Around the same time, on the other side of the city, Luna found the clone.
She'd been looking for him — moving through the quieting streets with purpose, stepping around the aftermath of the battle, until she spotted the familiar silver-white hair and crossed the distance without hesitation.
She thanked him directly. No ceremony, no elaborate words. Just clear, genuine gratitude from someone who meant it.
The clone shook his head easily. "This is Loriel's home city. I'd do it again without being asked."
Luna looked at him for a moment after that.
She'd already revised her understanding of him several times tonight. The healing, the fighters who had appeared from nowhere and turned what should have been a massacre into something survivable. Each revision had pushed her ceiling higher. That simple sentence pushed it somewhere she stopped trying to put a number on it.
