Chapter 25
SERA
The City is screaming through the stone.
Three strikes. Pause. Three strikes.
Metal on old pipe, probably. Maybe one of the lower watch stations. A scout with a hammer and enough terror to make rhythm out of panic.
Emergency. Collapse. Movement below.
Something has gone wrong where wrong things have no room left to be polite.
Kavor sets me on my feet before I ask, and for one stupid breath, I hate the absence of his arms. Then the alarm strikes again. Three. Pause. Three.
Duty comes back like heat. It drops over me all at once, the old familiar weight settling across my shoulders, heavier than the pack I’m not carrying, heavier than pain, heavier than want. Want can wait. People can’t.
I tighten my grip on the map and the sample bundles. Healthy strand. Blackened strand. Broken anchor. Gray-residue thread. All of it wrapped, labeled, separated, precious enough to start a war and fragile enough to die in my hands.
My injured arm throbs hard enough to spot my vision at the edges. I ignore it. Kavor notices, obviously.
“Sera,” he says.
“No.”
“I did not speak.”
“You breathed like you were about to.”
“I was going to ask if you can climb.”
“I can climb.”
His gaze drops to my arm.
“I can climb badly,” I amend. “Efficiently enough to be annoying.”
“That is likely.”
“See? Agreement. We’re evolving.”
The emergency signal strikes again.
The tunnel ahead angles upward through old stone split by zemlja pressure. Dry heat seeps down from above, carrying dust, smoke, sweat, and the sour bite of too many frightened bodies in an enclosed space.
City air. My lungs know it before my mind does. Home, if a person is generous with the word. Trap, if a person is honest.
Kavor moves beside me, not ahead, though every line of his body wants to. I can feel it in the way he keeps one claw near the wall and one near me, as if the tunnel might make a legal argument he intends to answer with violence.
He doesn’t touch me. Good. Bad. Useful. Pain takes a bite out of my next step. I keep moving.
The tunnel narrows, then cuts sharply right.
The stone changes from natural pressure break to old City repair work.
I know the difference even before I see the patch marks.
Human hands make ugly fixes. Zmaj hands make strong ones.
City hands make whatever will hold until everyone forgets to be afraid.
This one did not hold.
A fracture runs across the ceiling, black dust falling from it in thin streams. Someone has wedged old metal braces beneath the worst section, but two have buckled. Fresh scrape marks scar the floor where people fled or dragged something heavy.
The alarm is above us now. Three strikes. Pause. Three.
Then voices. Muffled. Human. I stop. Kavor stops too. My heart slams once, hard enough to hurt.
A woman shouts somewhere beyond the stone. A child cries. Another voice answers, distorted by the passage.
“Lower cistern access,” I say.
Kavor’s head tilts, listening.
“No water in it anymore,” I add. “Not for years. We use the outer chamber for storage when the heat’s bad. Sometimes shelter. Sometimes ration overflow. It connects to the east service hall.”
His eyes shift toward the ceiling fracture. “The zemlja pressure reaches near it.”
The frozen fingers of fear trail down my spine. I clench my fists and nod.
“Of course it does.”
The tunnel opens into a low access crawl, half-blocked by a fallen slab. Beyond it, no red emergency light glows because there is no electricity, no miracle lamps, no powered warning system. Only torchlight. Fire in wall cups. Shaking shadows.
People. Too many. The air carries panic like rot.
I duck through the crawl first because I fit more easily. Kavor follows with difficulty, his wings scraping the stone, his horns nearly catching on the broken lintel. He says nothing, but I hear the tightness in his breath.
Open spaces bother him. So do too many directions. So does danger he cannot kill.
The lower cistern access is chaos, but it’s not a full collapse.
The chamber is long and arched, carved from old City stone and patched so many times that the walls look diseased.
Cracks branch across the floor, glowing faintly white-gray in places where the wrong rhythm has crawled through buried channels.
Dust hangs thick in the torchlight. Storage bundles have spilled open: dried root, hide wraps, empty water vessels, broken tools.
People crowd the far end, pressing toward the east service hall. Others kneel near the cracked floor, trying to pull someone free from under a fallen storage rack. A rack has pinned two children against the wall. Lysa’s children.
My blood turns to ice.
Lysa is there, hair coming loose, hands bloody from trying to lift metal she cannot move. Beside her, Penr braces his shoulder against the rack, face gray, too young and too terrified to be useful alone.
One child is crying. The other is not.
Everything in me goes quiet.
Then moves.
“Sera!” Penr sees me first. His voice cracks. “Sera, it shifted. The floor just shifted, and the rack—”
“I see it.”
I shove the sample bundles and map against Kavor’s chest. He takes them without question. Good male. No. No time.
