The building was already grieving when she arrived, which meant she was not the most broken thing in the room.
Sable set her case on the marble and let the terminal speak. Her equipment warmed against her cold palms, reading the residue the way a tongue finds a missing tooth — the goodbyes, the abandonments, the children dragged toward boats. The departure board flickered through cities that had drowned or been renamed. Above her, the half-alive system cycled an announcement in Finnish, patient and pointless, calling passengers to a vessel that left thirty years ago.
She did not hear him cross the hall. He simply was there, at the edge of the amber light, holding the stillness of a man who had spent his life being furniture in sacred rooms.
"They take it down at dawn," Cass said. "I came to sit with it." A pause. "You feel the same things I do. You just have instruments."
He stepped into the light and showed her — the cracked departure screen, still cycling its ghost-routes. She moved beside him. His warmth reached her before any part of him reached any part of her, a heat she could map without touching, and her hand stopped a half-inch from his over the failing glass.
Her equipment chimed. Old residue, decades deep, fused into the marble exactly where they stood. Two people. The same held breath. The same not-quite.
"We're not the first," she said. "Someone stood here and wanted and didn't. The stone kept it."
She watched the knowledge settle in him — that this was not small, but ancient.
That was when his hand moved.
