Page 173 - DivineSparkRising II-TheMirrorofSilenceFinal

Nicholas Boothman
Her brow furrowed. Done was still reachable.
She closed her eyes and found a morning on a
Porto roof where she’d climbed into cold wind to
fix an antenna for a grandmother who missed her
dead husband’s soccer broadcasts. Her fingers
remembered the bite of rust, the ache in her
forearms, the snap of a connector seating true. She
breathed in salt air and gravity.
Sofia’s tone tightened.
“That was only an action. Relief will be so much
easier if you stop keeping score.”
Carolina tried to say Sofia and her lips should
have remembered how to hurt the name, but
instead a blank kindness rose to cradle the syllables
and took them away.
She scraped her fingernails against the rail,
anchored by the mundane burn. She imagined a
pen between her fingers and let her hand move as
if writing: curves, hooks, a line through a letter that
wasn’t there. The gesture helped. A sentence
flickered like fish visible for a second. Then the
sweep erased it.
“Bridge it,” Henry said. His voice had dropped,
slow and even, the way he would speak to a
student in a lab with a fragile experiment. “Not a
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