Page 21 of Orc’s Bones

“Yes.”

Varek, from the doorway — no preamble, no softening: “We need to seal the Crypt levels.”

“Sealing the Crypt levels won’t stop him. He moves through the bones themselves. Physical doors don’t affect his access.”

Varek’s jaw tightened. He looked at the door rather than at her, working through it. “Then what does.”

“A counter-resonance barrier, written deep into the bone structure itself, that disrupts the movement frequency he’s using. I can build it.” I put the research volumes back in their case. “But I need access to the lower Crypt levels to anchor it to the deepest lineage structures. The barrier has to run from the bottom up, not the other way.”

Thruk crossed toward me.

He stopped at the research table. His eyes hadn’t left my face since I named Malverek. Now they were on me with the intensity of a thing that had run out of patience for the distance between us and was holding that back by choice.

“The lower Crypt access. Tonight.”

“Tonight.”

Neither of us moved.

The chamber held all of it — the flagged volumes on the table, everything I’d built, untouched on the shelf behind me, the name Malverek sitting in the air between everyone, and the man two feet away from me who was the target of everything that had been built in those Crypts. The bone-ink cooling now that the lineage amplification had settled, but his eyes were still lit. Still there.

Still standing. Of course he is.

That was not a thought I had planned to have.

I dropped my gaze to the research case and closed it.

The door at the far end of the research chamber opened before I’d finished securing the clasp.

Lyssa stood in the interior archive doorway, a catalogue ledger in her hands, the look on her face that meant the information she was reading was worse than what she’d been expecting.

“Xya.”

One word. It meant several things at once.

I crossed to her.

She turned the ledger open to the page she’d been reading. Three entries, marked in her own hand with the notation she used for confirmed absences — the small, deliberate mark she put beside a catalogue slot when she’d verified the contents were no longer present.

Three more missing bones. All from the overnight period.

I read the bloodline notations beside each entry.

“Lyssa.”

“Yes.”

“These are all from the deepest Warline tier.”

“Yes.”

“And this one —“ I put my finger below the third entry, the one with no bloodline notation but a lineage marker I recognized without needing the notation to tell me what it meant. “This is the Varyn anchor.”

Lyssa’s voice was careful. “The catalogue record shows it was present at my last inventory. That was four hours ago.”

Four hours ago.

While I was in this room with Thruk, explaining the framework, naming Malverek, laying out the full picture — while I was doing all of that, Malverek had been in the lower stacks making the move the entire night had been building toward. He hadn’t been waiting to see how far I’d gotten. He’d used the time I spent in the confessional to take what he’d come for.