Timi keeps moving.
The guest quarters stretch wide and quiet, too quiet for a place meant to hold laughter and tired students. He runs the perimeter in long, soundless strides, feet finding the ground by instinct more than sight. The night air is cool, carrying the smell of damp grass and generator oil. Somewhere far off, a door creaks. Somewhere closer, something breathes when it shouldn't.
He slows.
There—movement where movement doesn't belong.
The bushes along the fence line trembled with intent, not wind: deliberate, patient shifts of form. Shadowed figures hunched among the leaves, the kind of men who practiced waiting and wore patience like armor. Their silhouettes were simple, human shapes folded tight against the dark. They thought their camouflage was perfect.
He became the opposite of thought.
He slipped from shadow to shadow, a dark thing unannounced and utterly present, so quiet he might have been a sound someone forgot to hear. The knife at his hip was a cold weight against his thigh, familiar and small, an old friend who never spoke. He did not flare into motion so much as allow motion to collect around him—breath measured, steps counted, every nerve tuned to the soft geometry of the night.
At the first bush he brushed past, a figure shifted. A boot whispered on dry leaf. Timi's hand went to the man's shoulder in a movement that blurred gentleness and force. A palm covered a mouth; a forearm steadied a head. There was no dramatic struggle—only the economy of necessity. The man's breath flattened into the hush of something contained. His body folded like a story closed, the sound of his breath retreating into the dark.
Another moved, startled, spine reacting faster than thought. For a second their eyes met—wide, alive, human in a way that made the possibility of noise dangerously close. Timi's face was an impossible stillness in that sliver of time. He was both nearer and farther than anyone should be. The world narrowed to the two of them: heartbeat, the faint metallic scent of a knife, the cold press of night air. Then the other went still. It was sudden, yes, but not theatrical; a paragraph ended. No shout rose. No ruin bloomed.
A twig snapped somewhere deeper in the hedge—an accident or a misstep—and Timi's spine tightened the way a horse's might at thunder. A pair of heads turned, curious, then alarmed. He moved through the arc with the same quiet authority that had become his paradox: swift enough to be decisive, controlled enough to be unreadable. Limbs slackened against root and leaf, bodies folding where they stood as if sleep had come early and without consent.
For those who registered him—who blinked and tried to speak—his interventions were merciful in their brevity. A palm pressed to a mouth. A wrist twisted not to teach pain but to teach silence. A weight applied and then withdrawn. It was surgical, in the sense of being precise and final; it was not spectacle. Nothing rang. Nothing echoed. The night held the sound and swallowed it.
When the last of them went quiet, Timi stepped back, breathing slow and even, like someone who had been running and then decided to stand. Leaves settled where his shadow had passed; the fence-line relinquished its secrets as if it had never held any. The perimeter exhaled—a small, private easing through the compound.
He lingered there a moment, palms cold, the knife feeling less like a tool and more like an answer to a question he didn't remember asking. Moonlight lit the slick of damp on his jacket and mapped the angles of his face into a study of calm. Then, as if on cue with the night, he pulled his hand away, wiped it on his thigh without drama, and melted back into the promenade that skirted the guest quarters, a single ghost among many.
The bushes resumed their patient posture. The threat was folded away.
He keeps moving.
His body knows where to go even if his mind doesn't. Muscles pull him forward along the wall, past shuttered windows and dark balconies. He passes one room, then another, all of them asleep, all of them unaware of how close the night leaned in.
Then he slows.
Not because of sound.
Because of light.
A single window is uncovered. Moonlight spills through it in a clean diagonal, silver and patient, cutting across a bed like a blade made of calm. It touches a figure lying there, peaceful and utterly defenseless.
Nila.
Her hair—silky, impossibly dark—fans across the pillow like spilled ink. The moon catches in it, softening the black into shades of blue and deep violet. Her skin glows pale under the light, near white but warm, alive, the kind of complexion that seems to hold its own quiet radiance. Her features are gentle even in sleep: high cheekbones kissed by shadow, long lashes resting against her cheeks, lips slightly parted as if holding a secret meant only for dreams. There's something unmistakably regal about her even now—Middle Eastern elegance, refined and delicate, like she belongs to a lineage of people who were once painted onto palace walls.
Timi stops breathing for a second.
The night goes very still around him.
She looks unreal. Not fragile—precious. Like the sort of beauty that isn't loud, that doesn't ask to be noticed, but commands attention anyway. Moonlight crowns her softly, and for a moment the world narrows to that single room, that single sleeping form.
Awe hits him—clean, sudden, almost painful.
Then something inside him snaps back into place.
What am I doing here?
The question lands hard.
He blinks, steps back from the window as if burned. His heart starts to pound, not from exertion now but from confusion. The perimeter. The bushes. The men. That all makes sense in the way instincts make sense.
But this?
He has no memory of deciding to come here. No plan that leads to her window. No clear thought that says protect, or watch, or guard. And yet his feet carried him here like it was inevitable, like some unseen current bent his path without asking permission.
He presses his palm against the wall, grounding himself.
Why her?
Why now?