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As soon as the Toki forces have control of the Sand Castle, Jessa leaves Ronak in charge and plunges into the Castle halls. Fuck the prisoners and the Queen’s bones and the invasion and all of it. There’s one task she can trust to no one but herself.
Oona should be on the Moon Moth by now, well out of the harbor and on her way to Aamlak Isle. Perhaps she is below decks taking a nap, or busy eating lunch, or perhaps she is too caught by the beauty of the deep blues of the Toki Sea and the novelty of the horizon to look back to the shore. Selfishly—probably uselessly—Jessa hopes the tides were strong, and that they had rounded Catamari Point before the smoke from the Sand Castle started to rise. She never wanted Oona to witness this destruction.
The hallways of the Castle are familiar and strange all at once. They’re smaller, to Jessa’s adult eyes, far less grand and far more weathered than the visions in her childhood memory. She can see the cracks, now: the self-aggrandizing carvings full of legends that fall apart upon the lightest inquiry, the raw and calloused hands of the Toki servants, the literal cracks in the walls that no one in the Sand Castle remembers how to repair. Still, a more critical eye cannot fully erase the ache of nostalgia crushing her heart. She passes a bench where she and Oona ate lunches together. The courtyard where she summoned her first aniform. A deceptively deep wedge of a corner obscured by a table that was the site of her greatest hide and seek victory.
She grits her teeth against all of it. There’s something far more important she has to retrieve.
Once she’s in Dean Plumb’s office, she doesn’t have to wonder where to look. She doesn’t know how she missed it, all those years she lived as a human. The pull is a physical thing, dragging her to a false panel of the wall that she claws at with her nails for several frantic moments before she manages to steady herself and think logically. She finds the hidden lever. The safe behind the wall is a paltry thing, its lock easily broken with a small burst of heated nanite sand. The door swings open.
She retrieves her own coat first; she can’t help it. Something primal and desperate takes her over, makes her reach in and snatch it and hold it to her chest, breathing heavily, teeth bared, ready to rip out the throat of anyone who takes it from her again. She doubles over, just clutching the coat to herself for several long moments. It hurts, this restoration. She’d begun to feel the coat’s absence years ago, an uncomfortable gap in her body like a missing tooth, but still she could not remember what it had felt like to actually have it. It was an abstract sense of something missing, like waking from a dream with a grief so soul-filling she was still crying, but unable to remember what about. Now, with her coat finally back in her hands, the pain of being without it for years seems to slam her all at once.
She blinks back to herself on her knees, her cheeks wet with tears, hands trembling. She scrubs her face clean and carefully tucks the seal pelt into her bag. Steadying herself on the wall, she rises back to her feet, reaches into the safe, and, more gently and carefully than she has ever handled anything in her life, takes Oona’s coat out of the safe.
It’s a tiny thing, neatly folded up and left untouched for years. The seal fur is almost unbearably soft beneath Jessa’s fingers, its color the brilliant cobalt blue of the Toki selkies. She cradles it, careful not to clutch it with the same violence she had her own.
Fresh tears overflow and Jessa lets her knees give out a second time. Wherever Oona is right now, Jessa hopes she can feel this, somehow, feel her sister’s embrace, feel herself freed from the lifeless confines of the safe.
“We’ll be together again soon,” Jessa whispers into the fur. “I promise. It’ll be better now. I promise.”
Jessa kneels on the floor of Plumb’s office and weeps, hugging a small piece of her sister for the first time in years.