The Matron crosses to him, calm, almost casual. She hasn’t looked my direction. She doesn’t know I’m still in the Chamber—doesn’t know I slipped behind the cylinders the second the doors began to open.
Every instinct screams to break cover. To run to him, fight beside him. To die with him if it comes to that.
My fingers dig into the stone until my nails crack. The pain grounds me. Helps me think.
If I break cover now, the ward sabotage fails. Hours of work, wasted. The Matron keeps her power. Keeps her ability to track us, control us, use us however she wants.
If I stay hidden and finish, Kharvek faces her alone for a few more minutes.
The resonance pulses again. His fury is fading now, replaced by cold resignation. The feeling of defeat.
No.
I close my eyes. Reach for the warmth in my scars—that echo of his heartbeat that tells me he’s still alive.
I’m coming. Hold on. Whatever she does to you, hold on.
I don’t know if he can sense the message. Don’t know if our resonance works that way. But I send it anyway, pour all my desperation into it, and then I turn back to the wards.
Finish the sabotage. Then save him.
It’s the only way any of us survive this.
THIRTY-NINE
IMARA
The work goes faster now.
I’m not being careful anymore. Not taking the time to make the damage invisible. Speed matters more than subtlety—I need to complete the pattern before the Matron turns and sees me, before she decides that I’m more valuable dead than sabotaging.
The second node falls. The third. The fourth.
Across the Chamber, the Matron speaks in low, patient cadences—promising, threatening, baiting. The resonance carries fragments of Kharvek’s experience to me. I feel the pressure of the wards crushing down on him, feel the moment when his consciousness starts to fade. Every fragment is a knife in my chest. Every echo makes me want to scream.
I keep working.
The fifth node. The sixth. One more and the pattern will be complete—the poison woven so deeply into the Sanctum’s infrastructure that activating it will bring the whole system crashing down.
I reach for the seventh node.
And a voice speaks from the shadows behind me.
“I knew you’d come back.”
Sister Vela steps outof the shadows.
She’s exactly as I remember—middle-aged, severe, with iron-gray hair pulled back from a face that has never shown anything softer than approval. The Matron’s primary assistant. The woman who taught me everything I know about blood magic.
The woman who selected me for the harvester corps when I was fourteen years old.
She’s alone. No Attendants flanking her. She must have entered through the side passage while my back was turned. Vela, watching me with an expression I can’t quite read.
“The Matron knows you’re here.” Her voice is calm. Conversational. Pitched low enough that the Matron, occupied with Kharvek across the Chamber, won’t hear it carry. “She felt the moment you entered the Sanctum. That resonance you’ve developed with the weapon—it lights up the ward network as a beacon.”
I don’t respond. My fingers stay pressed to the seventh node, the final piece of sabotage hovering at the edge of completion.
“I volunteered to find you.” Vela moves closer. “The Attendants wanted to come in force, but I convinced them to let me try first. I thought… I hoped…” She shakes her head. “I hoped I could talk sense into you before this went any further.”
