The ringing in her ears tasted like zinc.
Klee blinked through the haze of pulverized limestone, her left thumb immediately seeking the knuckle of each finger in sequence. Index, middle, ring, little. One, two, three, four. The skin was scarred across the joints, stiff from old chemical flash-burns, but the tendons pulled clean. Good. All ten accounted for. It was a stupid habit, one Alice had never taught her, born instead from a winter in the Mare Jivari when she had lost sensation in her extremities for three days straight. She tapped them again. Four beats.
The air cleared, but the silence did not belong to her.
It was too dry. Mondstadt smelled of wild garlic, river silt, and horse manure, but here the breeze lacked the iron tinge that had choked the Cider Lake perimeter ever since the southern sluice gates collapsed.
She stood in the center of the Acting Grand Master’s office.
The cedar desk was whole. There was no deep, blackened furrow gouged across the grain where the Skirk-spawned rift-hound had torn through the lintel eight years ago. The curtains were the heavy, unfrayed crimson velvet from the early years of the Fatui peace talks, not the patched sailcloth Jean had been forced to requisition after the docks burned.
Jean herself stood behind that desk.
She looked horrifyingly young. Her throat lacked the pale puckered stitch of the Abyssal lance-wound, and her hair was gathered in a pristine ribbon that hadn't yet lost its silver thread. Her hand rested on the pommel of an unchipped Favonius sword.
"Identify yourself," Jean said. Her tone was measured, but her weight was shifted slightly back on her left heel—a duelist’s habit she only adopted when an explosion occurred inside her own four walls without an accompanying alarm from the gate guards.
Klee did not raise her hands. If you raise your hands, people assume you are hiding a detonator under your armpits; if you drop them to your sides, they shoot for your collarbone. She kept them loosely curled at waist height, resting near the satchel buckles.
"Klee," she said.
Her voice was an octave lower than it had been when she last slept in the small cot upstairs, stripped of the bouncy squeak that used to buy her out of solitary confinement. It was dry from too much saltpeter.
Kaeya laughed softly from the shadow of the archive cabinet.
He hadn't made a sound until then. He was leaning against the mahogany, tossing an unpeeled apple between his hands. "An ambitious alias, friend. Little Klee is currently under house arrest in the library for turning the northern fountain into an improvised pressure-cooker. Albedo was just heading down to inspect her work."
Klee’s eyes cut toward the bay window.
Albedo stood there. He wore his old coat, pristine and free of the ash-fall grease that would eventually turn the cuffs black during the purge of the Spire. His expression was a familiar slate of calm, but his right thumb was tucked firmly into his vest—an alchemical seal-breaker posture. He was ready to salt the floor with geo crystallites if she twitched.
Yet he said nothing. He stared at the brass rings hanging from Klee’s belt, his pupils dilating slightly. He recognized the alloy; he had forged those exact containment hoops himself, but the formula for that specific density of cor lapis was one he had only written into his private journal three nights prior. He held his tongue, refusing to give Jean reason to call for the perimeter archers.
Klee knew that look. Albedo was calculating the margins of an impossibility and choosing to protect the data before the people. He hadn't changed at all.
"The seal on the hearth-flue is cracked," Klee said, looking directly at Jean. "You’ve been stuffing draft-stoppers into the gap instead of calling the masonry guild because the quartermaster's budget is four hundred thousand mora short after the storm terror reparations."
Jean's eyes narrowed. She did not confirm it, but the tight set of her mouth gave her away. She was hiding the treasury deficit from the Captains, just as she always had. "Who sent you?"
"Nobody sends an artillery specialist through a displaced ley line fissure," Klee said. "It’s a waste of powder."
She stepped back. The heel of her right boot struck the leg of a side table, and with a practiced, deliberate twitch of her ankle, she drove the brass locking-spindle of her ruined chronometer up into the hollow lining of her boot heel. The Knights could search her pack; they would find primers, dried fish, and three dull graphite sticks, but they would not find the crushed core that had dragged her back ten years across the marrow of Teyvat. She took the initiative before Kaeya could close the distance, planting her stance squarely on the hardwood floorboards.
"You smell like brimstone," Kaeya observed. He moved away from the shelves, circling wide to cut off her line of sight to the double doors. "And an uncommon variety of dusk bird grease. Not Mondstadt supply. Liyue harbor, maybe? But the crest on your cape is third-cohort Favonius."
"Second cohort," Klee corrected flatly. "The star on the lapel is six-pointed. The third cohort switched to four after the fall of the Whispering Woods."
A heavy, brittle quiet settled into the room.
Jean did not flinch, but her jaw muscles tightened. "The Whispering Woods are thriving. There is no six-pointed star in the Favonius register."
"Not yet," Klee said.
She looked at Kaeya. He was smiling, but his single blue eye was completely devoid of light. He was hiding the dossier in his breast pocket—she knew the yellow corner of that particular parchment; it was the weekly dispatch from the Dawn Winery detailing suspicious movements along the Dragonspine ridge. He hadn't shared it with Jean because he didn't trust her not to ride out there herself with a company of exhausted conscripts.
They were all carrying their miserable little secrets, just like they used to. It made her chest ache with a sudden, suffocating irritation.
"Albedo," Jean said, never breaking eye contact with Klee. "Scan her for abyssal corruption."
Albedo stepped away from the window. The scent of cecilias and wet chalk followed him, a smell Klee hadn't realized she’d forgotten until it filled the air between them. He raised his hand, the gold star on his throat catching the morning light.
"May I?" he asked quietly.
Klee didn't answer with words. She simply held out her left wrist, turning the palm up. The skin was rough, calloused from flint strikers and heavy brass casings, but under the skin, the faint, flickering ember of her Pyro Vision pulsed with an irregular, exhausted heartbeat.
Albedo pressed two fingers to her radial artery. His touch was cold.
He remained still for three breaths. His gaze drifted down her arm, over the patched red sleeve, to the small silver ring welded to her fourth finger. It was an alchemical marker—his own mark, the solar pattern he used to verify that an apprentice’s crucible had reached absolute zero.
A tiny, hairline fracture ran across the surface of the silver ring. Within that crack, pressed flat against the metal, was a dried petal of an Inteyvat flower—a species that did not bloom in Mondstadt, nor anywhere under the open sky of the Seven.
Albedo looked up. His eyes met hers, and for a fraction of a second, the mask of the Chief Alchemist slipped into something raw, fragile, and utterly terrified. He took his fingers away as though he had touched white phosphorus.
"Well?" Jean demanded.
"No corruption," Albedo said. His voice was too steady, the calibration too precise. "The elemental signature is pure. In fact... it is remarkably familiar."
"A shapeshifter?" Kaeya asked, stopping three paces out.
"No," Albedo replied, keeping his hands locked behind his back so Jean could not see the faint tremor in his right index finger. "The matter is authentic."
Klee looked past him, toward the heavy oak door leading to the courtyard. Down below, she could hear the faint, muffled thud of an explosion, followed immediately by the shrill, frantic blowing of an iron whistle. The other Klee—the small one, the one whose knees weren't scarred from shrapnel, the one who still believed her mother was simply on a long vacation—was running through the flowerbeds with soot on her cheeks.
Jean’s shoulders dropped half an inch in instinctive, motherly exasperation before she caught herself and stiffened again, glaring down at the woman who wore that same girl's red clover.
Klee did not smile. The familiar sunlight cutting through the high arched windows did not feel warm; it felt foreign, like an old coat she had outgrown until the seams bit into her shoulders. They were all alive here. Every single one of them had two arms, a straight spine, and a full set of lungs.
And they looked at her as if she were a bomb they didn't know how to dismantle.