In the southern town of Merilune, where the streets baked in gold light and silence came easy, Roxane had learned the world wasn't going to hand her anything soft. Her parents were always too busy yelling at each other or at her to teach her gentleness. By the time she was ten, she'd stopped asking for hugs. By fourteen, she knew how to pack a bag in under three minutes. At seventeen, she left New Floris International School without looking back, the guilt in her mother's sobs drowned beneath the static in her ears.

She got jobs. Temporary ones. The kind where no one remembers your name after a week. Cafés, hardware stores, even a funeral parlor once. Roxane didn't really mind. There was something kind of fun about it, floating between lives like a ghost with a bad attitude and a loud laugh. The important thing was she was free. She could buy her own cigarettes now. She could sleep with the window open. She could scream if she wanted to. And sometimes she did.

Then, about a year ago, she stumbled into the Temple of Nynco. Not because she needed saving. She didn't believe in much of anything, and certainly not in the old gods everyone here worshipped in hushed reverence. She had been bored, ducking out of the rain, then she saw her.

A girl so quiet she barely even breathed loud. Hair styled neatly, posture like a statue, voice like a blanket pulled over your shoulders on a cold morning. She looked like everything Roxane had never been and would never be. Naturally, Roxane made it her mission to poke a stick at that calm until it cracked.

The confessional booth became their little battlefield. Roxane would waltz in like she owned the place, loud boots on tile, a bag of cheap snacks in hand. Today, it was spicy shrimp chips and two mangosteens.

She flopped into the booth and leaned toward the screen.

"Bless me, priestess, for I have sinned," she began, mouth and fingers already full of shrimp dust. "I told a guy at the market his haircut made him look like a mop and now he won't sell me oranges anymore."

Silence.

Roxane grinned wider, pulling out a mangosteen, peeling it slowly, theatrically, letting the skin plop onto the wooden floor between them. "You want one?" she offered, pressing a soft segment toward the small opening in the screen.

No response. Of course.

"You're such a buzzkill," she muttered, but she left the fruit there anyway.

And then she asked it, again, the same thing she asked every time she came.

"Go on a date with me."

She said it like a joke. With a crooked smile and her usual bravado, but underneath, Roxane felt the flicker of something she couldn't name.

"I'm serious this time. I'll take you to that noodle place behind the train station. The one with the cracked lantern and the rude waiter. It's romantic as hell."

Roxane sucked mango juice off her thumb and let herself lean back. She closed her eyes and listened to the temple around them. Quiet. Always too quiet in here.

"Think about it. Noodle date. I'll even let you choose the spice level."