“Keep these separated. Do not let anyone touch them. Especially not Adran. Especially not anyone else.”
His eyes sharpen. “Sera.”
“Do it.”
He looks past me to the trapped children. Then back.
“I have them.”
I believe him, and that costs nothing now. Everything moves to later.
I push through the dust toward Lysa.
Her eyes catch mine, wild and red. “Please. Please, Sera. Miri is not answering.”
“I know.” I do not know. I cannot know. “Move your hands.”
“I can’t—”
“Move your hands.”
The old voice comes out. Route voice. Emergency voice. Do not think. Do not feel. Count exits. Count weight. Count bodies. Lysa obeys because people do when my voice goes that flat.
Good, even if I hate it.
Penr shakes too hard to hold the rack steady. “It keeps slipping.”
“Then stop fighting it.” I point to the left brace. “Hold there. Not the top. The top twists. Put your shoulder under the crossbar. If it drops, drop with it. Do not fight upward.”
“I can’t lift it.”
“I didn’t ask you to lift it.”
Kavor steps beside me. The chamber changes when people see him. Some recoil. Some freeze. A few whisper. Urr’ki curses. Zmaj names. Outsider. Cavern. Monster. Protector. All of it dust under my boots.
He ignores them. His gaze goes to the rack. Then the children. Then the cracked floor beneath.
“Left side holds,” he says. “Right side is sinking.”
“Can you lift?”
“Yes.”
“Can you lift without shaking the floor?”
His mouth tightens. Bad question. Necessary question.
“No,” he says.
I look down. The cracks beneath the rack are not random. They run in a broken arc around the children, following old channel lines under the floor. White-gray pulses faintly in the deepest seam.
The wrong rhythm is here. In the City. Not beneath us anymore. Here. My stomach turns over. The City has been sitting on a sleeping mouth, and now it’s learning to chew.
“Kavor cannot lift yet,” I say, loud enough for Lysa and Penr, but not loud enough for panic. “We need to brace before we move anything.”
Lysa makes a small broken sound.
I crouch. The child who is crying is Tavi, the older one. His leg is pinned, but his chest moves. Miri is smaller, her face turned away, one hand visible under a torn bundle of dried root.
No movement.
No. Not no. Not yet.
I reach through the gap with my good hand, ignoring the way my injured arm screams when I shift balance. My fingers brush Miri’s wrist. A pulse. Faint. There.
“There’s a pulse,” I say. Lysa sobs once. “Do not do that yet.”
She clamps both hands over her mouth. Good. She can break later. Not now.
I look around. “I need wedges. Hard ones. Stone or metal. Not wood. Wood will shear.”
People stare.
“Move!” I snap.
They move. Kavor’s gaze flicks to me. Something burns in them. Not red. Not desire. Something more. Respect in the middle of terror. I can’t look at it.
Penr scrambles toward a broken brace. Ila appears from the crowd, sharp as ever, pale under the dust but moving fast. Thank Tajss. She shoves two metal wedges into my hand.
“I knew it was you,” she says.
“Good or bad?” I ask.
“Both.” Ila’s gaze cuts to Kavor. Then the bundles at his chest. “You found something.”
“We found a problem dressed as hope,” I say.
Her mouth tightens. No questions.
That is why I love Ila, though I have never told her and do not intend to start during a structural failure.
Kavor lowers himself beside the rack. The chamber is too small for him, too crowded, too full of watchers. His wings are tight, his breathing controlled. I see the cavern-born discomfort in the way his claws test the floor before accepting weight.
He is in a room too open, with too many people and too much unstable stone. Still, he waits for my call. My instruction. Words matter. Especially now. Especially with my mouth still remembering his.
I jam one metal strip under the rack’s left base. “Penr, shoulder there.”
He moves.
“Lysa, stay back.”
“No—”
“Stay back or I drag you back and waste time.”
She hates me. I see it on her face. Good. Hate me and live.
I set the second wedge near the rack’s right leg, close to the sinking floor. The white-gray line pulses beneath my fingers.
Cold shoots through my injured arm. The bandage flares. I gasp before I can stop it.
Kavor’s head snaps toward me. So do three other people. Damn it. I close my fist around the bandaged arm and force my face to go blank.
“Sera?” Ila asks.
“Later.”
Her eyes narrow. She misses nothing. Terrible woman.
“Kavor,” I say.
He is already ready.
“One hand under the crossbar. Not the side frame. Lift enough to shift weight onto the wedges. No more than that.”
“Yes.”
“Penr, when it lifts, pull Tavi back by the shoulders. Not the leg. Ila, you take Miri.”
Ila’s face flickers. She knows what Miri’s stillness means. She also knows there is no time to mourn a living child just because she looks dead.
“I have her,” Ila says.
“Kavor, on my count.”