"Less visible is not the same as safe," Ira says.
"No one here thought it was."
The sentence comes out colder than I mean it to, but Ira doesn't react. He only marks the road, then circles the place Ellis indicates beneath the tower. Soren comes to the table and sets down a silver-bound ledger with more care than he's given anything else in the room. The book gives off a low, hungry hum when it touches the wood.
"Siphon infrastructure," Soren says. His voice is too smooth. "Lower level. Older than the visible foundation. The blood-tether network feeds through there, and if we don't interrupt it before we reach Cain, Adaro can make him a weapon against us."
Cain sitting on silk sheets with someone else's calm pressed into his bones. Cain's hands resting on his thighs because the leash told them where to be. Cain's mind screaming somewhere behind a face trained to look composed. I press my palm harder to the floorboards, and the authority under my skin stirs in answer.
The spirits feel it.
They've been gathered around the edges of the library since the bond screamed. I told them to stand, and they stood, which solved one problem and opened another. They wait near shelves, corners, windows, and the doorway, human shapes and almost-human shapes and things that have never worn bodies at all.Some are from the shop. Some came when Cain was taken and haven't left. Some are drawn by Ellis. Some are drawn by me, and that's the part I don't like naming.
Ellis moves along the map, and Ira follows. I keep relaying: upper room, narrow window, inner stair, guard rotation at the east corridor, old chapel beneath the foundation, Adaro's operating level, reservoir chambers where the impure magic knots thick enough that even Ellis struggles to describe it without breaking into static. Each detail feels less like information and more like a bruise pressed into the table. Ellis remembers the tower as a victim. Cain knows it as a cage. Ira reads it as a battlefield. Soren sees it as a system to break. I feel all of those things at once and still have to make my mouth work.
Soren passes behind me, close enough that his magic brushes the back of my neck. Like a lamp turned up too high behind frosted glass. I catch his sleeve before he can move away. He looks down at my hand, then at my face. "Cain first," he says quietly.
I hadn't asked the question out loud. "I know," I say.
His smile is small. "Good. Keep knowing that."
Then he slips away, and the spirits nearest him go silent in a different way than before. I file that away beside the folded paper in his pocket and the way Ira tracks him every time he crosses the room.Later, I tell myself.
Ira sets the pencil down. "The map is enough to start. We need eyes inside before we move."
The dead answer before I do.
I feel them in the floor, in the shelves, in the cold places between the walls. The ones already here and the ones beyond the shop, waiting under pavement and church stone, caught in old foundations, tucked into alleys where people prayed and were not answered. When Cain's terror tore through me, the light inside me rose and the dead knelt. I've been trying not tothink about how easy it was. How good it felt for half a breath before horror caught up.
The Church would use that feeling as proof.
The thought makes my stomach turn.
"I can call them," I say.
Ira looks up slowly. "By call, you mean ask."
"Yes."
Soren's hand pauses over the containment tin. Ira's eyes remain on mine, and there's no accusation in his face, which somehow makes the question heavier. He's spent his life around people who command in the name of protection. He knows exactly how little distance there can be between necessity and control.
"I mean ask," I say again, because the dead are listening too. "No binding. No pulling. No orders dressed up as holy purpose."
Ellis's expression hardens. "Some of them won't understand an invitation."
"Then I'll explain it until they do."
"And if they refuse?"
"Then they refuse."
The words are simple. They don't feel simple. Cain is in a cage. Cain is being forced calm. Cain, who's held me through my worst nights, who taught me what silence could feel like when it wasn't punishment, who let me put my bloody hands in his and didn't let go. There's a part of me willing to use every tool in the world to get him back. That part looks at the spirits and sees reach, numbers, access, invisible hands inside a tower built to ignore the living.
The Church has done worse with prettier words.
I push myself to my feet, and the room goes still around the movement. My knees object. My chest aches where Cain should be. Soren starts toward me with the water glass, then stops when Ira touches his wrist.
"I need space," I say.
