Chapter 21 #3
The corridor between the first and second nodes runs deeper still.
The stone changes color as we descend, gray to brown to a dark reddish hue that says we’ve passed below the level where builders used local materials and into the level where Konstantin chose the stone for how it holds magic.
The ward-hum intensifies. The vibration sits in my wrists now, in the bones of my forearms, a vibration that sits just below the threshold of sound and makes the air feel thick.
Mira walks with her hands open at her sides, palms facing the walls, reading the failsafe threads as they run alongside us. “The next node is deeper,” she says. “And he’s increased the guard density. I can feel footfalls. Five, maybe six, positioned at the junction ahead.”
“Range?”
“Thirty yards. They know we’re coming. The first node sent a vibration through the system when it neutralized. They’re waiting.”
The second node is three corridors deeper and guarded by five fighters who have been waiting for us since the first node went dark.
They’re positioned well, staggered at intervals that prevent me from reaching all of them with a single sweep, and the first two engage simultaneously from opposite directions while the third hangs back with a ward-breaker aimed at the corridor behind me.
The gift takes the one on my left. I throw him into his partner and both of them hit the wall in a tangle of limbs.
The third raises the ward-breaker and I rip it from his grip with a precision pull that costs me more than the broad throws, the fine-motor work burning hotter through my spine, and while he’s still processing the loss I close the distance and end the conversation with an elbow strike.
The fourth comes from a side corridor I didn’t see on the schematics.
His blade catches the edge of my tactical vest and the fabric tears and the blade scores a line of cold across my ribs.
Shallow. Not enough to slow me. I grab his wrist from across the corridor and twist until the blade drops and then I grab the rest of him and introduce him to the ceiling.
The fifth surrenders when I pin him up there beside the fourth and ask politely.
Mira steps over the fallen guards and puts her hands to the second node before the dust settles.
Her fingers are trembling. Not from fear.
From the sustained magical output that’s been running through her since the first node, the reserves draining faster than she’ll admit, and the pink new skin on her palms from the first node’s ward-burns is getting pinker with every contact.
“Secondary trap is here,” she confirms. Flat. Already working. “Same architecture. Different trigger orientation. He’s not repeating himself. He’s evolving the design across nodes.”
“How long?”
“Twelve minutes. Maybe fourteen. My hands are slower than they were.”
I guard the junction. The second node fights us for thirteen minutes and forty seconds, and somewhere in the middle of them the thing I have been afraid of since the lamp left the nightstand finally happens.
Another guard comes in fast, fresh from somewhere deeper in the building.
I reach for him without thinking and the gift answers from below my navel, too much of it, the fever spiking white behind my eyes, and for half a second the leash is just gone.
The force doesn’t take the guard. It takes the nearest living thing, as it took a bird off a branch once, as it went for my husband in our own bed, and the nearest living thing is Mira, on her knees at the node an arm’s length away, wrist-deep in Konstantin’s wards with her whole self somewhere I can’t reach.
I feel it find her. I feel it start to map the seams of her, the places a body comes apart, and she doesn’t know, because she is eight minutes into work that kills all of us if she flinches.
I tear it back.
Both hands, everything, same catch as the first time, except this time there is a person on the other end of the half second and the person is the one who taught me to hold this at all.
It does not want to let go of her. I drag it out of her by force and throw the whole screaming mass of it into the guard instead, and he does not fold like the others folded.
I land on my knees beside Mira with my own power still burning in my fists and the fever blowing my vision to static, and Mira finishes the node without ever knowing how close my hands came to her while hers were saving everyone.
When she pulls her palms off the stone they’re shaking, and so are mine, and only one of us knows both reasons.
The bond, north. Maximus alive.
Through the comms, Julian. “Second north node under way. Seraphina has the trap. Twenty-nine minutes remaining.”
Twenty-nine minutes. Four nodes. Twelve-plus minutes each. The arithmetic doesn’t fit, and we all know it, and we keep moving anyway, and the building hums around us and the dead-man’s switch counts the heartbeats of a man who designed this moment to be the one where the numbers break.
We walked in. We’re finding out. Now hold the door and don’t let go.
The clock runs. The wards fight. The family does not break.
And somewhere deeper, in the part of this building nobody has ever mapped, the man who built it all is waiting to show us what the math looks like when it breaks.