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Knox and Sully stood in the center of the room because the real Hellmark was still the bait. Knowing that and seeing it were two entirely different species of awful. Knox looked calm, the way cliffs looked calm before weather killed people. His sleeve was rolled back enough to show the Hellmark, black and ugly against his skin. It looked inert, but not harmless. The edges of it drank light from the room, turning the blue and white glow around his forearm dull and bruised. Every few breaths, one of the old lines in the mark seemed to sink deeper, like a hook remembering meat.

Carrick’s voice came through the projection, stripped of every spare emotion. “We do not initiate contact.”

“Same rule as before,” Bernie said. “We wait for the Hellmark to probe. If we trigger it deliberately, we tell whoever is watching that we understand the structure.”

So, we waited.

Carrick’s grids rotated overhead in slow, glassy increments. Bernie’s containment circle breathed in tiny pulses of gray ash and lavender light. The false composition hovered between my hands, light bending over it like heat over asphalt, and every time I blinked, I had the horrible impression it had shifted closer to Knox.

Ten seconds.

Thirty.

A full minute stretched thin enough to snap.

Hank lifted a thermos. “I brought coffee.”

“You are becoming my favorite person,” I said.

Knox turned his head. “Excuse me?”

“Bring coffee next time.”

The corner of his mouth almost moved. Then Knox looked down at his arm.

Sully went still. I felt that more than saw it, a sudden absence in the room’s pressure, like the air had forgotten how to breathe.

“What?” I asked.

Knox’s face changed. “The Hellmark.”

Bernie moved closer. “What about it?”

“It’s cold.”

Nobody moved.

The Hellmark had burned. It had pulsed, bitten, dragged, flared, and screamed through Knox’s body in ways I tried not to imagine too clearly. It had never been cold. Cold meant absence. Cold meant patience. Cold meant whatever had been on the other end was no longer knocking.

Carrick checked the Ward grid. Guy checked the reader. Bernie flicked one hand through the containment circle, and the preserved imprint trembled but did not reach. The ash line hissed softly where her Magic passed over it, throwing up a ring of gray sparks that vanished before they hit the floor. The blue and white grids over our heads stopped rotating. One by one, the symbols locked into place with soundless little jolts I felt in my molars, as if the whole room had held its breath and forgotten how to let it out.

Nothing was probing.

No query. No reconnaissance. No little test tapping at the boundary.

The entire system had gone silent. Not peaceful silence. Predatory silence. The kind of quiet that came after something stopped scratching at the door because it had found the hinge.

My stomach dropped. “Why would it stop?”

Knox understood first. Of course he did. Texas Ranger brain. All those tests. All that mapping. All those stolen pieces of me. The composite signatures. The hesitation at the lock. My throat went tight before the thought finished forming, because I knew that look on his face now. It meant he had found the pattern, and the pattern was worse than fear.

The system had not been probing forever. It had been gathering what it needed.

Knox looked at Carrick’s projection, and every bit of softness he had allowed himself on the porch vanished. “Because it’s done casing the place.”

Guy’s Ward reader went white. The color hit so hard it stripped the shadows from his face and turned every glass jar on the shelves into a tiny, blinding moon.

Not purple. Not warning pulse. White.