The last thing Atheris did with her life was leave it.

That was fitting. She'd have laughed, if there had been time to laugh — she had spent thirty-odd years perfecting the exit, the bag packed before the argument, the goodbye so warm nobody realized it was one, and in the end the exit was what she was doing when everything stopped. She was in motion. She remembered that much. Rain on a dark road and her breath loud in her own ears and the specific, familiar lightness of having just left something — that helium feeling right behind the sternum, terror and relief in the same body, the door closing behind her and the whole night opening up ahead like an apology.

She remembered running. She did not remember from what. That felt less like forgetting and more like tact, as if her memory had decided, kindly, that it no longer mattered.

Then the road went out from under her — not the way ground gives, the way a sentence gives, when someone stops speaking in the middle of it — and there was rain, and there was the smell of rain, and then there was only the smell.

She woke curled around herself, knees drawn in, chin down, small as she could make herself. Seed-shaped. She'd slept that way her whole life, in beds that belonged to other people, ready to be gone by morning.

The first thing was the sound. A single note, held. Low and reedy, like wind pulled through a gap too narrow for it, except no wind touched her and the note never wavered, never breathed, never needed to. It didn't seem to come from anywhere. It seemed to be the silence here — as if this place had simply decided that this was what quiet sounded like, and had never once reconsidered.

The second thing was the smell: rain, and crushed flowers.

She opened her eyes.

She was lying in a petal.

Atheris did what she always did in an unfamiliar room. She lay very still and located the exits.

There weren't any.