29. Althea
ALTHEA
Jorek's people come in loud, which is the one mistake he makes, because loud in a ruin this old is a death sentence and I know it before they do.
I have lived my whole life inside dead structures, learning which ones forgive you and which ones don't, and this city does not forgive.
Every shot Jorek's boarders fire brings down more of a ceiling that's been waiting three centuries for an excuse, and they don't read it, because they're hunters and not scavengers, and a hunter looks for prey while a scavenger looks for the thing that's about to kill them both.
So I stop running from them and start using the city against them.
I pull Caelis with me into the gallery levels, the unstable ones, the ones my eye flags as one good vibration from collapse.
I let Jorek's forward team see us. I let them chase.
And when they're strung out along a colonnade I've already read as failing, I put a salvage charge into the one load-bearing spar holding it up, and I bring a thousand years of stone down between them and the archive, sealing half his force off in the dark.
The other half adapts faster than I'd like.
They stop bunching and start moving in pairs, covering each other, and one of them gets a clean line on Caelis and I have half a heartbeat to shove him sideways into a fallen plinth before the shot goes through the space his head was in.
The return fire chews the plinth to gravel over us.
Caelis is shaking. 'I'm an engineer,' he says, like an apology, like he should be better at this.
'I fix the ship. I don't — this isn't —' 'You don't have to fight them,' I tell him, dragging him along a service gap the hunters are too big to follow into.
'You just have to help me read the building.
The building's going to do the fighting.
' And it does. I know these bones now, the way I've always known dead structures — which spar is load-bearing and which is decoration, which floor is a floor and which is a lid over a three-hundred-foot drop somebody forgot to chart.
I walk Jorek's people across the lids. I let them think they're flanking us and I lead them out onto a gallery that hasn't been a gallery for centuries, just a memory of one held up by rust and habit, and when they're all on it I drop the last good support and the whole thing folds into the dark with them on it, screaming, and the city eats them the way it's eaten everything else that came here to take instead of mourn.
It should make me feel something. Mostly it makes me feel like a girl who spent her whole life learning exactly which part of a dying thing will kill you, finally getting to choose who stands where when it goes.
"You just buried six people," Caelis says, wide-eyed, hauling me back from the dust.
"They came here to bury all of us." I'm already reading the next room. "Daxira sent them. I want to know where she is."
I find her the way I find everything — by following the value.
There's a command channel threading through the city's awakened systems, encrypted, routed back out past the dead zone's edge, and when I tap into it on a salvaged relay I get a voice I've heard exactly once, on Armstrong, the day my whole life turned into someone else's chess move.
Daxira. Directing the whole hunt from a safe distance, the way she's directed everything, never her own hands, never her own risk.
"She's not even in the zone," I tell Caelis, and something hard and clear settles in me. "She lit me like a fuse and she's standing back to watch me burn, same as always. She thinks she's safe because she's far away."
Her voice picks that moment to find our channel, smooth as poured oil, because of course she has been listening.
"The courier speaks," Daxira says, delighted.
"I did wonder whether you'd ever work it out.
You were always resourceful. It's exactly what made you such convenient kindling.
" I let her talk. Talking costs her nothing and tells me she still believes I am a thing that can be rattled by being seen.
While she enjoys her own voice, I start rerouting the city's own waking defenses, the ancient guns Saren flew us past, turning their faithful three-hundred-year murder-instinct toward the targets I feed them.
"Let's teach her that this city decides who's safe. "
The ruin answers me. It shouldn't — I'm not Ishani, my blood is nothing to it — but Caelis routes my commands through Saren's authorization, and the dead guns wake, and they turn on Jorek's ships in the dark, and the hunt becomes, very suddenly, a slaughter running in the other direction.
And the whole time, under everything, the city is coming down around us.
I've spent the structure's patience to do it.
Somewhere below, Saren is still pulling the truth out of the dark, and I have to hold this place together long enough for him to finish, in a building I've personally talked into falling.