Page 43 of Bite Bonded Bride

The first breath of surface air hits like a punishment. It's too thin and cold in the wrong places and warm in others. It smells of smoke, animal dung and the sourness of frightened people pressed too close together, my lungs don't know what to do with any of it. I stand at the mouth of the hidden passage for three seconds, long enough to remember what the sky looks like and then I'm moving, because standing still has never saved anyone.

The ancient records are bundled against my chest beneath my jacket, wrapped in cloth I tore from a Vrakken ceremonial hanging. The vellum is thick and strange under my fingers, timeworn than anything I've ever held. The ink that pressed those letters into the skin of long-dead animals has bled into the grain of the material until the words look less written and less carved, like the mountain itself tried to remember what was done to it.

I've got you, I tell them silently, stupidly. I've got you now.

The ache beneath my sternum disagrees.

It's been there since the passage sealed behind me. A pull, low and insistent, like a fishhook set somewhere between my ribs, tugging me back toward the dark. Toward him. I press my free hand flat against my chest and breathe through it.

When I get to the mining settlement it looks nothing like I left it.

Barricades made from cart wheels and timber beams block two of the main roads. Men I recognize from the lower crews are standing with pickaxes and hunting knives, wearing the expressions of people who've decided that doing is better than waiting to die. Malachar's soldiers are nowhere visible, which means they're either gone or watching from somewhere I can't see. Neither option is comforting.

The tremors come in waves. Each one rolls up from the ground, up through my spine, and I feel it differently than I did before, I know what's underneath now. I know exactly how close the Wildspont is to tearing this whole settlement sideways.

I find the makeshift shelter close to the eastern row’s edge, the same rented lean-to I've been paying for by the week since I took Theren's contract. The door is ajar.

"Eddie."

He's on his feet before I finish the word, and then he's crossing the room in that careful, lurching gait he uses when he's pretending his leg doesn't hurt, and then he's got both arms around me and his face pressed into my shoulder, and he's shaking.

He's so thin. I feel it immediately, the sharpness of his shoulder blades, the way his ribs move under my hands when I pull him in. He smells like the herbal tinctures he brews to manage the pain and underneath that, something medicinal and sharp that I don't like.

"I thought—" He stops. Tries again. "The mountain was shaking and you weren't back and the foreman's men were saying⁠—"

"I'm here." I pull back to look at him properly, my hands on his face. He lets me, even though he's seventeen and usually too proud for it. His color is poor. There are shadows under his eyes that weren't there when I left. "Look at me. Are you eating? The tinctures, are you still on the morning dose⁠—"

"Ly—"

"The leg, how's the leg, Theren's men didn't bother you⁠—"

"Cybele." His voice cracks on my name. "You look—" He searches my face, and whatever he finds there makes him go still. "What happened to you down there?"

I don't answer that. I can't, not yet, not all of it.

"I need you," I say instead. "Your sharp brain. And I need you to trust me even if what I'm about to say sounds like I've lost my mind."

He looks at me for a prolonged moment. Then: "When have you ever not sounded like that?"

When we reach the streets, it’s a powder keg with a short fuse. We move carefully, Edrin's cane clicking against loose stone, the records pressed against my ribs. A notice is nailed on a board near the main well. I read it as we pass. Underground beasts responsible for recent collapses. Citizens urged to arm and report suspicious movement near lower tunnels.

I recognize Malachar's voice in every word. Smooth, civic-minded and utterly hollow.

"He's been busy," Edrin murmurs.

"He's been scared," I correct. Good.

Theren opens his office door on the second knock, takes one look at my face, and pulls us inside without a word. The room smells like tallow and old fear. He looks worse than wear, somehow older like the past week aged him sideways.

"They're going to shut us down." He doesn't bother with pleasantries. "The magistrate's office sent word this morning. All lower operations suspended pending a full military review. That means elf soldiers in every shaft by nightfall." He drags a hand over his face. "I can't hold these men, Cybele. They're frightened enough to do something stupid."

"They should be frightened," I say. "But not of the Vrakken."

I set the records on his desk.

The vellum unrolls with a dry, papery whisper, and the three of us lean over it in the tallow light. The ink is so old it's turned a deep reddish-brown that I don't want to think about too closely. Seralya translated enough for me to understand what it says. What it proves.

I watch Theren read. I watch his face do several things in quick succession, disbelief, understanding, and the look of a man realizing the ground under him was never solid to begin with.