The fourth temperature did not spread like fire.

It spread like silence after a scream that had lasted too long.

In the mud of the contested origin, beside the body of the dying Luna who had once demanded more time, the new writing sank deeper than syllables were supposed to reach. It was not an eighth memory or a ninth. It was a redefinition: the first night had never been a ledger. The open heart, the mud, the walking away of Grayson and Delilah, the raw demand thrown at the dark—none of it had been a transaction. It had been a wound. And wounds, unlike debts, did not automatically generate...