the instruction that it was not to move from there until morning.