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Smoke reaches me before the second shout does.

Not candle smoke. Oil and old paper, thick enough to taste, rolling down the gallery from the restricted stacks. I press flat against the shelving at the end of my row and look down the corridor toward the reading room, and what I see turns my stomach over in one long drop.

Four of them. Maybe five. Moving through the stacks with a rhythm that has nothing to do with looting — they aren’t grabbing books; they’re burning them, section by section, with the calm of men who’ve done this before and expect to do it again. One holds a torch to the base of a shelf I indexed myself two years ago, and it goes up faster than dry paper has any right to. A chemical hiss under the flame. They came prepared.

This isn’t theft. This is erasure.

A hand grabs my shoulder from behind, and I nearly put my letter-opener through it before I recognize Rennis, his face the color of old parchment. “Lyessa — the east stair’s already burning, we need to move⁠—”

“Go.” I shove him toward the west corridor without waiting to see if he listens, because the man nearest the reading room door — no torch, hands empty, working down every face still in the room against a description he’s clearly memorized — has just found mine. His eyes drop to the parchment half-visible at my collar. His whole posture changes.

“The map.” Not a shout. Worse. Flat, certain, a man confirming an order instead of making a request. “Give it here, historian.”

For one bad second I actually consider it — the letter-opener’s a decent length, and he’s alone in the doorway, and I’ve put a blade through worse odds than this over an argument about footnotes. Then a second man rounds the far shelf behind him, then a third, and the math stops being interesting.

I run.

I know this building better than the men trying to burn it down, and that’s my only advantage. Seven years of unfunded research means seven years of finding every service passage the current staff forgot exists, because a woman quietly excluded from every reading room eventually learns which doors nobody bothers to lock. I grab a wheeled cart of unsorted scrolls on my way past and shove it hard across the corridor behind me — not much of an obstacle, but it buys three seconds, and three seconds is three seconds — then take the third left instead of the second, duck behind a collapsed shelf of tax records nobody’s touched since before I was born, and drop into the tunnel I found two years ago chasing a rat and a hunch.

Narrow. Low enough I have to duck. It smells of standing water and, increasingly, smoke seeping down through the cracks above me. One hand flat against the wall for balance, the other clamped over the parchment against my ribs, I move fast and don’t look back, because behind me I can hear an entire floor of somebody else’s careful lie finally catching up to itself.

The tunnel spits me out behind a cooper’s shuttered stall two streets from the Archives, into air thick with smoke and the first screaming bells of a city figuring out its library is on fire.

Asterhold at night is never fully quiet. Watchmen’s boots on cobblestone, drunks arguing outside a tavern, the low hum of a capital that doesn’t sleep so much as doze with one eye open. Nothing in that ordinary noise prepares a street for what’s pouring off the Archives roof right now — flame licking orange against black sky, people running toward the fire instead of away from it, because half this city works in that building and every one of them just understood what’s inside.

I don’t stop to watch. A man inside that building looked me dead in the eye and demanded the map like it was the only sentence he’d rehearsed all week, and stopping is exactly how I find out what he does for an encore.

I make it four buildings before the ground disagrees with that plan.

The archway above the alley I’m cutting through — old stonework, older than half the buildings around it, the kind nobody’s inspected since my grandmother was a girl — groans somewhere over my head. The fire’s already weakened a support two streets over. I hear the crack before I understand it. I understand it half a second before the first chunk of stone lets go.

There’s no time to run. There’s barely time to throw myself sideways.

I do it anyway — twist hard toward the far wall, boots skidding on wet cobblestone, already too late and knowing it — when an arm closes across me instead. Not grabbing. Not fumbling. Simply there, solid as the wall I was about to be buried under, hauling me sideways with enough force to lift my feet off the ground.

Stone comes down exactly where I was standing a heartbeat ago. Close enough that grit sprays my boots. Close enough that the sound of it hitting the cobblestones goes through my chest instead of my ears.

A hand is wrapped around my waist. A very large hand, attached to a very large arm, attached to considerably more orc than I have ever stood this close to in my life.

I look up, and up, and settle somewhere around his collarbone before I finally find his face.

He’s still watching the rooftops — scanning, checking for the next piece of architecture about to reconsider gravity — and it gives me exactly long enough to take him in before he looks down. Charcoal-gray skin, close to seven feet of it, crossed with old scars that catch the firelight in thin silver lines. Tusks sharp enough to make most faces look brutal — on him they look like they belong, like the rest of him got built around them instead of the other way around. Blackened steel over moon-iron, dented in places nobody dents armor unless they’ve used it hard and used it often. A greatsword strapped across his back, taller than I am, resting against him like a limb instead of a weapon.

Then he looks down, and every one of those observations stops being a list and starts being a problem.

Somewhere behind us, timber cracks and falls, and his free hand drops to the hilt at his hip before the sound’s even finished — a reflex, not a decision, gone again the instant he clocks it for what it is. I don’t think he notices. I notice.

His eyes catch the fire instead of just reflecting it, and for one full second he studies me exactly the way I study a map that doesn’t match its neighbors. Assessing. Then his expression shifts, sharpens, and turns into a different question entirely—one that has nothing to do with falling buildings.

Heat drops through me, low and sudden, chasing straight past every excuse the archway gave it to be there. My breath, which had every reason to be ragged from the stone alone, catches harder instead of settling. My body has apparently made a decision about him. Nobody consulted my brain.

That’s not fear. I know fear — I’ve been outrunning fear for the last four minutes. This has teeth of its own, and I resent it on principle.

“You’re not hurt.” Not a question. A conclusion. His voice comes out low and rough, like it doesn’t get used more than it has to.

“Observant.” Mine comes out steadier than I expect, which I count as a personal victory, given that his hand hasn’t moved off my waist and neither of us has done anything about that yet. “Do you always catch falling buildings, or was tonight special?”

A flicker moves at the corner of his mouth — there and gone, a smile considered and set aside for later. “Do you make a habit of running toward burning archives, or was tonight special?”