I'd like to say I'm just that good— [ Sabine says while picking up some of the books and piling them on to the bed table so that even those aren't that far from him if he decides that's what's happening with the next while, in a bit, too. ] —but I think if I had made a new book or two appear daily, you would have caught on.

[ Beat. ] And I'd have had to open a bookstore.


It's this place.

[ She pauses, two books in each hand, and glances at the one in his hand. His shock lines up with a second, and her expression wrinkles only briefly, correlating her past memory of it now synced up to his having it, too. It'd been lost a long time ago to a life it was better to walk away from with nothing rather than not to walk away from it at all—one of a handful of small, invaluable treasures. The last memory of it—the shape of a gun cut out of it, tinged with grief and rage—until now.

Sabine's mouth curved the smallest of whisps, and she nodded at it,
a very I have the best of surprise tucking into all the corners of her expression. ] Open it.