Nobody woke this guard by accident. Constructs like this don't stand a post; they're set, and held, and answer to one hand only, which means somewhere below us she felt the leashes go out and reached up out of her working and put men made of nothing between us and the stair.
Which means she knows where we are.
Which means she's stopped pretending she doesn't.
"Move," Atlas says, and shoulders a construct into the shelving, and the rack goes over in a long bright crash of breaking glass, a dozen leashes failing at once in the noise, a dozen heartbeats fleeing back up to their owners in a single freed breath—and in the gap that opens we run, both of us, toward the black mouth of the stair that goes down to the Sepulchre and the Hollows and past them to the place none of us can feel each other.
I've still got the bond.
I check it the way you check a tooth with your tongue, without deciding to, the same reflex I've run every few minutes since September. She's down. She's ahead. She's a warmth four levels of stone away and dimming as she descends, the Well already starting to drink the thread thin the deeper she goes, andthat's normal, that's the place doing what the place does, I told her it would and she nodded and went anyway?—
***-
The thread goes quiet.
My own pulse stutters trying to fill the space where hers should be, a half-beat of my heart reaching for a rhythm that isn't there anymore. This isn't the thinning I know—the slow fade of distance that still leaves a hum under everything. This is total, the dead kind of silence I've felt exactly once before, in exactly one place. The Deep is closing over her the way water closes over a dropped stone, and there's no ring left on the surface to say which way she went down.
My blood goes cold and it has nothing to do with the fight.
I stop. In the middle of the corridor, with a thing made of shadow swinging at the place my head was, I stop, my whole body gone colder than anything the fight has managed yet: she's reached the bottom. She's past the Hollows. She's gone where I can't taste her, can't read her pulse climbing or her fear spiking or whether she's still standing, where the bond that has been the one constant fact of my body for nine months simply ends—and the Well only takes what crosses into it on its own feet, and she crossed.
"Ren." Atlas has my arm. The charge is coming off him in sheets, his face gone white under the storm-grime. "What."
I taste for her again. Nothing. The cleanest nothing in the world.
Nine months. Nine months I've had her under everything else, a warmth running below the blood sense and steadier than it, there when I sleep and there when I don't, there through every wall on this campus and every mile of the summer road beforeit. I learned to live with it the way you learn to live with a sound in your own house: the furnace, the pipes, the thing you stop hearing until it stops. It's stopped. The house has gone silent and the silence is the loudest thing in it.
A construct's hand closes on my shoulder and I barely feel it. There's a worse hand than that one already on me.
My phone is already in my hand. I don't remember reaching for it. The screen lights the dark between us and there's one word on it, from Felix, from the choke point above—he saw the branch before I felt the silence, he always does, that's the whole curse of him—one word and then the rest a half-second behind it:
Everly.
Then:We have minutes.
I'm already moving. Past the construct, past Atlas, down toward the dark that ate the only heartbeat I've ever chosen to keep listening for—because there are a hundred dead things on the shelves behind me and I freed every one of them, and not one of those mattered the way the silence ahead of me does, and I will put my own blood on every stair between here and her if that's the toll the stone wants.
It can have it.
Catalina can't have her.
29
EVERLY
The last stair gives way to open air and the taste hits me before the light does: metal flooding the back of my tongue, thick and bright as a mouthful of pennies, the taste blood magic leaves behind when it's doing something it has no right to do.
I've been swallowing it the whole way down. Faint at the Reliquary, where the air still remembered the shape of a room. Stronger at the Sepulchre, where the stone went close and wet and the dark stopped being a thing the light pushed back and started being a thing the light moved through. By the Hollows it was a coat of it on my teeth, and I told myself it was the descent, the weight of all that earth over my head, the simple animal wrongness of going down where people aren't meant to go.
It wasn't the descent.
It was this. The Deep. The bottom of everything Nyxhaven keeps under itself, the place there's no name for that isn't also a warning, and at the center of it?—
The Well.
It's a wound in the floor of the world. A black mouth ringed in fire, except the fire isn't fire, because fire is warm and there isnothing warm down here. It's Mors. Burning circles of it—except burning isn't right either, because what I feel is the opposite, the cold leaching up through the stone before I've crossed the last step, a draw settling low in my belly, a cold with direction to it, pouring toward the Well the way dark pours into a room when you open the wrong door.
The circles are drawn in darkness made visible, laid one inside the next inside the next, and they're closing. I can see them closing—each ring sliding tighter toward the lip of the Well, slow and certain, the working coming to its point, a held breath reaching the end it always meant to reach. The metal taste climbs with every degree they turn. My grimoire stirs against the inside of my chest like something waking up, like it tastes it too, like it knows.
