Kevin buzzes once, high and clear, and I swear it sounds like hope.
I don’t know what’s happening inside that thing. I don’t know if they’re winning or dying or both, which, with this group, is usually the same thing. But something has changed.
Sarnyx looks at me. I look at her.
“Hold the wall,” she says.
We hold the wall.
I'm ten feet from the core when I feel Thalia slip.
I turn.
Thalia is on her knees behind me, her hands still pressed to the root floor, but she's barely there. Her body is translucent. The light from her marks pours through her. Like she's made of stained glass instead of flesh, and through her chest, I can see the vine walls of the Cathedral on the other side. Her mouth is open. Her jaw is locked. She's holding the anchor with everything she has, and what she has is running out.
Kaelren is beside her, his hands over hers, his corruption marks flaring dark where they press against the root floor. His face is carved with the particular agony of a man who is watching something he cannot stop. He's pouring his own power into the anchor, trying to stabilize her, and it's helping. Barely. Her edges sharpen for a moment with each pulse of his corruption, then blur again as the Cathedral fights back.
She's dying.
The Cathedral is locked in place. The vine walls are rigid; the root-legs frozen mid-step. The core is reachable. The man who wears Kaelren's face sits motionless at the center, silver eyes open, the vine connections running from his body hanging slack as the Cathedral's constant adaptation grinds to a halt.
Thalia did it. The anchor is holding.
But the anchor is killing her.
"KAELREN!"
My voice tears through the cavity. He looks up. His eyes meet mine across the thirty feet of root floor between us, and I see the same calculation happening in his head that's happening in mine. Thalia needs more power. She needs something to hold her in the timeline. Something to serve as a fixed point, an anchor for the anchor, a tether to linear reality that the Rootline can't pull loose.
The locket.
The thought arrives with the force of a slap. The locket that Grandma Jo gave me.
The locket is a tether. A fixed point. A bridge between scattered existence and linear time. It can keep Thalia anchored now.
"The locket!" I scream. "Kaelren, give her the locket!"
He stares at me for one second. Understanding hits his face like a wave.
His hands leave Thalia’s. She flickers hard, her entire body turning transparent for a terrifying moment. Then Kaelren is pulling the chain over his head.
The locket slips free of his shirt, silver and warm, the same small pendant that has traveled across more realities than any object should survive. He holds it in his hand for one heartbeat. Two.
I see the weight of letting it go settle across his face. This is the thing he swore never to release. The one he guarded through every iteration. The last physical connection to me when I was scattered.
He puts it around Thalia's neck.
The chain settles against her throat. The locket drops to her chest, and the moment it touches her skin, it flares.
The locket blazes like a star, and the light pours through Thalia's translucent body, filling the gaps, the thin places, the spaces where the Rootline was pulling her apart.
She solidifies.
I watch it happen in real time. Her edges sharpen. Her hands on the root floor shift from translucent to solid. Her face firms, features settling into clarity.
The green-gold of her marks burns bright and steady, glowing through skin that is solid, present, fully here.
The locket pulses against her chest. Each pulse sends a wave of stabilizing force through her body and into the anchor she’s holding.
