Page 145 of Zenith Tower

Kieran exhaled through his nose. “Caspian may be right. I still want my record opened in front of Walkin. If they mean to use me to frighten you, I would rather be present for the attempt.”

“You don’t have to stay just because you think I need protecting.”

“I know.” Kieran shifted the folio beneath his arm. “I’mstaying because I want my life entered into the record before Walkin tries to turn it into leverage.”

The warning bell sounded below us.

The steward outside shifted his weight. The blue wax along the door remained whole.

Caspian released my hand so I could choose whether to reach for him again. I placed my palm flat on the table instead. Feeling had begun to return in bright, painful threads.

“I need until first bell,” I said.

“Then take the hour,” Hale said.

None of them tried to tell me what answer they expected.

The administrator broke the seal from outside. Cold corridor air entered around her, carrying the sound of locks being tested farther east.

We left one at a time under the steward’s eye. Delphine went first, her Mark uncovered. Kieran followed with the black-ribboned folio beneath his arm. Hale paused at the threshold long enough to look back at the room, fixing its doors and distances in memory. Caspian waited beside me.

At the corridor junction, stewards waited beside the administrator’s blue seals with black wax ready in their hands.

I reached for all three bonds. They answered around my pulse. The fear remained.

We had one hour left.

Astra

The steward locked me in my room with the administrator’s map still hidden inside my sleeve.

I drew it out and spread it across the bed. The paper had softened along the folds since the night we used it to reach Kieran. A dark smear crossed the passage behind the records wall where my bloody thumb had pressed against the ink. The administrator’s route ended at the residential wing. Beyond it, escape depended on Caspian’s memory of the service levels leading toward the dock.

It was not an imagined escape. That made the choice worse.

I traced the hidden passage with one finger. My hand had begun to wake in burning patches, and the softened edge of the paper felt sharp enough to cut.

Beyond the door, a steward tested the lock and moved on.

The silver line waited at my wrist, cold and taut. Caspian had meant what he said in the consultation. He wanted us out before Walkin could place any of the men between me and the result they wanted. His fear carried no accusation throughthe bond. It did not become agreement simply because I could feel it.

Green-gold burned farther away. Kieran was moving, or being made to move. The rhythm came unevenly through the line, then steadied as Hale reached for both of us.

Through the bonds, I knew they were alive. Nothing in that knowledge told me what to do.

I left the map open on the bed and went to the washbowl.

The water had gone cold. I lowered my hands into it and watched the blood from Delphine’s Mark loosen beneath my nails. Pale threads drifted over my knuckles and clouded the bottom of the bowl.

Her repaired lines had been silver when I left her. They had belonged to her before I touched them, while I held them open, and after I let them close. Walkin would call what I had done an alteration because the word made ownership uncertain. If we disappeared into the mountain before the hearing, they would call Delphine injured and coerced. They would say I had taken her to keep her from testifying, and her absence would do the rest.

Delphine had spent long enough absent from the account of what was done to her.

I lifted my hands from the bowl. Water ran from my wrists into my sleeves. Sensation returned sharply enough that I had to grip the stone rim until the pain passed.

Running would keep Walkin from testing my reach today. It would not make that reach disappear.

With all three bonds complete, my reach no longer ended with Caspian, Kieran, and Hale. Delphine had proved that I could alter any Mark I touched. Leaving the Tower would not stop the Council from hunting a power it could neither reproduce nor control.