Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Fear flares through me, and for a moment, I cannot breathe.
What if the tracker was never dormant?
What about the children?
Surely they have not been tracking me all this time.
Vivian waits by the warehouse doors, standing with the poise of someone who knows when to give space.
Cáel does not let me speak. He takes my left wrist, turns it over and ties a strip of close-woven grey cloth across the mark, a rune stitched into it in dull thread. He does the same to the right.
The prickle beneath my skin goes quiet.
“Field wrap,” he says. “Velmoran army issue. It will not fix anything, and it will not last, but nobody is taking a position off you while we talk.”
“How long?”
“An hour. Two, if we are lucky.” He must see the panic still in my eyes, because he leans closer and lowers his voice. “The children are safe. Your people are safe. They activated the tracker only after the Ink District anchor exploded.”
“But… how do you know?” I croak.
“Because there’s no history in the spell,” he says. “No old route memory, no stored pings, no residue from years of use. The tracking layer is newly awake. Look at the evidence. Bruce is safe. Sarah too.” He pauses. “And I got Keeley and her family out.”
“You did?”
“I did. Quietly. Through Velmoran channels.”
My head drops, and I bury my face against his chest. “Thank you.”
He smells of clean wool, rain-washed cedar and something sharp-green, like mint crushed between fingertips. I do not know when it became the scent of safety, but my body recognises it before my mind catches up.
He folds me closer and strokes my hair with gentle fingers.
He was furious about what Keeley’s family did to me. He moved them across a border anyway, because I cared about her.
Where did this man come from?
None of this is your fault. Vivian’s words, in the car.
I was a victim.
I am allowed to say that, however much the word chafes.
Still, the guilt sits behind my ribs like something solid. The Fade existed before they stripped me. I did not build any of it. But my magic is in those runes, and it is making everything worse—destabilising the network, accelerating the Fade, killing people who have never heard my name.
Not through any choice of mine.
Mine all the same.
I do not know what to do with that.
“I’ve got you,” Cáel murmurs. “We’ll do everything we can to keep them safe.”
“But who’s going to keep you safe when I’m a walking tracking beacon?”
“I have a few tricks up my sleeve.” He kisses my forehead, and my heart flips so sharply that I almost resent it.
“I… thank you, Cáel. But what do we do now? I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Elenora, I’ll be fine. Besides, you’re very good at rescuing yourself—and everyone else. If anything goes wrong, I’ll be in the best possible hands.”
His arms tighten around me. “Trust me. Let me help.”
Can I be brave enough?
Trust. It has crept in quietly, slipping through the cracks while I was not paying attention.
Now I realise it is already there.
“All right.”
Only then, wrapped in his arms, do I remember that I haven’t asked what happened after I was taken.
Having friends—people I care about—is still strange.
“What happened at Salt?” I ask.
“My people cleared the anchor area and forced the local government to act. We leaked the anchor locations, so those zones have been evacuated for now. People know the sites aren’t safe, that they’ve been exploding and that the so-called Resistance isn’t responsible.
” He glances towards the warehouse entrance.
“Some still doubt us, but many understand.”
“That will make you popular,” I say.
He has forced a sovereign government to evacuate its own districts, published the locations of its infrastructure and moved a family across a border, and he has done all of it since this morning.
Governors on diplomatic visits do not do that. They write letters and wait. Thank goodness he is on our side.
I only hope the government gives us a reasonable head start before it begins hunting us in earnest.
“I don’t care,” he replies. “We don’t know what will happen if the network overloads completely. Every rune could explode. But for the moment…”
“What if my parents are right?”
His body stills.
“Not about sacrificing children,” I add quickly, waving one hand. “Obviously. But what if my death really would stabilise the magic?”
“It wouldn’t.”
His certainty makes me look up.
“They’re meddling with forces beyond their understanding. They can’t even see the runes. If they could, their repairs might help. Instead, they make everything worse. The lorry they parked over the anchor was full of salt.”
“Magic hates salt,” I groan.
Concentrated salt interferes with exposed rune-work. They didn’t need to damage the anchor permanently. They only needed to aggravate it enough for me to notice.
“It made the anchor fluctuate,” Cáel continues. “Good for setting a trap. We moved the lorry, and if you check the rune, it should be stable now.”
I push up the sleeve of the jumper. The feather sigil slides aside, and the map unfurls across my forearm in fine black lines.
The Salt anchor lies quiet.
No silver.
No pulse.
No sign of strain.
But the rest of the network—
The Iron anchor still seethes.
Perhaps I should have destroyed those botched repairs while we were there. They certainly were not helping.
I glance at the grey cloth. “What are we going to do about these?”
“When healers find corrupted tissue, they ward it in place until the body can deal with it. I can do something similar here.” Cáel holds out his hand. “First, I need to see exactly what they’ve done.”
I give him my wrist.
His magic settles over the mark, warm and careful. A faint gold glow gathers beneath his fingers and sinks into my skin.
At first, his expression is merely focused.
Then it tightens. “There are three parts,” he says quietly.
“The first part contains the work functions—the sleep mark and the truth mark. The second is the tracker, which was activated recently. That part is crude, but separate enough that I can ward it.”
I nod. “And the third?”
He rubs the back of his neck but keeps hold of my wrist, as though letting go might cause harm.
“The draining function reinforces the link between your living body and the imprint inside the network. It draws directly from you.” His thumb presses lightly over the mark.
“The connection goes back to the day the marks were placed.”
He finally meets my gaze. “Your life force is tied to the anchors. I can see the magical link, but Thea will need to trace the life-thread properly.”
A pause stretches between us.
“If we destroy the rune network—” he begins.
“It might kill me,” I finish.
He nods.
“Oh.”
Then, because my mind will not stop working even when I would rather it did: two anchors have already gone. One of them came down while I stood forty feet from it, and I walked away with a ringing in my ears.
So the link did not break when they did. It didn’t kill me either.
Which means it either redistributes the way the load does, in which case the last one takes everything—or it is thinner than my mother believes.
I do not say any of that aloud. I have no evidence, and I would rather not hear him agree with the first half.
The warehouse seems to grow quieter around us. Even the traffic beyond the walls fades beneath the rush of blood in my ears.
“Right.” I take one step back, though he does not release my hand. “That’s a problem, then.”
“It is,” he agrees. “But it’s one we will solve.”
He encloses my hand between both of his. “I’m not going to let you die, Elenora.”
In the warehouse’s low light, the deep navy of his eyes holds mine. He gives my hand one firm, steady squeeze. “Now let me ward those trackers properly, before they cause any more trouble.” He gently turns my left wrist and sets to work.