Chapter 25: Without Claim

"Sau-lin." The name entered her body before sound reached sense. Her hands formed first. Creases returned to her palms, followed by the faint blue of veins under skin. Her ribs remembered their cage. A pulse struck once in the hollow where Callum's heart had sounded for seven days. A century and a half of mouths had called her girl, specter, devil, tourist attraction. They had borrowed another dead woman's name because it fit on a pamphlet. Callum said hers without asking what it unlocked. It unlocked nothing. The steel walls remained. The tether still ran from the jade hairpin into his bruised hand and through her bones. Beneath the city, the Cypress kept its title. Her body knew the name anyway. "Sau-lin," he said again. She had not asked him to repeat it, and she did not stop him. Fog pressed against the van windows. Beyond them, the eighth morning…