Aven goes pale in a way I wish I had the luxury of addressing gently. The spirits behind him stir. Ellis closes his eyes, his face pulling into something that looks too much like Cain trying not to break.
Ira leans closer. "Can it be severed before we reach him?"
I look down at the ritual title again.
Tether Dissolution via Essence Absorption.
Vera's handwriting in the margin says:Blood-rooted command structures cannot be cut from outside without either killing the host or driving the command deeper. They must be interrupted at the active exchange point. Absorption requires a living vessel capable of holding predatory magic long enough for cleansing.
A living vessel.
My grandmother did love making murder sound academic.
"Yes," I say.
The word makes Aven look at me too quickly.
I keep reading because if I look up, I might say something honest, and honesty is currently standing in the way of Cain's survival. "The tower's network has to be overloaded at the access point. If we smash it, every ward in the building contracts around Cain. We need to make it misfire. I take the active blood magic into myself while Aven cleanses what shakes loose and Ira keeps the structure from collapsing around us."
Ira's stare cuts into me. "Take it into yourself."
"I absorb. Aven purifies. You keep us from being murdered by architecture." I flip to the next page, letting the motion look more casual than it feels. "It's a very modern division of labor."
Aven shifts on the floor, one hand pressing against the boards as if he might stand and then thinks better of leaving the spirits without a center. "Soren."
I don't like the way he says my name. Soft is dangerous from Aven because he means it.
"If Cain is inside the command structure, and he is, then the safest way to break the precision is to give the system something else to bite."
"Meaning you," Ira says.
"Meaning me."
The room settles around the answer with a silence I want to claw out of the air. The spirits understand enough to go still. The books understand because Vera is a terrible old spider who wrote this down before I was born and tucked it away for the exact day I'd hate her most. Aven looks from me to the page, amber eyes too bright. He wants to believe there's a version of this that doesn't cost much. Ira doesn't. Ira is already reading the parts I haven't said.
"How dangerous?" he asks.
"Less dangerous than leaving Cain where he is."
"Soren."
I look up then, because there's no dodging the warning in his voice. Ira has one palm flat on the table, pencil held too tightly in the other, and his eyes have gone that hard tactical green that means he's trying to see the wound through my clothes, the lie through my teeth, the trap through the map. The apology we built between us is alive in his restraint. A week ago, he would have stepped in front of me and called it protection. Now he makes himself ask.
That almost makes it worse.
"It'll hurt," I say. Truth, but trimmed. "It might knock me out afterward. I'll need containment so the absorbed magic doesn't spread into the rest of the shop through the bond. Silver wire outside the primary circle, salt at the entry points, and Aven close enough to cleanse the runoff without touching me directly until I say it's safe."
Aven's jaw flexes. "Until you say it's safe?"
"Yes."
"I hate that sentence."
"I'm not overly fond of it either, but it's having an accurate morning." I tap the diagram again, focusing on the mechanics because mechanics are cleaner than fear. "The ritual doesn't ask me to win a fight against the whole tower. It asks me to hold the magic long enough to break the command pathway. If I can interrupt the signal for thirty seconds, Cain gets his body back. If Cain gets his body back inside that building, Adaro's day becomes significantly worse."
Ellis lifts his head at that. Something moves through his ghostly face. It doesn't comfort me, but it does point in the same direction as my anger, and right now shared direction is the closest thing we have to hope.
Aven presses a hand to his chest, right over the bond. "He's still calm."
