Chapter 21 #2
I let him drop. The wolves pin him. Mira binds him before he gets his breath back. We move.
The south corridor runs deep. The air gets heavier with every step, the ward-magic pressing against my skin, thick, resisting every step.
The stone walls narrow. The windows disappear.
We’re underground now, into the estate’s bones, and the hum of the dead-man’s switch is louder here, a bass vibration I can feel in the soles of my feet.
Third junction. Left branch. The door has no handle. Smooth stone, seamless, warded so heavily the air in front of it ripples.
“This is it.” Mira puts her palm flat on the surface. Her eyes close. “The failsafe thread runs through the center. I can see the connection to Konstantin’s vitals. The node is live.” She opens her eyes. “If I cut wrong, the system inverts and everyone inside dies. Give me my eight minutes.”
“You’ll have them.”
I plant myself at the junction. Two corridors converging, both stretching into shadow, the ward-light dim and unsteady at this depth. The gift banked and ready. Every sense reaching down both approaches, listening for boots, for breathing, for the displacement of air that means someone’s coming.
Behind me Mira starts. The pressure thins at the node and thickens around it, sealing in around the cut she’s making in the wards. Her breathing is measured. One second in, one second out.
One minute. Two. The wolves at my flanks have their ears tilted toward the east approach. They heard something I didn’t. I tighten my focus.
There. Boots. Moving fast.
At minute three, two guards round the east corridor at full speed and the first one has a ward-breaker in his hand, designed to disrupt magical work in progress. If he reaches Mira, the node neutralization fails.
The power grabs the device out of his hand.
He stares at his empty palm for half a second and I use the half second to cover the distance and put him through the wall.
His partner swings for my head. I duck it.
The blade passes close enough that I feel the displaced air across my scalp, and my body does the ugly efficient thing it does now, the force reaching into him and finding the fault line and pulling before I’ve finished choosing to, and he goes down and stays down and I don’t look at what the pulling did.
The heat kicks. A spike from low and inside, the twins responding to the combat, the amplification surging, and I grab it and hold it and shove it down before it reaches for anyone on my side.
The wolves watched the whole exchange without moving.
They learn fast. They’ve learned that when it flares, distance is the only safe position.
Four minutes left. Hold the junction.
At minute six, Mira swears.
“The thread is layered into a secondary circuit,” she says. Tighter. “He built a trap inside the node. If I sever the primary connection, the secondary triggers a local ward collapse on this corridor. Not the whole estate. Just us.”
“Can you disarm the secondary?”
“I need four more minutes.”
“You have three. The clock is running.”
“Then I work fast and you pray to whatever you pray to.” Her hands are moving in patterns I can’t follow, her magic visible as a pale shimmer between her fingers and the stone. Sweat on her brow despite the cold air. Her jaw clenched so hard I can hear her teeth.
At minute seven another guard finds us. Solo this time, coming from the west branch, and I drop him before he clears the corner.
The cost stacks higher. The fever is in my neck now, working its way toward my temples, and through the bond I feel the thing that happened in the medical wing after the gas attack, the pull that shouldn’t exist, a thread of the strain lifting, carried north.
Somewhere in the building Maximus just took a piece of my fight into his own body without being asked.
The mechanic that alarmed him then is happening again, and I let it, because the alternative is the gift burning me out before I reach the second node.
At minute nine, sixty seconds past the margin, the stone under Mira’s palm flashes white and goes dark.
“First south node neutralized,” Mira says.
She pulls her hands back and they’re shaking.
“The secondary trap is disarmed. The system held. His vitals are stable.” She looks at me.
“He trapped the node. The other nodes will be trapped too. The estimate just became twelve a node, and the clock doesn’t care. ”
Julian on comms. “North team, first node confirmed. Seraphina reports a secondary trap, same architecture. She’s adapting. Five nodes remaining. Forty-three minutes.”
Forty-three minutes. Five nodes. Every one of them booby-trapped. And the clock that started at sixty just lost seventeen minutes to two traps nobody saw coming.
He told us in the letter. “I’ve been ready for you since before you knew I existed.” He wasn’t bragging. He was giving us the terms.
I straighten. “Move. Second node. Now.”
We move.