The hotel room had grown too quiet, the silence not peaceful but dense, filled with the echoing words of the day—*carry them until I can give them back*—and the image of a man weeping on a stone bridge. Y/N found the four walls pressing in, the carefully maintained composure of the day fraying at the edges. She needed air that didn’t taste of recycled grief.

She slipped out into the Swiss night without a word to Sana, who slept soundly in the other bed. The cold was immediate and sharp, a clean slap against her skin. The city, however, was alive with a soft, luminous warmth. Strings of delicate white lights crisscrossed the narrow cobblestone streets, glowing orbs hanging from wrought-iron lampposts. It was a festival of light, perhaps an early celebration against the winter dark, transforming the orderly precision of Geneva into something dreamlike and fleeting.