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“It learned,” Sully said.

The Wards were still holding. I forced myself to see that first. Hell had not cracked Arrhythmia open. It had not rolled over the town. But the stolen shape of Maisie’s Magic moved through the emergency lights, and the old system hesitated around it. Not surrender. Recognition. Confusion. The same dangerous pause we had seen before, only faster now. Better.

Still wrong.

Wrong was better than enough, but only just.

A seam formed beside the western window. Thin. Vertical. No grand portal. No roaring Hellmouth. Just a black line in the air, narrow as a knife cut, bleeding cold into the room before the sulfur followed.

Black and red light pulsed behind it. Something clawed at the edge, not enough to come through, enough to test whether the route would hold. That was worse than an army. An army could be counted. This was engineering.

Maisie’s warm brown eyes sharpened as her Alicorn Sight opened. Gold and sky-blue light, edged with the faintest iridescent pink, washed over the room, and her gaze fixed on the stolen signature threaded through the Ward-light.

“It copied my signature,” she said. Her voice had lost its joke. “Not me.”

I looked at her. “Explain.”

“The stolen version is rigid.” She lifted one hand, fingers moving as if she were tracing brushstrokes none of us could see. “Repetitive. Every layer lands in exactly the same place every time. Real Earth-and-Sky Magic shifts because I’m making choices while I use it.”

Her jaw set. “It’s copying the painting. It doesn’t know the hand that painted it.”

Good. Not safe. Not simple. But useful.

“What do you need?” I asked.

Maisie glanced at the false composition hovering near Bernie’s hands. “Feed it the forgery.”

We launched Phase One early, because plans were apparently just things fate liked to mock before noon.

Guy released the controlled kin echo.

Deep bronze Dragon Magic spilled into the room in a line no thicker than thread and twice as dangerous. Beneath it, Lou rose bronze-gold and ancient, the air vibrating with him until the emergency Wards hummed back in unwilling recognition.

Maisie caught both layers with Earth-and-Sky light. She did not force them. She bent them. The false composition shivered, loosened, and settled over Guy and Lou’s echo like a veil made of weather and choice.

Bernie held the result between two precise fingers of lavender-and-silver Necromancy. Without Carrick’s voice in the room, the decision belonged to her. When to push. How hard. How much of the Fogarty-linked relay to touch without waking everything attached to it.

Hank said, “No pressure.”

Bernie did not look away from the false answer. “I will kill you.”

“After Hell?”

Bernie sent it.

For one beautiful second, it worked.

The response lattice turned. The seam beside the window thinned until its black-and-red light shuddered. The Hellmark on my arm loosened. It didn’t release. It was not gone, but it was no longer digging inward with every beat of my heart. Sully shifted inside me, pressure moving off our bones and toward the false answer.

We got you, I thought.

Then the false signal began drawing toward Guy.

The Hellmark was not merely chasing Maisie’s forgery. It was beginning to read the source beneath it.

Exactly the danger Carrick had warned us about, because naturally Hell listened better than most people.

Guy’s Dragon Magic flared. Lou roared beneath it, the sound too large for the cabin and too old for any sane man to hear without reconsidering his entire life.