Chapter 5 – The Room Without Weight

I demand the truth. Cassian takes me to a room where lies cannot stay on the floor.

It hangs beneath the palace on chains above the sun core. Inside, gravity breaks into slow currents. Furniture drifts like wreckage. Every spoken falsehood becomes a black bead that rises to the ceiling and remains visible.

“Tariq is alive,” Cassian says.

No bead appears.

My knees fail though there is no floor to catch them. Cassian anchors us with one hand on a brass rail and the other offered—not imposed. I take it because I need something colder than hope.

“Where?”

“Inside the core complex. He designed a way to replace emotion fuel with freely donated memories. The Council imprisoned him when he refused to weaponize it.”

“You knew.”

A black bead forms between us.

His jaw tightens. “I suspected.”

Another bead.

“Cassian.”

“I knew he survived. I did not know which chamber held him.” This time the words remain clean. “I kept you away because the Council promised to kill him if a Qamar approached the core.”

The truth does not absolve him. It does, however, make my hatred lose its simple shape.

We drift near the room’s center while the broken gravity turns us slowly. His coat floats open, revealing old burns across his chest—concentric rings from the first artificial sunrise. He built the machine with his own body inside its test field. The tyrant’s invulnerability has always been theater.

“May I?” I ask.

He nods.

I touch one scar. Through the oath I feel the day it formed: Cassian holding a failing shield while civilians crossed behind him, screaming at engineers to increase the light though it stripped skin from his bones. He receives my answering memory—Tariq carrying me through a sandstorm, promising that clever people can build shade where none exists.

Our defenses do not vanish. They become visible, which is more frightening.

Cassian touches his forehead to mine. “If we survive, you will still hate me for what I did.”

“Frequently.”

“Good.”

The kiss begins with permission and ends with neither of us pretending it is strategic. Weightless, we cannot pin or possess each other. Every movement requires cooperation. When we part, the room is full of bright breath and not one new lie.

A metallic click sounds inside his coat.

I find a second letter hidden beneath the first. It is addressed to the Council in Cassian’s hand: KEEP ZAHRA QAMAR CLOSE. HER BOND CAN STABILIZE THE WOLF CIRCUIT.

Suspicion returns, sharp enough to cut.

Before I can ask, an explosion punches through the palace foundation. Gravity slams back. We hit the floor as alarms begin below us.

The sun core’s temperature doubles.

Across the observation glass, a figure appears inside the burning machinery. Thin, bearded, older than my memories—but unmistakable.

Tariq raises one hand toward me.

Then Council soldiers drag him out of sight.

The observation glass remains lit for eight seconds before the soldiers take Tariq. In that brief window he taps a sequence against his brass wrist: two, three, five, seven. Prime numbers, our childhood code for a message that must be read backward.

I replay every sentence Cassian spoke in the room. KEEP ZAHRA QAMAR CLOSE. HER BOND CAN STABILIZE THE WOLF CIRCUIT. Backward, the apparent order is a warning: the circuit becomes stable only while I remain outside it. If the Council brings me close, it can use my bond to reach every wolf.

Cassian wrote the letter where his ministers would find it, making them believe he intended to use me while secretly discouraging them from seizing me first. A strategy built from deception, protection, and arrogance in equal measure.

“You could have trusted me with the code,” I say.

“When we met, you were stealing from me.”

“I am still stealing from you.”

I remove his signet while he checks the damaged gravity controls. He catches me and, after a pause, closes my fingers around it. The ring grants access to the engineering levels but also carries the last legal fragment of his sovereign power.

“If the Council captures me,” he says, “the city must see you holding that.”

“They will call me your accomplice.”

“They already call you my pet.”

My wolf bares her teeth inside me.

“Then let us disappoint them in a new direction.”

We use the last minutes before the assault to map the core from the room’s drifting debris. Teacups become guard towers; black lie-beads become Council patrols; the child’s compass marks a maintenance shaft that remains cool. Cassian gives me every secret route, including the one that leads to his private escape tunnel. I cross it out. No one leaves without Tariq.

When the explosion strikes, we do not fall as strangers. He turns to shield my head; I hook my knee around the rail and keep him from being thrown through the glass. Trust is not forgiveness. It is a tool we choose to use while the truth is still unfinished.